DUST SETTLERS
LEADERS EMERGE WHEN COMPANIES GET THROWN INTO CHAOS
The path to a promotion can sometimes be long and boring. You’ll need to excel at your work, make the right people happy and ensure in subtle ways that others realize your worth and potential to the organization.
Or you can drive the owner of your company to Milwaukee during a snowstorm and help him craft a killer email along the way.
At least that’s how Bryan Chadwick received his promotion five years ago, a role that he eventually turned into a consulting job with Accenture and then later as an independent consultant. “My boss came out of his office ranting because his flight had been canceled at O’Hare and he needed to get to Minneapolis,” Chadwick says. “He somehow gets a flight out of the Milwaukee airport but has no way of getting there. He tells me that if I drive him, he’ll give me a couple of days off.”
Chadwick said the proposal seemed “a little weird and unprofessional” but he gladly accepted. “This was pre-wife and pre-kids. I really didn’t have much going on except going to the gym and going out with my friends so I said I’d do it,” says Chadwick, who now lives with his wife and 15-month-old son in San Diego.
The ride to the airport started out with a bang when Chadwick says his boss got into a shouting match with one of the company’s sales reps over the phone.
“We sold business software and someone had completely over-promised and now there was a company in Connecticut that needed everything they thought we’d deliver immediately, and I guess we were looking at four weeks before we’d have it finished.”
After watching his boss stew for about 10 or 15 minutes, Chadwick said he asked if there was anything he could do to help. “He said something like ‘yeah, you could get your friends in the office to get a clue about what it is we do, and what we can and can’t do,’” which gave Chadwick an idea.
Bad into good
The then-27-year-old staff accountant suggested going over an outline for an email or meeting that would current company issues. “We were at a strange spot — small but getting bigger, profitable but spending money to keep up — so there were a lot of growing pains,” he says.
Chadwick says he turned on his phone’s voice recorder and listened to his boss rage at his own machine, mentioning the shortcomings of various employees, ineffective company practices and the amount of food that people left in the kitchen refrigerator at the end of each week.
“Oh, it was classic, like an anti-TED Talk,” Chadwick says.
Upon returning home from Milwaukee, Chadwick says he took his boss’s “tantrum” and turned it into 10 bullet points about professionalism in the workplace and expectations with clients.
“I cleaned up a lot of what he said and made it more succinct,” Chadwick says. “I took out names and specific instances and made things general but there was no doubting the validity of his concerns.”
Chadwick sent his boss the email, immediately regretted it and went to sleep.
The next morning, an email from his boss titled THANKYOUTHANKYOU — “I’m surprised it made it past the spam filter,” Chadwick says — was waiting for him in his inbox.
“He said I put everything he wanted to say into words he would have never been able to use,” he says. “I emailed back that I enjoyed doing it and if he needed any help like that again to let me know.”
Two weeks later, after the “list of 10,” as it was referred to, was distributed throughout the company and presented in a mandatory meeting, Chadwick was named senior advisor, a position that didn’t even exist prior to the snowstorm.
“I basically was his sounding board and — I guess you could say ‘translator’ — for three years,” he says.
Chadwick quickly adapted to his new role, learning the ins and outs of helping new companies launch. When his boss decided to sell in 2014, Chadwicks revised his resume, secured a few highlevel references and began looking for a job.
“Everything that I did stemmed from that particular car ride,” he says. “It was like a little gift to me. And I’m glad I got to take advantage of it.”
Know the moment
It’s that move to take advantage of a chaotic situation that matters, says Matthew Sanderson, a career consultant in Dallas. “I’m always amazed when people don’t see the opportunities in stressful situations,” he says. “When things are going badly at work because of a natural event or an injury or even something that happens outside of the office, the goal is to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.”
Sanderson says that while it might be tempting to act on your impulses when things go wrong, the key is to be smart and helpful. It helps, Sanderson says, to be selfless. “You can certainly think about how what you’re doing will impact your career later but the bottom line is you need to be the type of person who immediately jumps to action when he or she is needed, but to do so in a mindful manner,” he says.
React with a purpose
If faced with a spell of unexpected chaos at work, keep the following tips in mind:
Organize a reaction team: If the company is short-staffed or if key players are not currently on hand, you should work with your peers to identify the immediate needs and then collectively choose the people who will help fill those needs.
Keep communication open: When things go wrong, people often stop contacting each other and wait for a single, catch-all announcement. In some cases, the lack of communication may have to do with a natural disaster or a large-scale technical issue. In most instances, though, it has more to do with hurt feelings, embarrassment and anger. When problems begin, create a new email thread, message thread or task group that keeps everyone in the loop.
Use appropriate knowledge: If you’re the company’s marketing expert in a company that’s experiencing a server meltdown, defer to others who know more about the situation at hand than you. Even if you feel like you started the recovery process, that doesn’t mean you’re the person responsible for every step of the recovery. Don’t act on what you don’t know.