Speaker #0Hi everyone, Malu speaking. I'm the author of Life's Notebook. Welcome to the Elevation Grid. I speak about career, science, and well-being. Okay, enough. Let's stop. How to deal with a crisis? So leadership during crisis management. quite a challenging task, especially today. We are all facing challenges. We had the fallout of COVID pandemic, the conflict in Ukraine and Middle East are widening, climate change, and you name it. There are lots of things which have an impact on our lives and which is difficult to manage. And I will take some examples from real crisis management, like the one of Governor Cuomo during the COVID crisis in New York, when New York was at the epicenter. And we'll also talk briefly about Rudy Giuliani, who did an excellent job at 9-11. So... What is a leader's mission actually during a crisis? It's really to be a compass, to steer the action and behaviors of people towards the future, which means inspiring and guiding people while keeping their own insecurities at check. It's not because you are a leader that you don't have anxieties and fears, especially when you're in a crisis. since you don't have a GPS compass that tells you during a crisis, turn right, turn left, do this, do that. So it's very difficult to be composed to oneself when there is such a big crisis with no precedent. So what are the key attributes of leaders in such situations? It's really to have courage and strength of character, which is important, because they are really at the forefront of the crisis. And I saw Rudy Giuliani, who was really, on the day of 9-11, he went six times to Ground Zero and he was really present. So let's think about what helps to, what are they doing, leaders, actually, during a crisis. First of all, they act as a strategist and need to have a vision of where to go, what are the different steps to get out of the crisis. And they, as strategists, they face a paradox, which is that when action is required, the freedom of action is often limited. by the scarcity of the information. Often at the beginning of a crisis, you have very little information. It accumulates later, but your march of maneuver is reduced later on. So you need already to know what to do at the beginning. So for example, during the COVID crisis, it took authorities a certain time to realize the gravity. and not that it was a serious crisis and not a transient crisis, and before reacting. And obviously there were no vaccines available and then there were vaccines of less quality and so on. But they have to take action. They need to do something. So do they give a less good vaccine to a person or do they wait? until the better vaccine becomes available and have more contagion. It's really difficult. And the second thing, there are strategists, as I said, but there are also educators. Leaders must be educators. They must start by giving the facts. People want to know what's going on because everyone is anxious. Wow, it's difficult to apprehend what's going on if you don't have a leader who is engaging in early, clear and frequent communication. That's what they need to do, to be visible and engage in early, clear and frequent communication by starting with giving the facts and help. the people make sense of the crisis because they need to understand and they need to trust their leader to trust him that he will get them out of there because that's that's what it is all about let's take the example of government governor cuomo So Governor Cuomo, he held daily press conferences where he declared, here's what's going to happen, here's the spectrum of possibilities, here's how we're preparing. So he explains to people, he doesn't know obviously where he's going, he's not admitting this, obviously he needs to be confident, which he was. But he has to navigate from one point to the next with confidence on the basis of the information he has available and share them with the people as it becomes available. Because every day he had video conferences. I was watching it and so I was also following. Where are we going? Will there be an outcome soon? Or that's important, actually. Will there be an outcome soon? If you know that the problem will not be resolved quickly as a leader, you have to let people know. And that's what Governor Cuomo also did. He explained, for example, that COVID was a multi-chapter book and that we were at chapter one and we would go to chapter... chapter 3, chapter 4, etc. And that at chapter 4, we would be better off than chapter 1. And that, why? Because we would develop resilience muscles and would only get stronger by developing resilience muscles. So there's a hopeful communication. We are in shit today, but it will only get better as we are getting... solutions to the problems we are navigating through progressively and here's what you need to know and then also what is very important is to explain to people the progress and the small victories you have already achieved because every small victory is worth celebrating and that is very hopeful And that's very helpful also during crisis. Julian did the same thing. He was very calm and very present and very hopeful. He said, we will get out of here. We take one step at a time, but we will get you out of here. And so it was. It's important for them, for the leaders who have crisis management to perform, that they have also private outlets for their own anxieties, because that's also important, that they can get rid of their anxieties, because they also have some. We are all humans, and it's only logical that this is the case. So really... be at the forefront, be calm and composed, and work closely with the people and the team, and eventually let people know what their role can be in the situation so they feel engaged in the problem and they are part of the solution. That also gives them hope that they have some control over the situation.
