There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
Henry Kissinger
Last week I delved into the corporate culture of crisis, shedding light on its high costs and offering some strategies to break free from the grip of this insidious mindset. If you missed that, you can catch up with the article here.
Now let’s dig a little more deeply into crisis culture, starting with the word itself. “Crisis” sounds pretty intimidating, right? In defining it, Merriam-Webster tosses around such phrases as “turning point,” “paroxysmal attack of pain,” and “radical change.” No wonder so many people pretend to be in perpetual crisis. If you are regularly willing to take on a “paroxysmal attack of pain,” you must be a certified badass!
But what if we strip away all that apparatus of doom: the paroxysms, the radicalism, the urgency? What’s left?
The Problem
A crisis is nothing more than a supersized problem served up with a generous side of urgency. So, even the most colossal crisis is, at it’s core, just a problem. And one thing we know about problems is that problems tend to have solutions.
As I discussed last week, many workplace crises are in fact nothing more than routine tasks gussied up to seem more catastrophic—in other words mere problems of the moment. So, let’s try a thought experiment. What if we started viewing crises—all crises, real and imagined—as camouflaged and eminently solvable problems? What if we faced them with clarity? What would happen then? Would all these “crises” appear so insurmountable? Sure we might not seem as badass for taking them on, but isn’t that a small price to pay for behaving rationally?
I want to share a little anecdote—the origin story of my healthier mindset if you will. Picture me as a brand-new dean at a small university—younger, much thinner—trying on different personas like I did hats. Eventually I fell into mimicking my more experienced fellow deans who always seemed to be in a tizzy. And sure enough I soon was tizzying right along with them. Then one spring morning, an epiphany altered my trajectory and put me on the path to discovering the persona that would fit me best: me just being me.
That day, I had a breakfast meeting with an industry advisory board for one of my departments. My role? Purely ceremonial. I'd chitchat, coo over the continental breakfast spread, try to look dapper in my suit [link], shake some hands, and say a few welcoming words—no big deal. Then I was to exit gracefully so that the chair of the department could run her meeting.
Simple enough. But when I had done my part, I excused myself by declaring dramatically, as I was wont, “I’d love to stay, but I have a fire to put out!”
A fire! To put out! Here all the while as we shared pleasantries over pastry and stale coffee, there was some conflagration raging that only I could extinguish!
The room chuckled and nodded empathetically as I slipped out the door.
Hustling across campus to my office, I started to think about what lay ahead. What was this inferno I had to battle? What impending disaster loomed?
It was just a phone call. That was it. I had to make a call to someone I didn’t feel like speaking to. Unpleasant, yes, but nothing urgent. Nothing even important, but referring to it as a “fire” sure made me feel like I was!
That was the moment it hit me. I was a pretender, and so were my crisis-addicted peers. We made every little setback into a big deal. “No time to talk,” we’d say, “I have so much to do,” when we just had to get some budget numbers together. Worse still, I realized that my petty crisis mongering had started trickling down to the people I led. They were speaking the same way!
I then understood that most of our crises were really just overblown tasks and solvable problems ginned up to look significant. And aside from all the psychodrama, one clear consequence was that the more we treated our every problem like a crisis, the less we actually resolved it. You simply can’t solve a problem properly if you regard it as a crisis.
Of course, we then had to sweep some problems under the rug—particularly the ones we generated ourselves. Consequently these largely predictable and utterly avoidable problems, left unchecked, often metastasized into full-blown crises, real ones. See how self-perpetuating the crisis-industrial complex can be?
And then there’s the blame game. When you turn everything into a crisis, someone else has to take the fall. Someone must have been responsible for getting us to this turning point. That’s the part I could never stomach. Unfortunately, my boss too was addicted to crises, and in his rather inventive brain innocent misunderstandings transmogrified into willful acts of defiance and honest errors became emblems of gross incompetence. Sometimes he whipped his fevered fantasies into full-blown accusations of insubordination and rebellion, complete with threats of firing. His was a vicious paranoia that solved nothing and kept everyone on eggshells, forcing me to expend near-constant effort to protect my team and myself and thereby creating even more problems.
Here’s a pro-tip: The more you are pointing fingers, the less you are solving problems.
Lastly, crisis enthusiasts tend to build elaborate, redundant, and utterly unworkable systems to prevent imagined disasters. [link] It should be obvious, but if you are fixated on a fictional future, you are ignoring the actual problem right in front of your face. Hyper-crisis planning is a form of problem avoidance.
In fact, all crisis mongering is a form of reality avoidance. Existing in a crisis bubble insulates you from the challenge of facing real problems and taking responsibility. It’s never your fault. You are somehow always the hapless victim of every crisis, even the ones you caused or manufactured yourself, and that stance only foments more crises.
You can break free of the crisis cycle, though. You can start by calling it out in yourself and then maybe in others if they’ll hear you. From there pinpoint the actual problem at the core of your faux crisis. Once you see it, it often becomes exceedingly manageable, so solve for that problem, ignoring the lure of psychodrama. Otherwise you will remain mired in a perpetual feedback loop of crises.
Simply put, if you can identify and solve problems without all the emotional nonsense you can break free from crisis culture. And doing so is imperative if you and your organization are to succeed. Here’s to facing problems honestly as the solvable challenges they are!
How often do you feel you face crises? How can you be sure they are not just solvable problems?
Great leaders must know the difference between confronting crises and solving problems, and I can help.
If you want to learn more about how to become a great leader in this world of bad bosses, visit GuidanceForGreatness.com.
Join the conversation by leaving a comment, and leave a like or review.
Please share this post on social media.
And be sure to SUBSCRIBE to have On Leading with Greatness sent weekly to your inbox.
Your Big Crisis Is Really a Bit of a Problem