 Facing a crisis at work? These tips will help you get through it. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. If you're a leader at work, chances are you're going to face a crisis sooner or later. Today I've got five tips for you that'll help you and your team get through that crisis successfully. And stay tuned to the end. I'm going to give you a link where you can download our free Leadership Development Plan workbook. That'll help you set your goals for the next 2, 5 and 10 years and build a plan of action to achieve them. When you're a leader, dealing with crisis is just part of the job sometimes. No matter how much we plan and prepare, we can't prepare for everything and those crises are going to come up sometimes. Now that doesn't mean we don't plan and prepare and try to manage risk, but what it does mean is when a crisis comes up it's important not to look back at what we can do differently. There's a time for that later on after we've gotten through the crisis, but in the crisis we need to look forward, we need to move forward, get through the crisis and then move on. We can go back and do those postmortems on what could we've done better after the crisis is done. I hope you're not in the middle of a crisis right now, but if you're watching this because you're in the middle of a crisis, these five tips will help you do that looking forward, get through the crisis and then do that postmortem afterwards to keep that crisis from happening again. Tip number one is don't panic and be honest with yourself. Whatever's going on right now may be a fast-moving target coming right at you, but it's important to remember that you can get through this and your team can get through this and we need to be honest with ourselves in the middle of a crisis. Yes this crisis is actually happening and we need to go tell the appropriate people that need to know about it. Good news doesn't get better with age. Now you're going to want to move through this crisis resolution process quickly, but that doesn't mean we cut corners. It's still important to think through things and be deliberate as we move through this crisis resolution process so that we can get to the solution and then figure out what went wrong later. Tip number two is to assess the problems. So many times I've seen leaders react to a crisis by just start applying solutions without really understanding what the whole problem is or what the root causes of the problem are and you really need to get down to the root cause of those problems. If you don't figure out those root causes you might start applying band-aids to the bleeding without noticing that big bone that's sticking through the hole in the skin so you want to make sure you get down to the root of the problem because if you don't address the root of the problem and you don't address the whole problem the crisis is going to continue to move on and fester and you're never really going to get past it to see how you could do things better in the future. Tip number three is to address the crisis and not every other problem out there in the world. So many times I've seen leaders get into crisis mode and start using that sense of urgency to attack every other problem every pet peeve they've got with how their organization runs and that's not that this crisis mode isn't the time to do this. What you really want to do is address those root causes of the problem stop that fast moving target from moving directly at you and you want to get to the point where this is no longer a crisis where it's an important problem that needs to be solved and you need to find a long-term solution for but you want to get out of crisis mode as quickly as possible. Once you get out of crisis mode then you can start to evaluate okay what is the longer solution to longer term solution to this problem and how can we solve it effectively for the organization but leave everything else out of it. When it comes to implementing a solution you want to have multiple courses of action you want to have multiple options that you can exercise because if you put all your eggs in one basket if you only have one solution it may not work and you may be back to square one so you want to have those multiple options and what you may want to do if the crisis is big enough you may want to exercise all of those options all those courses of actions that you came up with simultaneously. Now as the leader of the team it's important for us if multiple team members or multiple groups are implementing multiple solutions simultaneously it's incumbent upon us to make sure that there's coordination and communication between those teams so they don't step on each other and actually get counter productive and work across purposes. So remember the most important thing is getting out of crisis mode so come up with multiple courses of action that are going to get you out of crisis mode and then get on to the long-term solution. Finally debrief your team when the crisis is over this is where to talk about what's the long-term solution going to be and to have that really honest conversation about how did we get in this situation the first place. This is where we can all take accountability for our actions in the events and moments leading up to the crisis. Now remember accountability isn't about assigning blame or pointing fingers. Accountability is looking at those places in the process or with the people or even the communication and coordination where things might have broken down and to get to the long-term solution we want to get to we have to address those things and take accountability for our role in those things when they happened. Now sometimes it's really simple. Sometimes maybe someone was just sick that day and a key piece of communication or coordination didn't happen. Sometimes there's more important or bigger structural problems in the process and in the organization that prevented key communication or coordination or processes from happening. It doesn't really matter what those are but this is the time when you talk about those things figure out how to take accountability for them put new processes and people and tools in place to do that and then move on and develop that long-term solution to try to keep this crisis from happening again. Like I said I hope you're not in the middle of the crisis at work but if you are and you're watching this because you're in the middle of crisis at work remember don't try to assign blame early on move thoroughly and deliberately through understanding the problem and coming up with solutions have multiple solutions that you can implement and then debrief your team when you're done. I know if you follow these five steps whatever crisis you're facing whether it's right now or in the future you'll be able to get you and your team through it successfully. If you found this helpful please like comment and share it with a friend or co-worker. Click on that link below in the description that'll take you to where you can download our free leadership development plan workbook and that'll help you set your career goals for the next two five and ten years and build a plan of action to achieve them. If you have any business or leadership questions leave us a comment below we love to hear from you or email us at info at evilgeniusleadership.com evilgeniusleadership.com is also where you can learn about all of our coaching and training programs so if you're looking for a little one-on-one work on your leadership style or some team work on leadership development at your workplace let us know email us and we'll set you up with a free consultation and we'll see how we can help. Thanks for watching today i really appreciate it remember the future is out there leave the way