How to be a high-quality leader during a crisis: Catherine Stagg-Macey

It’s not about telling everyone everything at every stage of a process because that’s just not possible.

So, we need to look at traits of a leader and what will help them during a crisis. One is a degree of self-awareness – understanding what matters to the organisation and how to lead with that as the compass to guide them through.

The other thing is having a capacity to have hard conversations. You really need to get over yourself and your own discomfort when it comes to situations like this.

A lot of leaders would try to sweep a crisis under the carpet and maybe that’s what’s been happening in these large corporations recently and why it has taken so long for them to be seen to be doing something. Media leaks, rather than integrity, have been the key triggers for action.

Accountability is a big word used within the corporate world and it is used even more than the word responsibility.

The leaders may not be at the heart of the crisis, but it has happened on their watch, so they need to be accountable.

There is always going to be something festering in the corner that you don’t know about, but it should be part of your role to ensure you’re trying to find out what’s going on so there are no surprises. That’s why you are in a position of power.

There’s an emergency triage response and a ‘how the hell did we get here?’ response. The question should always be ‘how is abuse of power showing up in this organisation?’ rather than ‘is abuse of power showing up in this organisation?’

These questions can relate to various scenarios such as racism and sexism within the organisation and how this is manifesting. Those are the brave questions that I think leaders don’t ask because I don’t think they really want to know the answers. They are in denial and demanding proof before they will actually acknowledge it as a problem.

Large organisations should always assume there are abuses of power going on and it’s the role of a leadership team to get under the skin of that and tackle it more efficiently. This is not something you just pass over to HR.

Another thing leaders don’t do is reflective dialogue as a leadership team. They aren’t asking themselves what their blind spots are and how they can address those. Very few teams do this because it doesn’t fit into their tick-list work style.

Through my work I get leadership teams to see the value in making time to do this as an activity and then they realise how important it is. These are the conversations that will help leadership teams to be more aware.

Catherine Stagg-Macey is a business coach and host of podcast Unsaid @ Work

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