You have followed a playbook, and moved to a “command and control†style to address the cascading effects of natural disasters. But now you’re dealing with a crisis unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. There is no playbook.
In fact, to understand the current situation — let alone make decisions about how to respond — you will need to involve more people than you’re accustomed to, Andrea Alexander, Aaron De Smet, Sarah Kleinman, and Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi write for McKinsey.
In this rapidly changing environment, your people need to respond with urgency, without senior executives and traditional governance slowing things down.
Waiting to decide, or even waiting for approval, is the worst thing they can do. Yet some level of coordination across teams and activities is crucial for your organization’s response to be effective.
How do you do this? How do you accomplish the seemingly impossible?
The answer: create a robust network of teams that is empowered to operate outside of the current hierarchy and bureaucratic structures of the organization. In response to the coronavirus, organizations of all shapes and sizes are moving in this direction.
They are setting up “control towers,†“nerve centersâ€â€”which take over some of the company’s critical operations—and other crisis-response teams to deal with rapidly shifting priorities and challenges.
They see that these teams make faster, better decisions, and many are wondering how they can replicate this effort in other parts of their organization.
Creating a central “rapid response†group is the right first move, but leaders shouldn’t stop there.
In this article, we will focus on the steps leaders should take to create a cohesive and adaptable network of teams, united by a common purpose, that gathers information, devises solutions, puts them into practice, refines outcomes—and does it all fast.
Create teams that will tackle current strategic priorities and key challenges facing the organization. That’s job number one—everything flows from it.
But leaders should also understand that mistakes will be made. Maybe these teams won’t be the right ones a month down the road, but the model is built to be flexible and to shift when that happens. Teams have to make the best decisions they can with the information that’s available.
Don’t worry about perfection; the key is to stand up teams and let them course-correct quickly.
After creating the initial set of teams, a leader must shift toward ensuring that multidirectional communication is taking place—not only across teams within the network but also between these teams and the rest of the organization.
To do this, there should be s The central hub can check in on progress being made and find ways to support teams and make sure they are using first-order problem-solving principles. Collaboration and transparency take hold when individuals in an organization feel psychologically safe.
Leaders should recognize people who are taking smart risks, be authentic in their communications and empathetic toward those who are anxious, and acknowledge their mistakes to others.
What they shouldn’t do is punish people for failing when they’ve taken risks, or exclude those with relevant information or expertise from the conversation.
And at this point, once the initial network of teams is established and after support from leadership early in the journey, the network should become self-sustaining and self-managing.
It’s important to note that the empowered network of teams won’t encompass all of the organization’s activities; this is not a re-org.
There is still a core set of functions operating in the more traditional way, where the normal organizational structures are still operating and performing their typical duties in a more or less traditional way. ■