Confront Critical Incidents
You can’t plan everything about your day. Even the most disciplined leaders can’t stop the intrusion of the unexpected. Stuff happens. Critical incidents—chance occurrences, particularly at a time of stress and challenge—are a part of the life of every leader. They also offer significant moments of learning for leaders and constituents.
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Critical incidents present opportunities for leaders to teach impor- tant lessons about appropriate norms of behavior.
Abhijit Chitnis experienced just such a situation when he was working at Accenture as a team lead on an engagement for a U.S.- based storage client, with a five-person team working out of India, along with a global team of eight from the United States and Ireland. It was during the critical year-end financial reporting period for their client, and they were assigned to work on one of the business intel- ligence systems that the client used to report the annual and quarter- end financial numbers to Wall Street. The schedule was tight and demanding, but the team was on time and doing fine. Then they hit a patch of bad luck. They were just two days away from the critical deadline of December 31 when they ran into a slippage and some defects. They risked failure to deliver on time. That result could also have meant that they would lose part of the client’s business. Team members were disappointed, of course, not only about the slippage but also about the possibility of missing their New Year’s plans with friends and family. It meant they were going to have to put in extra work over the holiday in order to complete the task.
It was in this context that Abhijit witnessed something that demonstrated to him the extraordinary results that can be achieved when a team is led by someone who, he said, “truly personified the values that he stood for.” The senior client engagement delivery manager, Bob, had been on a planned vacation when he heard about the problem. Says Abhijit,
Bob cancelled all his planned commitments, and reported back to work, even though he was not a part of the delivery team. The personal commitment everyone saw from him boosted the entire team’s morale. He stayed with the team day and night for
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G E two days, providing motivational support, interfacing with the
client, and setting the expectations for everyone in the team. As a result of this and all the hard work put in by the team, we were successful in delivering the required reports, on time and of high quality, to the client.
Bob sent a powerful message that holiday season by showing up to work when it wasn’t really expected of him. It demonstrated how committed he was to his team, the project, and the client. Bob’s example for his team, Abhijit told us, “in turn made me personally committed to the goal. We took each of the words from our leader very seriously, because we believed in him and trusted him more, and because he showed us that he truly means every word that he says. Every person in the team forgot about any of their grudges and got together to work efficiently as a team.” All this happened because a leader put his values into practice. It is, says Abhijit, “incredibly strong evidence of the importance of the idea of model- ing the way.”
There are critical moments when leaders have to put values squarely on the table in order to make sure everyone understands the principles that guide how they work together. Sometimes leaders need to clearly and unambiguously point out that a particular deci- sion or action is being taken because a core value is at stake. In doing so, leaders demonstrate the connection between actions taken and values espoused. They set an example for what it means to live the values under even the most trying of circumstances. By standing up for values, leaders demonstrate that having shared values requires a mutual commitment from everyone to align words and deeds.
Critical incidents are those events in the lives of leaders (and organizations) that offer the chance to improvise while still staying true to the script. Although these incidents can’t be explicitly planned,
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it’s useful to keep in mind, as Abhijit and Bob did, that the way you handle these events—how you link actions and decisions to shared values—speaks volumes about what really matters to you. Critical incidents create important teachable moments. They offer leaders the occasion in real time to demonstrate what’s valued and what’s not.
Tell Stories
Stories are another powerful tool for teaching people about what’s important and what’s not, what works and what doesn’t, what is and what could be.14 Through stories, leaders pass on lessons about shared values and get others to work together.
When he was program director of knowledge management for the World Bank, Steve Denning learned firsthand how stories can change the course of an organization. After trying all the more tra- ditional ways of getting people to change their behavior, Steve found that simple stories were the most effective means of communicating the essential messages within the organization. “Nothing else worked,” Steve said. “Charts left listeners bemused. Prose remained unread. Dialogue was just too laborious and slow. Time after time, when faced with the task of persuading a group of managers or frontline staff in a large organization to get enthusiastic about a major change, I found that storytelling was the only thing that worked.”15
In a business climate obsessed with PowerPoint presentations, complex graphs and charts, and lengthy reports, storytelling may seem to some like a soft way of getting hard stuff done. It’s anything but that. Steve’s experience with storytelling is, in fact, supported by the data. Research shows that when leaders want to commu- nicate standards, stories are a much more effective means of
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G E communication than are corporate policy statements, data about
performance, and even a story plus the data.16 Information is more quickly and accurately remembered when it is first presented in the form of an example or story.17
That’s certainly been Phillip Kane’s experience. Storytelling has been a part of his life since he was a kid. His dad was a great story- teller, and he used stories especially effectively to teach lessons. Phillip has carried the family tradition into his business life at Goodyear.
When Phillip was named to head up a large team with previ- ously poor engagement scores for communication, he needed to find a way to be more proactive about connecting with employees. So he began writing to the team every Friday. He carried the practice with him when he was appointed president of Wingfoot Commercial Tire Systems, a twenty-five-hundred-person wholly owned subsidiary of Goodyear. As Phillip explained,
The letter, simply and unoriginally titled “The Week,” began as a recap of highlights from the prior week’s work but soon morphed into a communication that was less about what we do than how we do it—which to me is as, or more, important. “The Week” is based on the notion that life lessons exist in unlikely places. These lessons, if we are open to them, help make us better tire sellers, parents, spouses, friends, and members of our community. When we grow and become better as individuals, the teams we belong to get better as well and will win more. That’s the point of “The Week.”
When we spoke to Phillip about “The Week,” he’d written more than 150 issues, each one with a story and a lesson. Storytelling, Phillips says, accomplishes two things. It offers a framework for relating to the message—something that people encounter in their
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own lives that can bridge to the main point. It also offers him the chance to lead through an example rather than to come across simply as preaching.
Telling stories, as Phillip knows, has another lasting benefit. It forces you to pay close attention to what your constituents are doing. Peers generally make better role models for what to do at work than famous people or ones several levels up in the hierarchy. When others hear or read a story about someone with whom they can identify, they are much more likely to see themselves doing the same thing. People seldom tire of hearing stories about themselves and the people they know. These stories get repeated, and the lessons of the stories get spread far and wide. In fact, Phillip told us that folks who worked for him in his prior job asked if they could remain on his distribu- tion list so that they’d continue to get “The Week,” even though the stories and lessons didn’t necessarily relate to them directly. Now that shows the power of stories!