Ten Things To Keep In Mind During A Crisis

I first put these thoughts together to help support a client of mine who is navigating the escalating crisis in Ukraine. But I’ve since found it’s a useful resource for any startup leader who is leading themselves and their team through a crisis that is uncertain and unfolding in nature. 1-5 focus more on managing yourself and/or your partners/co-founders and 6-10 focus more on managing your team/the company.

1 - Reflect and integrate past experiences to enhance your current sense of agency.

The setting and challenges of this particular crisis are different in scale or nature than personal or professional crises you’ve faced before. But this likely isn’t the first time you’ve had to lead through something big, stressful, unprecedented and outside of your control. Take some time to reflect. What did you learn about leadership resilience and crisis management from the COVID-19 pandemic? From other high stress moments you’ve experienced with this company or with previous startups? The key from downscaling feelings of overwhelm to feelings of stress is reclaiming your sense of agency – grounding yourself in the belief that you can face this crisis and it’s not fundamentally outside your abilities or limits.

2 - Manage your boundaries so you can stay in caring compassion and out of empathic distress.

As a leader and manager of others, you will feel pressure to care for others who are navigating this crisis alongside you. During a time when you may also feel depleted yourself, it’s even more important to manage your boundaries so you can show up with care+compassion but not end up in empathic distress and overwhelm. [If you have co-founders or other leader-partners in your role, enlist their help + support in helping to keep track of and help you manage that boundary. Empower them with permission, tactics or even scripted language for how to bring it up with you if they think you are extending yourself too far.]

3 - Be intentional about how you consume information during this crisis.

During a crisis there is both real dynamism in an unfolding situation and the illusion of dynamism fueled by a 24-hour news cycle, social media and attention-grabbing notifications. You need to help your brain discern the information it needs, at the frequency you need it. For some that might mean monitoring news only once daily, for others it might be more or less frequent. The point is that it be intentional consumption of information vs. reflexively glancing at notifications, websites or television screens. Decide what information you need/want. Decide from whom you will get it. Decide how often you want to get it. And then ignore everything else.

4 - Take care of your body.

If you are facing a crisis, your body is experiencing stress. It is essential that you stay aware of your physical needs (sleep, nutrition, movement) and try to meet your needs as best you can so that your body can function and help support you during this crisis. Here are two resources to help you: (1) this self-coaching guide ; and (2) this summary of how to “complete stress cycles.”

5 - Give your support to the people “one-circle in” and receive support from the people “one -circle out.”

One way to ensure everyone gets support during a crisis is by visualizing a set of concentric or nested circles. The person who is experiencing the threat/trauma/crisis most directly is at the center and in the space of the innermost circle. Then the people who support that person (friends, family, therapists, coaches, etc.) are the next circle. The people who support those people are the next circle. And so on.

Both in my personal and professional life, I find it helpful to visualize where I am in the set of circles (i.e., how many layers from center) so I can focus more clearly on who I need to support and who I need to make sure I get my own support from. For this support model to function and sustain itself indefinitely, everyone needs to follow two rules:

(1) Do not skip inwards and try to support someone directly who is not one-circle in from you. [If you do that, you run the risk of (a) burning yourself out or (b) failing to support the people in your “one-circle-in” group.]

(2) Ensure that you have access to and communication with your “one-circle-out” people AND that you trust those people to manage their own boundaries with you (i.e., they know where/how to get their own support from their “one-circle-out” people) [Otherwise you will burn yourself out and waste energy trying to care for the people who are supposed to be caring for you.]

Note: If you look “one circle-out” from you and find that you are lacking people who can support you, ascertain if that is because (1) you haven’t reached out or (2) the people in that circle aren’t skilled or specialized enough to fully help you.

If the latter, it’s time to add more or different professional caregivers to your circle of support (i.e., therapists, coaches, advisors, etc.) Sometimes it’s the people in the circle (friends, family, co-founders) who can help you realize you do need to add more/different professionals into your circle.

6 - Accept that you will get less done during this period as an individual and as a team/company.

Generally-speaking, most startup leaders I know struggle with accepting limits, but a crisis is a time for temporarily accepting limits instead of wasting energy fighting them. First, for you: What can be triaged or postponed or re-classified as less important now? Then, for your team/company: What can be triaged or postponed or re-classified as less important now? If the limits themselves start to evoke stress or anxiety for you, remind yourself that they are not forever. They are for now. As you/your team adapts and the crisis unfolds in ways you can’t predict right now, this will all change again.

7 - Accept teammates’ offers of help/support while also staying in touch with how much and for how long other teammates are “stepping up.”

In times of crisis, certain teammates may want to take action, “step up” and help as a way to show their care and as a way to feel more in control or foster a greater sense of agency in themselves. Accepting their help in the short-term is connecting for them and can offer you/others some relief. The key is to keep track of workload intensity over time. When teammates volunteer and then “step up” too much or for too long, they can generate their own resentment or burnout. (And that’s another way the “concentric circles of support” model can break.) As a leader/manager, you can couple your acceptance of “stepping up to help” with a request that the person simultaneously track their own workload intensity; make sure they have their own system in place for managing their stress and getting their own support. Make sure they are tracking themselves for the earliest indicators of burnout or resentment towards the teammates they are stepping up to help. And you can keep a pulse on them as well.

8 - Don’t judge how you (or anyone else) navigates the grief or loss this crisis might be evoking.

Crises often generate real or potential losses and with any form of loss comes grief. The key to navigating loss and grief as a leader and as a team is to recognize that everyone grieves differently. There isn’t one way or even a right way to grieve. As leaders, it’s important you hold this in mind so that you can more accurately and compassionately interpret teammates’ behaviors when they are experiencing grief or loss. When you feel the impulse to judge someone’s behavior or response to grief in some way, try to resist that judgment and instead give them space to have their own experience. [And if you want to explore more of the details and nuances of navigating grief and loss in a startup setting - Read this]

9 - Give your team the permission and the language to ask for what they need at any given moment/hour/day and keep the menu of options as broad as possible for as long as you can.

People process information, emotion and stress in different ways under normal circumstances, but during a crisis these differences can get magnified. Your team will have a wide range of needs and those needs can dynamically shift as well. Sometimes the best practice is to ask what someone needs. Other times, it will be more effective to offer a menu and have someone pick from a set of options. Some people will want time off, others may want extra work to use as an adaptive distraction. Some people will want to talk about what’s going on, while others will want a break/respite from the crisis around them. As a leader, you can create space/permission for people to ask what they need and negotiate how everyone can get their needs met over time.

10 - Do not forget that you lead a company. There are limits to how much or how long you can help individuals because there is a larger community you need to support.

These might be some of the toughest moments you face during a crisis, especially an extended one. As a leader, you have the responsibility to ensure the existential survival of the company - and amidst all the other noisy needs and competing challenges, you can’t lose sight of that responsibility. This is why #9 above is “for as long as you can” and #6 is “temporarily accepting” — because the extent to which you can make accommodations for one or a subset of individuals is not infinite. There are limits. The challenging part is deciding what those limits are and then making the painful (sometimes excruciating) decision to enforce them. It will be important for you to calibrate with other decision-makers on what those limits are and how you will collectively talk about it if (or when) you see the limits differently. (For example: at what point would we decide to do a RIF/layoffs? At what point do we have to let go of an employee in crisis who can no longer work? What do we do if we evaluate where/when those points are and they are different?)

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