Crisis Leadership and Shock Trauma

If you’ve ever been in one of my Leading Change workshops you know that I believe that business change environments dictate the style of leadership you should adopt. For instance, Business As Usual is best served by 'Champion' leaders, while Crisis situations require a more directive 'Captain' in charge. Traditional leadership models often fall short during intense organizational change.

Some interesting ideas about Crisis leadership have come from researchers at the US Army Research Institute who spent ten months observing the Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, Maryland, a world-renowned urban facility that treats more than 7,000 patients each year with severe, often life-threatening injuries. They wanted to find out which leadership strategies fared best for teams working in "highly dynamic and stressful situations". The Shock Trauma Center was the perfect petri dish.

The center's trauma teams are made up of three key leadership roles: the top-ranked position, held by the 'Attending' surgeon; the second-ranked 'Fellow' position, followed by the third-ranked 'Admitting' resident, with the players changing from day to day, week to week and month to month. A trauma team's lifetime is short - about 15 to 60 minutes - with individual leaders coming and going while the leadership positions remain rigid, but flexible.

What People Magazine Knows About Customer Experience Management

When Seal and Heidi Klum called it quits earlier this year, they reported having “grown apart’, a common theme among Hollywood power couples; they come together in a storm of romance, and beat a hasty retreat at the first sign of trouble. They gush about their new beau when things are new, but lose interest once their needs inevitably change.

So, what about your relationship with your customers? Sure, you probably don’t have paparazzi following you to every meeting, luncheon, or conference, but when things change, business relationships can fall prey to the same pitfalls as Hollywood romances do.

How do you know when your customer’s needs have changed? Do you know what’s important to them - now? And on the flip side, how do you let your customers know when your needs have changed?

For starters, not all customers leave suppliers because of price, products or options. Research tells us that most leave because they feel that their current supplier doesn't understand them or their needs. There’s that word again: needs.

So, how are you staying ahead of your customer’s changes? How are you letting them know that you care about them? Here are few tips for making sure that your company doesn’t end up on the cover of People magazine.

Super Nanny to the Rescue! Redux

ED: This is an update of an earlier post I wrote in 2007. You can read the old one here.

Have you seen the popular TV series Super Nanny, where a “real” English nanny comes to the rescue of distraught parents?

Week after week the nanny smiles as she steps into house after house of screaming children and clueless parents. The kids are a mess, the parents are frazzled, and everyone has reached their boiling point. You can just imagine why these families dial 911 out of sheer exhaustion.

But it’s Super Nanny to the rescue! She sweeps into the situation, disciplines the kids, organizes workable programs, encourages the parents to become "real parents," and—in her no-nonsense way—she puts the family right again.

How can you keep from letting your business turn into a screaming, dysfunctional mess during times of challenge? Here are three simple rules, complements of Super Nanny: