Crisis? What crisis?
Everything is going wrong, and everyone wants their problem fixed right now. How can you cope? Here are 5 proven techniques for handling a situation in which several crises seem to be happening at once.
Break it down before you have a break-down
The first thing to bear in mind is that although everything seems to be happening at once, they are not necessarily. So look at the situation, and decide what is actually happening, what already has happened, and what may be about to happen.
Important may not mean urgent
I think this is a key distinction to make. You have to decide, what absolutely must be dealt with immediately, and what can be deferred for now? Whatever can be deferred, ought to be.
Delegate, delegate, delegate
You're the manager, so you have to carry the can for the decisions. But can some of them be delegated? If not, then you need to sort that out, because it's a problem. I will be dealing with that in the next article about decision-making. For now, fall back on the second best solution, which is to delegate the thinking at least. In other words, get members of your team to outline options, and their likely outcomes. See Decision-making in a complex environment for advice about this.
Delegate decisions upward
Are all the decisions yours to make? It is very easy to get carried away with your own need to reach a satisfactory conclusion, but sometimes your boss can take a decision that will simply stop everything in its tracks.
For example, if your school network keeps breaking down, with the result that every lesson you have dozens of frantic phone calls from all over the school, an effective short-term solution would be to simply call a moratorium on all use of educational technology for the next week, and for you to be taken off timetable for a week whilst you get the problems sorted out. But you can hardly take such drastic decisions yourself, or without backing from above.
Don't get me wrong: I am not suggesting you take such decisions lightly. But here's an example of how that sort of drastic measure can be effective. In one new job I had, as Head of Information Technology in a high school, nobody would use the computer facilities because they were always breaking down, for no apparent reason, and without warning.
I took the computer rooms off-line for a week whilst I had the whole set-up examined from top to bottom. It turned out that there was a partial break in one of the network cables, behind the wall of one of the computer rooms. Once that had been fixed, the system hardly ever broke down again.
Learn from the Karate Kid
I can't remember if it was in The Karate Kid or the Kung Fu series on TV, but in one of them the hero makes the point that when you are fighting several people at once, you need to actually engage in just one at a time. In a sense, that's what you have to do when things appear to be in a melt-down state.
In one job I started, within literally days of starting I had a crisis on each of several fronts. I was receiving phone calls from Headteachers saying that they needed their broadband connection installed yesterday, someone from another section trying to poach one of my team, the team member in question threatening to take out a grievance procedure against me for not letting him go straight away, and several other issues that just seemed to erupt.
The way I dealt with the situation was by using the self-defence technique just alluded to -- not literally, of course! The way to do so is by using the techniques already listed, plus making sure that you have procedures that all concerned can follow.
In fact, in many respects I would say that that is the single most important tactic in crisis-management: making everyone follow a proper procedure in order to deal with each situation logically.
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