“Mountaintops inspire leaders, but valleys mature.” –Winston Churchill

Introduction

Your reputation as a leader is formed not only by the results you achieve, but also by the behaviors you display along the way. Nothing will contribute more to that reputation than your actions and effectiveness when things go wrong. How do you perform under pressure?

television leadership

In an episode of “CSI Miami” about a year ago, Eric (one of the investigators) gets into trouble by bending (okay, breaking) some rules while working on a case. He decides to try to solve the problem himself, and his boss (the ever-confident Lt. Horatio Caine) is in the dark until Internal Affairs shows up.

In the end, of course, the problem is solved. Horatio takes his charge aside and calmly but firmly tells him that he will never let this happen again. And after being sure the message has been received, he adds “and if you ever do, tell me right away so I can watch your back.”

What do you do when one of your projects is in trouble? Maybe it has quality problems or it is delayed. Perhaps you’ve lost a key resource or are running into a budget overrun. How will you behave?

Evaluate your leadership behavior

There are (at least) four areas where you have the opportunity to demonstrate situational leadership and good (or poor) judgment. In each of these areas, you are going to make decisions about how to behave, whether you make them consciously or unconsciously.

Panic Emergency — The level of urgency you show will affect everyone. Act too casual and you can expect ongoing problems. Treat every problem as a severity 1 crisis and you will eventually be brushed off like Chicken Little. Show your maturity; Assess the situation and act accordingly. Showing disappointment is often more effective than showing your anger.

Accountability vs. Blame — You have multiple roles here; you must be responsible and you must hold others accountable.

• Your customers want you to take ownership and responsibility for the failure and clearly demonstrate corrective action.
• For your people, it’s essential that you correctly assess what caused the failure and hold the appropriate people accountable, even while limiting public criticism and providing individual feedback in private. If someone can’t be trusted to perform, get them out. Otherwise, be prepared to have your people’s back even while giving them tough love behind closed doors.
• And for your own management, you need to take the same personal responsibility that you do with clients, while clearly demonstrating that you’ve gotten to the bottom of the issues.

Greater participation vs. taking control — Again, you have multiple audiences to satisfy. Step in and take over the failed project, and your customers will be satisfied. But he has completely undermined his own people, and his management may or may not be pleased. Your bias here should be to increase your visibility (more status reporting, faster issue escalation) but avoid taking over unless there really is no alternative.

What actions to take — Something has to give. If you are going to make up for lost programming time, there may be additional costs or great demands on people’s capabilities. If you are going to push the schedule back, what is the business impact? Quality issues need to be evaluated and can bring an entire project into question.

Everyone will be looking for you to be decisive. But you want to solve problems, not make them worse. Be quick if you can, but be honest if taking a few days to reassess the project is the appropriate action.

Examine your leadership actions in each of these categories. Make sure that your actions and decisions in each are consistent with the needs of the situation.