When things don t go to plan What happens when you have too much to do? How do you deal with too much stress? How do you complete your work? Most of the time everything goes more or less to plan and people wonder what there is for a team leader to do. After all, the team seems to get by OK. Even when things get busy, they seem to pull through. Then something goes wrong and everyone looks to the team leader to sort it out. Being a team leader involves you in planning workloads so that everyone is kept busy, but not too busy. It assumes that you can foresee what is needed or what is going to happen, and prepare for it. That way you use people and resources and your own time as efficiently as possible. However, sometimes things go wrong and you have a crisis. Team members have to take on unplanned or unexpected tasks, do things they don t normally do or do tasks under unusual conditions. Crises (the plural of crisis) don t happen often, otherwise they would become part of the normal way of working. It is because they are unplanned that they throw everyone. How you cope with them is important. If you panic or freeze up then a bad situation can become worse. This session is all about preparing for unplanned events, accepting that crises will sometimes happen and being ready to deal with them. Page 1
Preparing for the unpredictable Crises fall into two groups: 1. Those events you can predict may happen but not when or if they will happen. 2. Those events that are so unlikely that you can t imagine them happening. Most crises fall into the first group, and if you really think hard about what may happen (as opposed to what is likely to happen) then there are relatively few things that fall into the second group. People often don t predict unpleasant or unwelcome events because they don t want them to happen. They ignore the possibility that they will happen. If you could foresee that something could happen then it wouldn t be unplanned for. It might be unexpected, but it doesn t need to be unprepared for. Being an effective team leader includes thinking about the things that might happen, as well as those things you expect or want to happen, and then preparing for them. Planning for these events is called contingency planning. Contingency simply means an event that occurs as a result of something else happening, so contingency planning is preparing for events that happen because of something that you can t control or predict. Exercise What unexpected or unplanned events have happened in your workplace that have affected your team s work? Had you anticipated that the events might happen (even if you didn t know when)? Do you have contingency plans for them (or other unpredictable events)? Page 2
It is useful, when planning your own work or your team s work to prepare for the unexpected. Ask yourself: What could happen that would seriously affect my/our ability to complete the tasks/achieve the goals? How likely is it that each event would happen? What would the effect be? What can I/we do to prepare for the event? This is a type of risk assessment. There is more about doing this in the sessions on health and safety, but a simple approach is to ask: How likely is it to happen? High Medium Low What impact would it have? High Medium Low High means there is a good chance of it happening or, if it happens, the impact could be quite severe. Medium means it could happen and, if it does, it would be quite disrupting. Low means it probably won t happen or, if it does, it won t have much effect. If you rate it High for either likelihood or impact, or Medium for both, then it s probably worth spending a little time thinking about how you would deal with it. Case Study Robbie is a team leader in a factory producing plastic packaging for the food industry. Because their products are used for food, the factory is subject to the same regulations as the food industry itself. Team members all have to wear protective clothing and handle the products with care. During a really busy period one of the machines has to be switched over to produce a different product. Although the team have made these changes many times before, there is a small chance that a mistake could be made leading to contamination of products. If it happens, the machine has to be stripped down, cleaned and reassembled, and all the contaminated product thrown away. In the rush to changeover the machine, a mistake is made and the process has to be halted. Two hours production is lost. Robbie and the team carry out the clean as quickly as possible, but time is lost collecting together the materials they need to do it. There is also some confusion over who should do it, and another production run gets disrupted. Robbie hadn t prepared for the event, because he had hoped it wouldn t happen. Page 3
Decision-making under pressure When things go wrong you often have to make decisions that you haven t made before, or make them without very much information. You may also have to make them quickly. All this can put you under pressure. People look to leaders in a crisis and expect them to make decisions for them. Sometimes you have to take charge when more senior people aren t about. There are six steps you should take when making decisions under pressure, if you possibly can: 1. Keep calm. Don t panic, rush into decisions and get things wrong. Focus on the problem and give others confidence in your ability to handle the situation. 2. Find out what has happened. Sometimes people panic in crises and give very misleading reports on what has happened. If you can t see for yourself, ask questions and confirm what one person says with others who were there. 3. Report the problem to those who need to know. This could be your line manager, the health and safety officer, or the emergency services. 4. Work out what is important. For example, in the Case Study on the previous page, the most important thing was to keep the lost production to a minimum. By getting too involved in the problem of the contaminated machine, other processes had problems. 5. Collect enough information to make an informed decision. Ask questions - you don t need to know everything, just what is critical. Often it only takes one or two pieces of information to know what it s right to do. The main thing is to recognise what you need to know. By knowing what has happened and what is important you will be able to make a judgement. 6. Tell people what you have decided and check that they understand what they need to do. In crises people often don t think clearly and can misunderstand. Don t be afraid to strip a job to its basics. Sometimes you may have to accept something that is less than ideal. That may mean a product or service is not to your usual standards. If people are warned in advance, they will often be happy to have something rather than nothing, for a short period. However, whatever you do, don t take unnecessary health, safety or environmental risks and make the crisis worse than it needs to be! Page 4
Lower Your Stress Stress happens when you feel tense about a situation. When things don t go to plan you will often feel stressed. Reducing your stress will allow you to focus on your work and deal with the situation more effectively. The first step in handling a crisis is to keep calm. This helps to reduce the stress of the situation. Here are some simple tips if you feel stressed when things have gone wrong: Take deep breaths, breathing in and then breathing out slowly. Breathing deeply provides more oxygen to your brain and it is easier for you to concentrate. You are more likely to do a task well if you give it your full attention. Don t let your emotions take over. Think about what needs to be done and focus on how to get each task done. Read the following case study to see how to handle stress. Case Study Vada s team are assembling a new catalogue to be despatched that evening. A machine has broken down and they are way behind their schedule. Vada is afraid that they may not get all the catalogues assembled and prepared for despatch. She decides that in order to resolve the problem, she will have to calm down. She stops what she is doing and takes several deep breaths and then she thinks carefully about what the problem is. Once she has dealt with her emotions, Vada s mind is clear. Now she is ready to work out how they can resolve the problem. Exercise Which situations at work (and at home or elsewhere) make you feel stressed? Write down three or four recent events which have caused you to feel stressed: Continued over page Page 5
How do you deal with this stress? Which of these events did you take some positive action (like Vada) to help resolve, and which did you respond to in a negative way (lose your temper or cry, perhaps)? In future, when you feel stressed, try to relieve it in a more positive way so that you can maintain some control over yourself and therefore, over the situation Learning from things that don t go to plan The best leaders still make mistakes, but they don t make the same mistake twice, because they learn from them. In crises people are all put to the test, and they don t always work as you d expect. Some do much better, others much worse. When things didn t go to plan you should always make time to review what happened, afterwards. Ask yourself: 1. Why did the crisis happen? a. Was it something we did or didn t do? b. Should we have seen it was likely to happen sooner than we did? c. Was there anything we could have done to prevent it happening? 2. Did we react in the right way once things started to go wrong? a. Did we react fast enough, or too fast? b. Was there any information available that we could have used, but didn t? c. Did we misunderstand what was happening? d. Was there anything else we could have done that would have been better? 3. How did we perform in the crisis? a. Did people perform as well as expected? b. Did some people prove to be better or more effective than expected, or have skills we didn t realise? (Continued on page 7) Page 6
c. Should any plans be changed or created? 4. How did you perform, as a leader? a. Did you keep your head and behave as calmly as possible? b. Did you find out what happened? c. Did you report the problem to the right people? d. Did you collect enough information to make an informed decision? e. Did you tell people clearly what they had to do? 5. What do other people think of your performance? a. How do you know? b. Have you asked them? Leadership in a crisis is a true measure of your leadership in normal times. People will follow you if they trust and respect you, and have confidence in you. If they trust and respect you, and have confidence in you normally, they will do so in a crisis. If people are not willing to follow at other times, they will not do so in a crisis. Page 7
Comprehension Check Complete the following exercises. Refer back to the session if necessary. A. Read the following. Circle the letter in front of the correct answer. 1. A crisis occurs when: a. a leader loses control b. unplanned events occur and cause disruption c. people lack the skills to do their job properly 2. A contingency plan is: a. a plan that has to be abandoned b. another name for planning a team s workload c. a plan for dealing with unpredicted for events 3. A risk assessment should consider: a. the likelihood of something unpredicted happening b. the impact of something unpredicted happening c. the likelihood and the impact of something unpredicted happening B. Complete the following. In the event of a crisis occurring, a team leader should: 1. Keep 2. what has happened. 3. to those who need to know. 4. Work out 5. Collect enough C. Mark the following statements T (True) or F (False). 1. A crisis can make people feel stressed 2. Effective planning will always prevent crises occurring 3. The best leaders only make the same mistake once 4. Once a crisis is over you should put it out of your mind as quickly as possible Page 8
Making Connections Answer the questions following the case. Tim leads a team that repairs minor damage to a council s roads. A surveyor marks the tarmac to indicate areas to repair and the method to employ. The surveyor also estimates the time needed to make each repair. Using these markings, road repair crews like Tim s will know exactly what work to do. Tim s team are expected to complete their workload within the time assessed for the jobs allocated to them. Today they were severely delayed by a car crash in the area they had intended starting their work. It took an hour and a half for the scene to be cleared. Tim is worried that they will not make it to every location that they must repair today. Using the risk assessment model, how would you assess the risk of something like this happening to Tim s team? How likely is it to happen? High Medium Low What impact is it likely to have? High Medium Low Is this a situation that Tim could have predicted might happen and had a contingency plan for? Why do you think that? Page 9
Think and Apply How well do you use the skills in this session? Think about your response to crises at work or at home. Do you prepare for possible disruptions to plans? Do you make decisions without getting stressed? Do you learn from your experience of crises? Reflect on your answers to these questions and then complete the questions below. 1. Read the list of skills. Tick the boxes to show your strengths and weaknesses. Skills strengths <- - - -> weaknesses identifying events that could disrupt work plans I m good at this I m quite good at this I m not so good at this I m quite poor at this coping with crises at work assessing the risk of disruptive events making decisions under pressure handling the stress of crises reviewing crises to learn from them 2. Do you want to improve any of these skills? 3. How do you plan to improve the skills you listed in question 2? (You might want to discuss this with your line manager or your tutor/mentor/coach.) Page 10