Post-Crisis Leadership and Team Development: How to Get It Right

Why Post-Crisis Leadership and Team Development Matters
When something disrupts the way people think and work, leaders and their teams not only have to deal with managing the immediate fallout, but they must also create and enable a compelling vision for a preferred future state.  Post-crisis leadership and team development can be a tricky and difficult endeavor depending upon the:

• Type of crisis.
• Composition of the team
• Effectiveness of leadership.

When Post-Crisis Leadership and Team Development Matters
When Covid disrupted our way of life, leaders learned how important it is to effectively deal with the urgent and the important.  But other crises can be equally daunting within a business and require effective post-crisis leadership and team development to make it to the other side such as:

• Legal investigations
• Violation of respectful workplace directives
• Failed mergers
• Misguided leadership
• Team politics

The situations that lead up to these events can cause troubled or even damaged relationships and substantial loss of trust in the aftermath. Problematic internal team dynamics are costly and can lead to diminished employee engagement, loss of valued talent, lawsuits, and destroyed reputations. Companies can save hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars by taking steps to rebuild the culture, leadership, and trust among the team.

5 Steps to Get Post-Crisis Leadership and Team Development Right

Rebuilding a team after a crisis — and restoring high levels of collaboration, productivity, and innovation — starts with a disciplined focus on five essentials:

1. Get Aligned
   Align the senior leadership team around a shared direction, priorities, and expectations.
2. Evaluate Individuals
   Assess individual capabilities and needs to understand where support, development, or accountability is required.
3. Assess the Team
   Diagnose team dynamics and performance barriers that may be undermining trust and execution.
4. Create Alignment
   Strengthen leaders at every level so consistent behaviors reinforce the desired culture and strategy.
5. Make Repairs
   Repair strained or broken relationships that, if left unaddressed, will continue to sap energy and results.

6 Essential and Enabling Conditions for an Effective Team
For the five steps above to work, the team must be ready. Decades of research by Ruth Wageman and Richard Hackman of Harvard University show that effective teams do not emerge from good intentions alone. They are built on a small set of foundational conditions that create a sturdy platform for sustained performance.

These conditions must be addressed first. Without them, efforts focused on psychological team safety, engagement, or collaboration are unlikely to stick or translate into results. In other words, teams cannot compensate for weak foundations with better feelings or more communication.

Wageman and Hackman’s research points to three essential conditions that enable teams to perform effectively. These conditions should be established before moving on to more advanced team development concepts. They include:

• Being a Real Team
  The members are interdependent and need to work together to accomplish their work.
• Sharing a Compelling Purpose & Direction
  The team’s purpose is challenging, clear, and consequential enough to energize and align team members.
• Having the Right People
  The team has enough of the right skills, diversity, attitudes, and behaviors to be successful.

While not considered “essential,” Wageman and Hackman also identified the following three enabling elements that accelerate how fast teams create higher performance.  Together, these six conditions account for up to 80% of a team’s effectiveness.

• Sound Structure
  The right team structure, size, distributed leadership, task design, and processes.
• Supportive Context
  Aligned culture, information, resources, rewards, and opportunities.
• Team Coaching
  Someone who pays attention to and can help the team reflect, learn, and grow.

To learn more about how far and how fast to push your team to get to the next level, download Leadership Performance Pressure – The Science Behind Performance Expectations

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.