Leading Through Crisis and Change

Welcome to the Courage of a Leader podcast. This is where you hear real life stories of top leaders achieving extraordinary results, and you get practical advice and techniques you can immediately apply for your own success. This is where you will get inspired and take bold, courageous action. I'm so glad you can join us. I'm your host. Amy Reilly, now are you ready to step into the full power of your leadership and achieve the results you care about most. Let's ignite the courage of a leader.

Welcome back to the Courage of a Leader. I'm Amy Riley, and today we're talking about something every leader faces eventually, sometimes more than once in a career, and sometimes all at once, leading through crisis and change, not the tidy kind of change with a clean PowerPoint and a six month runway. I mean the change that hits hard and hits fast, the crisis that makes your stomach drop. The uncertainty that has your team watching you a little more closely. If you lead people, you will lead through disruption. And the question is an if the question is, how do you stay composed when you don't feel composed? How do you inspire people when you're also trying to steady yourself? How do you make decisive calls without perfect information? That's what we're going to talk about today. So let's get into it. Here's the first truth. Crisis doesn't create leaders, it reveals them. When things get shaky, what you are committed to shows up fast. In my book, the courage of a leader, how to inspire, engage and get extraordinary results, I talk about the power of a leadership legacy, a purpose that's bigger than your mood, your ego or the noise around you. Your legacy is the commitment that keeps you steady when everything else is moving a leadership legacy is an aspiration about how you want to be known or what you want to create when the environment gets turbulent, your leadership legacy helps you stay the course in spite of the turmoil around you or the turmoil inside of you.

So if you're in crisis or change right now, and likely you are, here's your first leadership move. Name your bigger commitment. What are you here to protect? What future Are you refusing to sacrifice for short term comfort? What legacy Are you building through this mess? Let me make that super practical. Here are a few examples of what those answers might sound like I'm here to protect our people and our culture translation. Even if we have to cut costs, restructure or pivot, we will do it in a way that preserves people's dignity, that preserves transparency and trust. Could sound like I'm here to protect the customer experience. Translation, we're not going to rush a half baked solution just to calm the anxiety of the moment. Quality and long term reputation will win. I'm here to protect our mission. Translation, we might change how we serve, but we won't drift from why we exist. I'm here to build leaders, not dependents. Translation, I will involve the team in hard decisions, even when it's tempting to control everything myself. I'm here to model courage and clarity translation. I won't pretend this is easy, and I won't catastrophize, right? I'll tell the truth and take the next right step. When your commitment is clear, your composure gets easier because you have a North Star, even when the map is on fire. Let's talk next about composure. We have been sold a myth that great leaders stay calm because they feel calm. Nope, that is simply not true. Great leaders stay composed because they know how to work with their emotions.

Now. Pretend that they don't have them in the courage of a leader. I lay out resilience as a practice, not a personality trait. You build it mentally, emotionally and through day to day habits. One core practice is having an empowering perspective, not Pollyanna, not denial, but an encouraging view that's grounded in reality and possibility. So here's the move in a crisis, acknowledge what's real, what's not working, what feels scary, what's at stake, because what you resist persists. So take a look at it and do a full mind sweep. Get the swirl out of your head and onto paper. Capture Your disempowering thoughts, your fears, your seemingly neutral assumptions about the situation, and your empowering thoughts and opportunities objectively, see what's there inside of your head, and then see what is there to leverage those empowering perspectives, what is there to learn from, to shift and to influence? Here's another piece of advice, and I used to reject this one, but now I love it. Make a tiny emotional shift upward. You don't need to jump from fear to joy, and that's probably not very likely. You want to move up one step on the emotional scale, and that changes your whole trajectory.

Want to share with you an example that illustrates this. I coached a new leader, James, who was assigned a complex global project. This was big. He felt fear. He was panicked. His heart was racing. All of it, we named the fear and then intentionally shifted one step up to overwhelm. I asked him, could you feel overwhelmed instead of afraid? And he could, and from there, he could identify next steps, figure out how to gain traction, right? He could begin to think at another level and move into action, a tiny emotional shift changed everything for him. Remember, composure isn't the absence of fear. Composure is fear plus leadership. It's you saying. I see what's happening, I feel it and I'm still choosing my next best move. That's what your team needs most. When people feel unstable, they look for two things. Can I trust you? Are we going somewhere meaningful? So let's start with trust. In my book, I offer a trust equation that's simple and powerful. Trust equals credibility times connection times commitment times customer, focus plus creation. We'll put that formula into the show notes for you. So during a crisis, you don't build trust with hype, you build it with those components of the trust equation, credibility, clear thinking, clear communication, connection, staying human, seeing your people, checking in with them, finding out how they're really doing, commitment, doing what you say you'll Do, and like I said, being clear about and communicating your bigger commitment. And then customer focus plus co creation really boils down to acting like partners, not being transactional. And one of the fastest ways to inspire is to extend trust.

First, I want to tell you a story about Galero Rodriguez, an executive in the beverage alcohol industry. He created a program with distributors called one leadership he had seen too frequently, the tendency for distillers and distributors to point fingers. They point fingers at themselves when times were good and point to others to blame when times weren't so good. Galero articulated the need for all the players in the distillers and the distributors to see themselves on the same team. In order to implement one leadership, galermo needed to extend trust. He needed to go to the top line management of the distributors, lay his cards on the table, ask others to do the same. Really listen to others needs and develop a plan to truly create. Alignment at the top and to genuinely present a shared plan, galero knew he needed to trust first and put himself and his individual and organizational desires out there. He did and the one, leadership program worked, processes were redesigned, collaboration improved, and sales increased significantly in year over year comparisons.

One of the fastest ways to inspire is to extend trust. First, extend trust. And trust is there. It may seem risky, trusting always is yet if you extend it, you'll either build trust fast, or you will very quickly learn the other person isn't worthy of the trust you're given. Then there's the movement part. When you lead from your leadership legacy, you stop orchestrating everything yourself. You involve others, paint the picture with them, and build a legacy team that creates momentum people want to belong to. So if you want to inspire your team right now, ask, where do I need to involve others, even if it's messy, what part of this change can become a shared mission? How can I hand off leadership, not hoard it in a crisis, control looks so tempting, yet inspiration shows up when people feel trusted and needed. Crisis, leadership is decision dense, the clock is loud, the data is incomplete, and everybody wants certainty. Yesterday. In the leadership programs I lead, I emphasize that resilience and courage are about continuing to move forward when the path isn't fully lit. A mind sweep helps you separate what you think from what is true and find the next clear move. Three anchors for decisive action. Let legacy guide your priority. If your commitment is clear, it becomes easier to decide what matters most, right? What's going to get us there? Stay rooted in strengths. Ask, where do I and my team create the most value right now? Choose the next clear step, not the whole staircase, right? If there's crisis, if there's change, chances are you can't see all the steps on that staircase to get where you need to go. Choose the next clear step, not the whole staircase. Decisiveness is clarity about what you know now and what you're willing to learn fast

When covid hit, several years ago, I guided a client team start that over. When covid hit, I guided a client team to quickly convert their in person, Global Leadership Program to virtual as a team, we named our disempowering thoughts. We don't have time. This won't translate well to virtual we named our neutral realities. We have time zones to deal with right here are the constraints of the virtual format and our empowering opportunities we can model new virtual ways of leading. Many of these leaders have remote team members, then we made rapid, concrete decisions, reworking agendas, using team and WebEx tools, redesigning sessions, and we launched on time. It was decisive action with imperfect information, grounded in commitment and possibility that team is still today proud of that effort. Decisiveness doesn't mean recklessness, it means aligned movement. Let me wrap this up with a simple summary you can carry into your next hard week when you lead through crisis and change anchor to your bigger commitment, your leadership legacy studies. You master your inner game, acknowledge reality, sweep your mind, shift your emotional trajectory upward. Inspire through trust and shared movement. Extend trust, invite leadership. CO create the way forward. Decide with courage, not certainty. Move anyway. Learn. Learn quickly, keep having the conversations to stay aligned. And here's my final question for you, what would leadership look like here if you trusted yourself and your people a little more than you trusted your fear? Sit with that, let it guide you, and then take the next step.

If this episode supported you, I'd ask you to share it with another leader who's carrying a lot right now. And if you want more structure around leadership legacy resilience and courageous leadership, you can grab the courage of a leader book. Check it out in the resources linked in the show notes. You've got this show, your team, your customers, your stakeholders, that you've got the Courage of a Leader.

Thank you for listening to the Courage of a Leader podcast. If you'd like to further explore this episode's topic, please reach out to me through the courage of a leader website at www.courageofaleader.com I'd love to hear from you. Please take the time to leave a review on iTunes that helps us expand our reach and get more people fully stepping into their leadership potential until next time, be bold and be brave, because you've got the courage of a leader.