Chad Silverstein advises leaders to expect and prepare for unexpected crises ("bad surprises") by developing contingency and disaster-recovery plans, rehearsing responses, and practicing emotional steadiness. He uses the COVID-19 pandemic—notably sending a call center to work-from-home—as a concrete example of an unforeseen disruption and argues leaders should preload responses to reduce acute pain and guide their teams calmly through crises.
Chapters
If you lead anything, you can expect to have bad surprises. We hate bad surprises. At built to lead. And as a leader, you should never give anyone a bad surprise. But you can be sure that you run any type of system long enough, you're going to be on tilt. You're going to have something come out of left field. And I'll never forget when Covid hit and we had to send everybody home, what we had to go through and how that was so unexpected. Even though it was crazy that we knew what was going on, we didn't think, we're going to send everybody home. I had a call center, so imagine me having to send a whole call center home to work from home. You've got to think of contingency plans. You got to think about disaster recovery. You got to think about what happens if the worst could happen. Play, play out the devil's advocate. You know, I think brainstorming this out with your team, doing it by yourself, you know, there's something really powerful in having a little bit of the vision that visionaries have to kind of see down the road what could be coming, what could be the next disruption. And not to obsess about it, but to just plan for a contingency and being smart, thinking it through, writing it out, and not getting caught off guard. You're not going to be able to predict everything that happens in your company, but you don't have to look far in history to see that there are certain things that could happen and are very likely going to happen or that cause a blip in the business. To know how you would want to respond when that happens, either again because it's happened in the past, or if it happens for the first time because you know what's happened to your competitors. And to preload that response is going to just save you a lot of acute pain that you may find to be inevitable because you'll have it anyways. But your response, your emotions, your ability to kind of live through it and get through it and then carry your team through it, that's a strong leader. And to be able to do it cool, calm and collected as you go through it is definitely a skill. And it's not something that you just wake up and you're good at one day. You've got to be able to practice that and think that through and preload the response and, and. And expect it. Expect the unexpected to happen and don't be naive and think that it won't and plan for it.
