The Public Leadership Through Crisis blog series aims to provide insights for leaders navigating crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. While previous posts focused on individual readiness for leadership during crises, this post emphasizes the importance of understanding one’s role, empowering others, and staying focused.
Recognizing that effective crisis leadership involves collaboration and coordination, the post urges leaders to acknowledge that they cannot tackle crises alone. Instead, they must identify their role, empower others to fulfill their roles, and avoid overstepping boundaries.
Drawing on insights from multi-agent leadership engagements, the post identifies various roles crucial for effective crisis leadership, including authorizers, motivators, conveners, connectors, problem identifiers, idea generators, encouragers, resource providers, and implementers. It emphasizes that effective leaders typically focus on a few key roles rather than trying to do everything themselves.
To illustrate the concept of multi-agent leadership, the post shares research findings highlighting the importance of distributed leadership during crisis periods. It emphasizes the benefits of spreading decision-making risks, fostering creativity, and preventing burnout.
The post encourages leaders to reflect on their own roles in leading through crises and to identify individuals who can play complementary roles. It provides a set of questions for leaders to consider, including defining their roles, choosing three key roles from the list provided, and identifying individuals to fulfill specific roles.
Additionally, the post discusses the challenge of “staying in your lane” in crisis situations, particularly for leaders in supervisory roles. It warns against the temptation to take on too many responsibilities and emphasizes the importance of self-control in allowing others to contribute effectively.
Overall, the post emphasizes the importance of collaborative leadership and the need for leaders to recognize their role, empower others, and resist the urge to micromanage or take on too much themselves during crises.