LEADERSHIP

Balance Change with Routine

JOSEPH BADARACCO
Harvard Business School professor focusing on leadership and ethics, Cambridge, Mass.

The first thing for managers to consider is the importance of preparation. It’s true that preparation for Y2K helped many CIOs on Sept. 11 because they had redundant systems.

So contingency planning is important. But the kind of contingency planning most people do is "best case plus 20 percent," "worst case minus 20 percent." Sept. 11 presents us with a much more dramatic situation.

But there’s only so much you can do. There will always be things you can’t foresee. What you can do as a manager is keep all lines of communication open so you can communicate quickly when something unexpected happens, even something drastic. You’ve got to be ready to scramble?and not just as an individual but as a team. The team will always be more resourceful than a single person. Scrambling means learning about what’s happened quickly and formulating a response.

Another thing to consider is that it’s going to be very hard for people to differentiate between long-term and short-term changes after the Sept. 11 attacks. One scenario is that we really stamp down terrorism. Another comparably probable scenario is that there are more attacks, and we move into an Israel-like state, with permanent insecurity. Those are radically different worlds. It’s going to be hard to know for a while how things will turn out.

That said, people have a strong need for routines. Their old routines will assert themselves. From time to time, people will be pulled back, reminded. Maybe when they go into a tall building, for instance. This catastrophe reached people at a very deep level.

For the next couple of months, managers need to do two things?and these things are a bit contradictory. The first is to get back to work, because things need to be done and because people need routines. At the same time, managers have to find a way to give people space and let them work through this. You have to be sensitive to the way people are feeling. People respond to crises differently and at different speeds.

If flying is an inescapable part of someone’s job and they refuse to fly, at some point you’re going to have to find somebody else to do the job. At some point, the work has to go on. But somebody who says, "I can’t deal with flying now" might be willing to fly in a month.