Note: I’m reposting some things I wrote a while back on LinkedIn here, in part to slowly “port” the content back to my own blog, but in part because some of this stuff is worth resurfacing. This was from Dec. 2014. It still feels relevant, and probably always will.
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Someone on your team comes to you and says there’s a problem. The last release broke the purchase flow of your product, and it’s costing you $10,000 an hour and lost customers. What’s your first reaction?
A lot of times, regardless of intent, the first reaction is one of bewilderment, anger, or frustration. Over the course of my career, I’ve heard managers shouting at people more often than not, almost every time, it’s the wrong response.
Which may sound obvious, since we’re sitting here looking at a post, and not desperately trying to get a $10K/hr problem fixed. But in the heat of the moment, most people revert to the full-scale freakout, and it’s in those moments where reacting differently can have a dramatically better effect.
Here’s the thing – a lot of places say, “Move fast & break stuff,” but they don’t really mean it. They don’t want you to break important things. They don’t want you to break things that will make them look bad. If you really mean for people to move fast, and you accept that the consequences of moving fast means that sometimes things get broken, then you need to accept that this will often cost actual money, and that breaking things is often not a failure of the team.
What you want as a leader is that in times of crisis, people should want to bring things up as quickly as possible. You want them to tell the truth immediately and work to fix the problem without worrying about blame or consequence. In that moment, you want no barriers to fixing the problem.
If you’ve reacted badly in the past and yelled at someone when something’s gone wrong, that’s not going to happen. First, instead of “moving fast”, those people are now in “risk mitigation” mode, which means they’re worried less about finding success and more about avoiding failure. These are dramatically different mindsets, and risk mitigation prevents people from making bold choices.
The correct response in a time of crisis is:
- Remain calm
- Help people get back to an acceptable situation as quickly as possible
- Follow up by understanding what went wrong, and if there is a good way of preventing the same or similar mistakes in the future.
I understand how simple and obvious that sounds.
If more people actually responded that way, I wouldn’t be writing this. But primal reactions are hard to suppress, and even if most people want to react to things this way, often they start with a “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED!?!?!” Some people think this is their “right” or that a bit of fear makes for a good motivator. But the reality of it is that if you have hired good people, there is nothing you can say or do that will make them feel worse than they already do. You don’t need to point out their failing, they already know something terrible has happened.
They’re coming to you because they need your help to recover. If you yell at them, or threaten them, or otherwise react badly, consider how they’ll respond the next time something bad happens.
Creative, collaborative, risk-taking environments are built on trust. Trust is a brittle thing. Once it’s broken, it’s incredibly difficult if not impossible to recover. If you want the benefits of a highly iterative, fast-moving team, you need to pay the cost of learning to react to crisis situations well. You need to make sure that you are the first person that people want to talk to in case of a critical emergency. Not because you need to be the lynchpin of the response (usually, you won’t be anyway, because it’s the team that screwed it up that will fix the problem), but because as a leader, you need to know what is happening and you will set the tone for how the team responds.
For that to happen, in times of crisis and chaos, before flying off the handle, you need to remember that the best way of getting the result you want is simple: be nice.
* Addendum from 2023: “Help people get back to an acceptable situation as quickly as possible” is definitely an important step. But a lot of the work involved in this step has to be done before anything goes wrong. You need to build the infrastructure that lets you roll back code easily and reliably. If you don’t have this infrastructure, every mistake will be a disaster. So since you know for certain that things will eventually go wrong, you have to build this out as early as you can. If you think you can build this out after the 1st crisis happens, the 1st crisis may be the only crisis your company ever has before it dies.