Category: Wisdom Sparks

10 Bad, and Intentional, Leadership Behaviors and Decisions That Corrode and Seriously Damage Community Relationships

If you are a senior staffer or a particularly precocious junior staffer reading this, you’ll recognize these negative intentional leadership behaviors and decisions. Like many of you, I’ve been in the room with senior leadership countless times when the most unbelievable and often unrealistic, to say the least, discussions have occurred. Really smart people made decisions they knew were bad but did them anyway, out of frustration, irritation, spite, or getting even.

Why do decisions like this happen so frequently? I think there are five reasons:

  1. The “I’m the smartest guy/gal in the room” syndrome. (Generally from business school grad).
  2. The only things that matter are the things you can actually count (compassion avoidance, insensitivity towards people, victims, injured or abused, living systems, rivers, lakes, forests, and species).
  3. Anything emotional is to be avoided, “I don’t want to look like a sissy to my peers.”
  4. No accommodation of or to negative voices because noticing them and their groups, ideas,  or troublemakers, don’t deserve it.
  5. Intentional disrespect.

The reason I raise these behaviors and decisions in this way is that far too often we find ourselves as chief staff advisors failing to make a potent and powerful case against these behaviors and decisions. But each one of these, if carried out, invariably becomes extraordinarily expensive, reputationally harmful, often requiring long-term rehabilitation with concessions you would never have been forced to make had better decisions been made in the first place, and intentionally bad decisions avoided.  

Here are seven of the most toxic.

Seven Toxic Intentional Leadership Behaviors and Decisions That Are Disabling, Trust Busting, and Damaging to Community Cooperation And Support

  1. Failure to be truthful with communities.
    • This is done more by intentional information omission and outright lying.
  2. Failure to be forthcoming with communities.
    • This is mostly because management feels communities don’t deserve to have all of the information; “they haven’t earned it.” “Don’t know what to do with it.”
  3. Failure to trust communities with sufficient information to decide.
    • “It’s just a handful of angry people, powerless but irritable.” – Famous last words
  4. Failure to be open and engaging with the community.
    • Reflects a fundamental lack of respect for anyone who disagrees, who can’t be fired.
    • “We have been good corporate citizens responding to all requests and rules and therefore have earned a social license to do what we want and get what we want.”
  5. Failure to accept or invite community oversight, regulations, restrictions, and supervision.
    • What… am I crazy? “There are already too many meddlers.” Lexicon of Control
  6. Failure to answer all the questions that are being and will be asked.
    • Management: “You must be kidding. Who’s got the time for all of this? Communities don’t need to know half of the information you’re proposing to give away.”
    • “We will determine what the community needs to know.”
  7. Failure to continuously seek, ask for, and deserve community permission to operate.
    • Management asks, “Isn’t this what the permit process and politics are all about?”
    • Why doesn’t community dissent and controversy end once we get the permit and have answered all the most important political and public questions?

Your Success Manifesto fo Community Trust Building, Permission Enabling, Cooperation Fostering, Public Support Generation

  1. Be truthful with communities.
    • Provide more information than requested.
  2. Be forthcoming with communities.
    • Communities deserve to have all of the information; because they are entitled to get it. The community wants those affected to have the information, all of it.
  3. Trust communities with sufficient information to decide.
    • Make sure angry people, opposing people, and those who need to hear, have the power, to be heard.
  4. Be open and engaging with the community.
    • Reflect, respect, and accommodation to anyone who disagrees. Protect and prevent antagonists and opponents from being retaliated against or fired.
    • Work every day to reestablish the community’s permission for you to do what you need and want, get what you need and when you need and want it.
  5. Accept and invite community oversight, regulations, restrictions, control, and supervision. Lexicon of Control
    • The more control you accept, the more power you have to actually manage your own destiny.
  6. Answer all the questions that are being asked, will be asked, should be asked, and especially questions that you wish they would ask you.
    • Management must make time for this! Stop asking when questions will have to be answered. You stop answering questions when people stop asking them.
    • Only communities know what they need to know. Suggest and provide more.
    • It is the community that decides what the community wants and needs to know. Comply. Better yet, anticipate and provide.
    • The greatest management communication mistake is failure to prepare for, introduce, and effectively answers all the questions you wish would be asked of you.
  7. Continuously seek, ask for, and earn community permission to operate.
    • Be prepared for community dissent and controversy to continue even after you get and meet all the conditions for permits, licenses, and truly answer all of the political and other public questions.
    • Management asks, “When will these angry and destructive people stop going after us and trying to increase restrictions on our operations? Every victory you have infuriates your opponents. The more successful your efforts the tougher the opposition becomes.
    • Start with the knowable, get the getable, do the doable, understand the understandable, keep this positive pressure on, and increase it where you can.

Remember the first of Lukaszewski’s 12 Axioms of Crisis Avoidance/Survival: “Neither the media, your toughest opponents, smartest critics, nor the government knows enough to defeat you. Defeat is almost always the work of uninformed or overconfident, overly optimistic bosses, co-workers and associates; well-meaning but uninformed friends, relatives, or from dysfunction in an organization.”

Boeing, the Poster Child for Intentionally Bad Decision Making

At this writing in mid-2024, the most obvious current example of these corrosive behaviors is, in a single word: Boeing. To put it mildly, this company is in extraordinary turmoil. Its current Chairman is leaving, under duress, and is going to leverage a gigantic payout. The public is losing trust in this company. Doors have blown off Boeing planes in flight.  Boeing continues to fail more rigorous inspections by Federal Safety and Production Agencies.

The company’s overwhelming problems are making it vulnerable to the ever-present international competition.

The weight of all of these problems has slowed Boeing’s deliveries to the lowest point in five years. The company’s continuing history of safety issues spectacularly and fatally demonstrated by the crashes of the two fully loaded Boeing 737 Max plane crashes in Ethiopia and one in the Javis Sea these disasters still haunt the company. The revelations recently that the company has intentionally put delivery, production, and productivity over safety and public confidence. Legal issues are multiplying. A recent survey found that many Americans are willing to pay more to avoid flying on Boeing. Leadership failure has lead most often to devastating degradation of company progress and reputation. There are no more corners to cut.

Another huge embarrassment, on the 30th of May 2024 Boeing’s long awaited and much  troubled manned space vehicle failed to launch being stopped in the last thirty seconds by a computer warning. Since the end of the American Space Program, Elon Musk’s rocket company has launched something like 85% of all American projects being put it into space. 48 hours after the emergency halt of the Boeing space vehicle launch, the company is unable to explain why this occurred. Remember one of my most favorite crisis axioms, bad news always ripens badly, things only get worse before they get better. Boeing’s situation is living proof with this action.  

No one at Boeing has been indited, but investigations are ongoing.

Let’s Find Out Who the Chronically Bad, Poorly Lead, and Intentionally Clumsy Company’s Are.

Question for you. What company’s organizations and business leaders would you include in this list of chronically bad and intentional, willful leaders? Send me your ideas and suggestions about the candidates, company’s, and circumstances in a hundred words or less and we’ll discuss them specifically in an upcoming newsletter or broadcast.

Please use my direct email address (jel@e911.com) to submit your examples.

How to Get More Invitations to the C-Suite and Be Heard Part 1

Irritating Habits to Avoid
Better Habits to Improve Your
Access, Influence, Impact, and Inclusion

Having spent the vast majority of my professional career in or very near the C-Suite of my clients, more than 400 companies in 42 years, I had the opportunity to view a wide variety of advice givers to senior people and organizational operators.

It in all candor I have to observe that the profession of public relations is in the middle, to be charitable, of those whose opinions are valued at the highest level of organizations. I wrote and published a book about this in 2009, “Why Should The Boss Listen To You, The 7 Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor”. © 2009 Jossey Bass Publishing

The subject comes to mind again and again because although I now spend far less time consulting, I still am often engaged at the top levels, after all these years. The irony and reason for this discussion is that while the behaviors of staff professions have improved steadily and striven to become more relevant to the concerns at ever higher operating levels, my profession continues to struggle for attention and once having gotten it the problem of actually being heard, continues.

There are five easily observable, and especially irritating habits to avoid that get in the way of the creative sensitivity and empathetic approaches we always tend to bring to executive decision-making. These higher-value behaviors and experiences are eclipsed by other behaviors that obscure the most important attributes of our profession. Examples of behaviors to avoid include:

1. Timidity and Hesitation – Public relations and communicators tend to speak later, sometimes not at all. If you’re spending time inside the C-Suite, those who are running the place and who requested that you be there are watching, and waiting. If you fail to contribute, you will rarely be invited back.

THREE MINUTE DRILL

2. Mindless Editing – When all else fails, it seems the one thing we tend to do automatically is edit anything in sight. Whether it’s a news release, memo, or proposal. We are always marking things up. As advisors to senior people, we fail to realize how annoying this can be. In fact, many of us believe editing is our franchise to be in these meetings. It’s especially irritating to the top level of executives who are generally in those positions because they’re running the place.

I’ve never seen any studies but my assumption based on my experience is that improved understanding, clarity, idea value, and powerful concept improvements are very rare in PR editing. We tend to exchange words that reflect more our limited understanding of the organization or a staff perspective rather than a management perspective. Editing often changes or obscures the truth. Ask if the change proposed preserves or obscures the truth.  

I warn those seeking expanded access, impact, influence, and inclusion wanting to be trusted strategic advisors, “If you are going to hold a pencil in your hand, a better use than editing could be to take notes to remember things to talk about or question, as opposed to the automatic red pen markup. Editing should add significant knowledge or insight. If all you’re doing is word shuffling, or using truth-avoiding techniques like allegories, metaphors, or analogies…stop.”

3. Remember – The vast majority of bosses feel that they are good if not great communicators, important if not gifted writers. That’s why there are crucial questions editors need to address as they pick up the red pen. Does your editing checklist include:

  • Increasing strategic value or insight.
  • Stating the obvious, you should be the first.
  • Add candor, “Truth with an attitude delivered right now.”
  • Simplify and add meaningful specificity. (Reduce the wandering generalities, “We are a great company.”
  • Add inconsistency (A key ingredient of strategy).
  • Add pattern intuition.
  • Reveal new constructive approaches to established norms, tasks, and challenges.

And,

  • Add significant new knowledge or insight to the existing context?
  • Add some facts and data that make the management objectives more powerful, focused, and useful?
  • Add or suggest examples that improve the power, memorability, and importance of the content and context?
  • Provide or develop insight, clarity, moral, bottom-line, lesson, or self-evident truth?

4. Understand your true relationship with those whose language you change. The relationship between leader and communicator is far different than the leader’s relationship with other consultants. The difference is, listening to an accountant, a lawyer, an engineer, a subject-matter expert or a scientist, fields of interest where leaders need these specialized knowledges. When it comes to communication, expect bosses, sometimes everyone in the room, to be mentally debating what you say rather than listen to what you have to teach. This behavior is why we so often feel our conversations and advice-giving is not heard. It isn’t. Often, when you finish explaining, you discover that the boss is just waiting to talk. Repeat yourself.

POWER WORDS

5. Say things that matter. Move the conversation along constructively. Question, rather than challenge the value of other ideas if you can improve their value or demonstrate more important sensitive or powerful information. Strive to make significant additional points. Abide by three powerful editing rubrics:

  • Say less, but make it more important, surprising.
  • Write less, but make it more interesting, memorable, helpful, insightful, and useful.
  • Go for the truth first.

In Jim’s Wisdom #51 (May ’24 Savvy), I’ll expand further on these irritating habits:

  1. Euphemizing everything. As consultants, we seem to have great reluctance to speak truth to power or to speak truth in any venue.
  2. Reputation we have for avoiding conflict and candor.
  3. Our reluctance to assess the skills and competence, strengths, and weaknesses of colleagues and members of the management team and group, upon executive request.
  4. For some of us, the notion that we can be an organizational conscience.
  5. Reviewing employee ethical expectations of leadership during urgent or emergent situations. 

Happy to talk about any or all of these ideas. Just pick up the phone, (203) 948-7029, text that number, or email jel@e911.com.

Authenticity
Tough to Achieve,
but Enormously Liberating and Powerful

Authenticity is a self-directed process of continuous analysis, validation, and verification of personal beliefs, practices, guiding principles, aspirations, and operational purposes that drive, direct, focus, and fulfill your life.

The higher you go in operations, and as a trusted strategic advisor, the more your authenticity and that of other senior decision-makers comes into play. The concepts come to the fore when:

  • The truth matters.
  • Tough questions need to be answered.
  • Ideas from beyond the pale need suggesting or defeating.
  • Corrective action and behavior change, especially among leaders, needs to be surfaced.
  • Meaningful discussion of personal beliefs and reasoning are on the table.
  • Serious decisions or important input is required.
  • Trust is at risk.
  • A reservoir of sensible, simple, positive, constructive, and useful options is needed to move forward or begin resolution of serious issues.
  • When you need the boss to really listen.
  • When you are a boss who needs others to really listen.
  • When you are the boss and really need to listen and pay attention to others.

Here is my current authenticity analysis template. Perhaps you might find it useful for yourself.

  1. Please let me know what you think.
  2. Please send this to anyone you might think it could help.
  3. Questions to jel@e911.com, subject: Authenticity Template

This is Jim Lukaszewski:
A Personal Profile

Powerful Speaker, Important Author, Inspiring Teacher, Trusted Advisor

Purpose: Through helping resolve the significant troubles of others, find and do what will be the most important things I will ever do in my career and life.

Vision/Aspiration: To be an authentic trusted Communicator, Coach, Counselor and Strategic Thinker; to be the first call when leaders and managers face their toughest, touchiest, most sensitive and devastating situations and questions.

Mission: To be the table, truly strategic; promptly finding those exceptionally achievable, ethical, honorable, powerful, and sensible ingredients for solutions to the most challenging leadership, management and organizational problems.

Disciplines: Gettable, doable approaches; Intuition-Pattern Sensitivity; lifelong learning; Management Perspective/sensitivity; Teach, Coach, Counsel to educate, motivate, and expand  Management and leadership influence and success; Thoughtful, Incremental Achievable Advice; Tomorrow Focused; Trustability; Verbal Clarity.

Values: Compassion; Constructive approaches; Curiosity; Honesty; Inconsistency (strategy); Positivity; Pragmatism; Promptness; Truthfulness, Intentional Inconsistency (the key to novel ideas)

Principles: Candor; Prompt Intentional Communication; Destiny Management; Empathy/Compassion/Apology; Engagement; Openness; Responsiveness; Transparency; Truthfulness.

Acknowledgements:

Bill George, Senior Fellow, Harvard Business School, Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Medtronic

  • Author of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership with Peter Simms, Jossey-Bass, 2007.
  • He created the Authenticity industry
David Grossman, ABC, APR Fellow PRSA, Founder & CEO of The Grossman Group

Jim Lukaszewski has more than 2,000 recommendations on LinkedIn, is listed in more than 35 editions of who’s who, and is the author of 13 books since 1992 (14th coming out in 2025), hundreds of articles, many book chapters, and dozens and dozens of webinars.

© Copyright 2024, James E. Lukaszewski. America’s Crisis Guru®

Please get permission to reproduce or quote. Contact the copyright holder, jel@e911.com. Subject line: Permissions

“What Makes a Fellow, a Fellow?”

An Extraordinary Footprint.

The Most Important Personal Honor in American Public Relations

Spring is the time of year when many of our PRSA senior colleagues are nominated or nominate themselves for election to the PRSA College of Fellows. As I begin my 31st  year as a Fellow ‘93, it’s interesting to reflect on the experiences of all those I have coached or mentored over the years. Just about everyone comes to the process with few clues about what a being a Fellow actually is.

Becoming a Fellow is all about the footprint the candidate has left on the profession, culture, colleagues, and society. There are Fellows who have worked their entire careers in a single market and left a powerful footprint. There are Fellows who have worked in a single state and leave a significant footprint. There are Fellows who work regionally or nationally and, in the process, leave a meaningful footprint.

A footprint is about the quality of practice and the level of influence and relevance to the entire practice rather than how many projects completed, or awards won. This is the hardest part and biggest test of becoming a Fellow. It is a profound mindset shift from counting projects, clicks and likes to really understanding the power of the candidate’s intentional, personal impact, ideas, behavior and ethics that help others to become better and improve as practitioners, citizens, public officials, leaders, more honorable advisors, and people of professional substance; people who have then become more successful and influential among the people they impact, influence and change throughout their professional lives.

It’s also more than the activities within the Public Relations profession. It is about the candidates’ intentions, impact, influence, access, and acceptance in their vicinity, marketplace or practice specialties; it’s about how the candidate uses their influence, experience, insights and presence to make important change happen – perhaps bringing reality and sensibility, as well as reducing contention and bringing peace to important contentious circumstances.

Earning their access, intentions, influence, impact, acceptance, and inclusion in what matters.

Sometimes it’s easy to misread this impact, or mistake proficiency or expertise for leadership, personal impact on others. Those who wish to analyze their careers, to assess their footprint, ultimately go through an interesting and introspective analysis of their lives and work. These are the steps I recommend:

  1. Examine one’s life for the lessons that were shared with others and what others learned from their own perspective. And what the candidate learned from being helpful.
  2. Reach back and make contact with those whose lives the candidate truly affected, seek short real examples of the value to them from knowing the candidate.
  3. Ask those whohave known, worked, and benefited from the candidate’s efforts, presence, and insights the answers to five basic questions:
  1. What is/are/were the most important things, ideas or concepts that these individuals learned from the candidate?
  2. What is/are/were the most interesting things, ideas or concepts learned or remembered?
  3. What is/are/were those things these individuals feel they might never have learned had the candidate been absent from their lives . . . What do they know now that they didn’t know before that mattered because they met the candidate, whatever the circumstance?
  4. What meaningful questions did the candidate help others to confront, consider or explore that might not have happened had the candidate not been present?
  5. How has knowing the candidate changed people’s lives, in the beneficiary’s own words?
4. There are crucial personal questions the candidate must ask themselves.

  1. How have you stepped outside the realm of PR for some purpose larger than yourself? What, when and why?
  2. Can you explain your motivation or your intentions for achieving election to The PRSA College of Fellows?
  3. Can you provide a sense of the purpose of your life, larger than yourself?
  4. What evidence can you share that, rather than on yourself, you put the spotlight or gave the spotlight to others?  Or, how you helped someone else find the spotlight for their work and accomplishments?
  5. How do your accomplishments fit together so we can know your plan or how your career was driven, by personal spontaneous actions, self-motivated activities, or other forces?
  6. Have you systematically shared your insights and learnings based on what you were accomplishing and learning in your practice?
  7. How do you share the principles that drive your practice in  hopes that those you help will retain and apply them in their own practices? In other words, are you already acting like a Fellow?
  8. What are some of the lessons, morals, and self-evident truths about what and why you do what you do or believe what you believe?
5. Can and do you explicitly share the principles and higher purposes, if any, and intentions that guide and influence your thinking and judgment and in turn constructively and memorably influence others.

  1. In simple single words and short phrases, how would you describe who you are?
  2. Should you be elected to The College of Fellows how do you plan to remain relevant to those who will seek your assistance and counsel?
6.  What were some of the surprises the candidate experienced as their access, influence, impact, and professional success expanded?

  1. True success in life is intentional. It may start by accident and often does.
  2. What were the Candidate’s intentions as success and visibility increased?
  3. What can the candidate pass on to PRSA’s leaders of tomorrow?
7. How would the Candidate characterize their career purpose(s) and goals?

These questions matter because once a practitioner becomes a Fellow; all these impacts on others continue and intensify. It is more than an honor to be elected a Fellow. This election turns out to be a public recommitment by the candidate to helping our profession and our professional colleagues find ways to improve their skills, yes, but also to begin to look at their practices and their practice circumstances from larger, more powerful social and cultural perspectives.

Becoming a Fellow is about reinterpreting our professional metrics from a new, higher, and entirely different and more impactful perspective: Helping others become more substantive, influential and insightful practitioners. It’s about understanding what matters, what is helpful, what is sensible and often what is powerfully simple and true. It is about professional integrity, honesty, and having a truly meaningful personal and professional life.

It’s a life dedicated to the recognition of the needs and accomplishments of others and working on issues and questions larger than the candidate that creates the extraordinary footprint, election to the College of Fellows represents.

It’s that Extraordinary Footprint that makes a Fellow, a Fellow.

How extraordinary is the footprint the candidate presents in their application and in their life?

© Copyright 2024, James E. Lukaszewski. America’s Crisis Guru®

Get permission to reproduce or quote. Contact the copyright holder, jel@e911.com. Subject line: Permissions

The Five Counterintuitive Effects of Explosive Visibility

Whenever a business interest, product, or person is suddenly forced into the limelight, a predictable set of counter-intuitive effects occurs. These effects can be prepared for, often pre-empted or mitigated. It doesn’t matter whether the limelight or public visibility is caused by positive or negative events. Managing sensational visibility depends on anticipation, planning, and counteraction:

Effect 1:

Inverse Credibility – Opinions of the lowest employee, neighbor, public official, or competitor will outrank the facts supplied by scientists, CEOs, acknowledged experts, and sometimes even Nobel Prize winners.

Victim values define who is credible in adverse situations.

Effect 2:

Inverse Intellectual Content – Complex, difficult-to-understand issues and nuances are reduced to abject simplicity.

The rule of the thirteen-year-old applies. If it can’t be explained so that your mother, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, or an average thirteen-year-old can easily understand it, it will be misunderstood, and misinterpreted, all of which will be your fault.

Effect 3:

Inverse Relationships – Those most negatively affected by your actions will have more power than common sense or the greatest positive majority. People you don’t respect will have great power over you and your decisions.

To paraphrase what Margaret Mead said early in this century, “Never underestimate the power of a handful of dedicated individuals (or victims) to change everyone else’s life.” Believe it.

Effect 4:

Inverse Compatibility – Getting to and staying at a table – no matter what – is crucial to controlling outcomes. Overcome your discontent, your distrust, and your disrespect for your opposition. Compatibility isn’t necessarily essential to winning. What’s essential is engagement with trust. Be in the discussion, in the fight, in the dispute, in the debate – positively – until the situation is resolved.

Effect 5:

Time vs. Healing – In high-profile disputes, discussions, and problems, time lags, delays, and unresponsiveness are always counterproductive. Silence is always perceived as doing nothing (Often an unrecoverable mistake and leadership killer). Delay is perceived as arrogance or incompetence; postponement is perceived as collusive; and a non-response is admission of guilt. Do it now; say it now; decide it now; ask it now. Act decisively; decide; control; survive; sometimes even win.

The lesson: Explosive visibility remains sensational as long as you allow it to.

© Copyright 2023, James E. Lukaszewski. America’s Crisis Guru®

Get permission to reproduce or quote. Contact the copyright holder, jel@e911.com.

Stop with the Wandering Generalities, Please. Get Specific.

Wandering generalities are a plague on humanity. When in doubt, people hide behind bland, useless, and often misleading statements. Below I show three examples of these typical types of statements and how to make them meaningfully specific.

Wandering GeneralitiesMeaningfully Specific Translation
1. “We’re a great company.”1. “We are a powerful company, leading three important business sectors, digitalization, transmission efficiency and end user acceptance.”
2. “Everybody loves our company.”2. “We use three techniques every month to test our customer acceptance: direct contact with key users; short, direct questionnaires; and, seeking testimonials.”
3. “We’ve successfully dealt with this problem in the past.”3. “We made three crucial improvements in this process starting four years ago: first, we significantly reduced defects; second, we began more careful education of our customers; and third, we introduced a monitoring program to catch defects earlier.”

Translate Generalities into Specificity

Rather than say:

  • Everyone…name them
  • Everybody…name them
  • They…say specifically who
  • That…say specifically what
  • Theirs…name or itemize them
  • Those…name or specifically identify what it is
  • It’s…Again identify what It’s is
  • Her…name her
  • His…name him

You get the idea.

Generalities are barriers to understanding and actually help people miss the importance of what you are trying to communicate.

More GeneralitiesMeaningfully Specific Translation
1. “Everything will be fine, we’ve been through this before.”1. “We live by three success initiatives: start early; stay customer engaged; and follow up for results. These three initiatives will work to improve our accuracy, activity, and performance.”
2. “I’ve always enjoyed their work.”2. “The strategy teams work is essential to our success. We need their accuracy, their persistence, and their intuitiveness.”
3. “They’ve always been a championship outfit.”3. “Mary and Bill always show their leadership, their skill, and their consistent responsiveness.”
4. “This idea is very important.”4. “Our success depends on three crucial ingredients: speed, accuracy, and choosing a limited number of targets.”

Also see Packing and Bundling.

© Copyright 2023, James E. Lukaszewski. America’s Crisis Guru®Get permission to reproduce or quote. Contact the copyright holder, jel@e911.com.

Wisdom Sparks #1 – Critical Insights in a Few Words

Leaders in Crises are times for:
 
·       Discovering new leaders/leadership.
·       Uncovering incompetent and ineffective leaders.
·       Taking needless risks.
·       Exposing leadership misbehavior, and intentionally bad decisions.
·       Helping troubled leaders depart promptly.
 
Are these scenarios in your readiness plans?