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How to LEAD in a Time of CRISISHow to LEAD in a Time of CRISISHow to LEAD in a Time of CRISISLessons from some of the most diffi cult challenges we’ve faced: 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, the 2008 fi nancial crisis, and moreSpeciaICrisis communication / Providing predictability Dealing with trauma / Weathering a downturnThinking like a futurist / Building resilient growthThe Bestof HBR Summer 2020HBR.orgIssue2 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020FROM THE EDITORSConfronting a Changing World employees, embracing an unknown future, and avoiding layoffs. We were able to look to the best advice that has come out of research and practice from crises such as the 9/11 attacks, the fiscal crash of 2008, and Hurricane Sandy.In aggregate, these articles make it clear that the best leaders do more than keep their organizations going through tough, uncertain times: They provide a source of steadiness and direction that brings out the best in their people. That might mean the difference between a hollowed-out organization and a staff that’s well positioned to innovate and create growth as our new normal sets in. It might mean the difference between everyone running in opposite directions and a team that sustains high perfor-mance even in the face of rapid change.And it might simply mean an employee who remembers amid the turmoil and trauma his or her boss’s moral courage or compassionate human face.Be well,– The EditorsOUR STAF F HAD I NITIALLY set out to cover marketing in this Summer Special Issue, and we were readying those materials for the printer when the world changed. In the early spring it quickly became clear that the worldwide spread of the coronavirus would have vast implications for our careers, companies, economies, and psyches, even if many of those implications are still unfolding as we go to press. With problems and stake holders clamoring, leaders are being forced to make some of the most important decisions of their careers to keep their people safe and their com-panies afloat, all without knowing what tomorrow will look like, much less next quarter.But though this crisis looks different from any we’ve faced, it’s not the first time leaders have had to confront a large-scale disaster, a struggling economy, or the unknown.Abandoning our marketing issue, our team delved into HBR’s archives to find the best wisdom about leading through a crisis that has come out of a century of management thinking. In these pages we’ve included articles on communi-cating through a crisis, finding growth in a downturn, managing traumatized 4 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020ContentsCulled by the editors of Harvard Business Review from the magazine’s rich archives, these articles are written by some of the world’s leading management scholars and practitioners. To help busy leaders apply the concepts, they are accompanied by “Idea in Brief” summaries.SUMMER 2020Leading in a CrisisLeadership in a (Permanent) Crisis | 10Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty LinskyCrisis Communication: Lessons from 9/11 | 18Paul A. Argenti Leading in Times of Trauma | 26Jane E. Dutton, Peter J. Frost, Monica C. Worline, Jacoba M. Lilius, and Jason M. KanovLeading, Not Managing, in Crisis | 34Daniel McGinnIn New Jersey, Good Crisis Management Has Mitigated Sandy’s Impact | 35Lauren Stiller RikleenWhat Aircraft Crews Know About Managing High-Pressure Situations | 36Jan U. Hagen, Zhike Lei, and Avner ShahalHow Chinese Companies Have Responded to Coronavirus | 39Martin Reeves, Lars Fæste, Cinthia Chen, Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, and Kevin WhitakerHow to Reassure Your Team When the News Is Scary | 43Allison Shapira Preparing Your Company for a Crisis | 44Marshall GoldsmithKELLY ROMANALDIL E A R N M O R E A N D A P P L YWWW.EXED.HBS.EDU/GOYOU WON’T BE DIFFERENT.YOU WILL BE CHANGED.GO.We’re all looking for meaning and purpose in our work. Whether you’re looking for something “more” or just ready for a change, Harvard Business School Executive Education can help you turn a career into a calling and propel your life’s work.6 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020Embracing UncertaintyLiving in the Futures | 46Angela Wilkinson and Roland KupersManaging When the Future Is Unclear | 56Lisa LaiHow to Do Strategic Planning Like a Futurist | 58Amy WebbYou Can’t Make Good Predictions Without Embracing Uncertainty | 62Peter Hopper and Carl SpetzlerPredicting the Future | 64Ania G. WieckowskiWeathering the Business CycleSeize Advantage in a Downturn | 66David Rhodes and Daniel StelterLayoffs That Don’t Break Your Company | 74Sandra J. Sucher and Shalene GuptaHow to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy | 82Robert I. SuttonHow to Protect Your Job in a Recession | 90Janet Banks and Diane CoutuHow to Survive a Recession and Thrive Afterward | 96Walter FrickHow to Achieve Resilient Growth Throughout the Business Cycle | 102W. Chan Kim and Renee MauborgneCompanies Need to Prepare for the Next Economic Downturn | 104Martin Reeves, Kevin Whitaker, and Christian KetelsPreparing for RiskManaging Risks: A New Framework | 108Robert S. Kaplan and Anette MikesManaging 21st- Century Political Risk | 118Condoleezza Rice and Amy ZegartHow to Prepare for a Crisis You Couldn’t Possibly Predict | 128Chris Clearfield and András TilcsikWhat Organizations Need to Survive a Pandemic | 130Nitin NohriaHow Kaiser Permanente Prepares for Disasters | 132Tom Hanenburg, Shakiara Kitchen, and Suzy FitzgeraldHow the Internet of Things Can Prepare Cities for Natural Disasters | 134Kris Tremaine and Kyle TubersonExecutive Summaries | 136MATT CARLSONWe’re proud that the paper we use in our print magazine is certifiedunder the Sustainable Forestry Initiative® program, meaning that itcomes from responsibly managed sources and is a renewable resource.Our Commitment to SustainabilitySUMMER 2020Go ahead. Love your job.Your people at their best.glintinc.comEDITOR IN CHIEF Adi IgnatiusEDITORIALSENIOR EDITORS Laura Amico, Alison Beard, Scott Berinato, David Champion Paris, Gretchen Gavett, Eben Harrell, Jeff Kehoe, Scott LaPierre, Toby Lester, Amy Meeker, Gardiner Morse, Curt Nickisch, Steven Prokesch, Vasundhara Sawhney, Tom StackpoleMANAGING EDITOR, HBR PRESS Allison PeterSENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITORS Courtney Cashman, Paige Cohen, Kevin Evers, Susan Francis, Dave Lievens, Erica TruxlerASSOCIATE EDITOR Emma WaldmanARTICLES EDITORS Christina Bortz, Susan Donovan, Martha Lee SpauldingAUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Kelsey GripenstrawSENIOR AUDIO PRODUCER Anne Noyes Saini MULTIMEDIA PRODUCER Andy RobinsonASSISTANT EDITORS Ramsey Khabbaz, Raksh*tha RavishankarEDITORIAL COORDINATORS Dagny Dukach, Alicyn ZallSTAFF ASSISTANT Christine C. JackCONTRIBUTING EDITORS Karen Dillon, Amy Gallo, Jane Heifetz, John Landry, Andrew O’Connell, Anand P. Raman, Dana RousmaniereCONTRIBUTING STAFF Kathryn K. 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Subscribe today and receive our mini issue on creativity FREE!Just $49.95 cad/yearAvailable in print or digitalwww.rotman.utoronto.ca/hbr +FreeGiftTom Peters Author, In Search of Excellence; Thinkers50 Hall of Fame10 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020HBR Special Issue Summer 2020 11Illustration by KELLY ROMANALDILeadership in a (Permanent) CrisisWhen the economy recovers, things won’t return to normal—and a different mode of leadership will be required.→ by RONALD HEIFETZ, ALEXANDER GRASHOW, and MARTY LINSKYORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY–AUGUST 2009LEADING IN A CRISISI T WOU LD B E profoundly reassuring to view the current eco-nomic crisis as simply another rough spell that we need to get through. Unfortunately, though, today’s mix of urgency, high stakes, and uncertainty will continue as the norm even after the recession ends. Economies cannot erect a fi rewall against inten-sifying global competition, energy constraints, climate change, and political instability. The immediate crisis—which we will get through, with the help of policy makers’ expert technical adjustments—merely sets the stage for a sustained or even 12 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020prowess, which solves the immediate problem of survival, inadvertently lets patients off the hook for changing their lives to thrive in the long term. High stakes and uncertainty remain, but the diminished sense of urgency keeps most patients from focusing on the need for adaptation.People who practice what we call adaptive leadership do not make this mistake. Instead of hunkering down, they seize the opportunity of moments like the current one to hit the organi-zation’s reset button. They use the turbu-lence of the present to build on and bring closure to the past. In the process, they change key rules of the game, reshape parts of the organization, and redefine the workpeople do. We are not talking here about shaking up an organization so that nothing makes sense anymore. The process of adaptation is at least as much a process of conservation as it is of reinvention. Targeted modifications in specific strands of the organizational DNA will make the critical difference. (Consider that human beings share more than 90% of their DNA with chimpanzees.) Still, people will experience loss. Some parts of the organization will have to die, and some jobs and familiar ways of working will be eliminated. As people try to develop new competencies, they’ll often feel ashamed of their incompe-tence. Many will need to renegotiate loy-alties with the mentors and colleagues whose teachings no longer apply. Your empathy will be as essential for success as the strategic decisions you make about what elements of the organi-zational DNA to discard. That is because you will need people’s help—not their Hunker Down— or Press “Reset”The danger in the current economic situation is that people in positions of authority will hunker down. They will try to solve the problem with short-term fixes: tightened controls, across-the-board cuts, restructuring plans. They’ll default to what they know how to do in order to reduce frustration and quell their own and others’ fears. Their pri-mary mode will be drawing on familiar expertise to help their organizations weather the storm. That is understandable. It’s natural for authority figures to try to protect their people from external threats so that everyone can quickly return to busi-ness as usual. But in these times, even the most competent authority will be unable to offer this protection. The orga-nizational adaptability required to meet a relentless succession of challenges is beyond anyone’s current expertise. No one in a position of authority—none of us, in fact—has been here before. (The expertise we relied on in the past got us to this point, after all.) An organization that depends solely on its senior man-agers to deal with the challenges risks failure.That risk increases if we draw the wrong conclusions from our likely recovery from the current economic downturn. Many people survive heart attacks, but most cardiac surgery pa-tients soon resume their old ways: Only about 20% give up smoking, change their diet, or get more exercise. In fact, by reducing the sense of urgency, the very success of the initial treatment creates the illusion of a return to nor-malcy. The medical experts’ technical permanent crisis of serious and unfamil-iar challenges. Consider the heart attack that strikes in the middle of the night. EMTs rush the victim to the hospital, where expert trauma and surgical teams—executing established procedures because there is little time for creative improvisation—stabilize the patient and then provide new vessels for the heart. The emer-gency has passed, but a high-stakes, if somewhat less urgent, set of challenges remains. Having recovered from the surgery, how does the patient prevent another attack? Having survived, how does he adapt to the uncertainties of a new reality in order to thrive? The crisis is far from over. The task of leading during a sustained crisis—whether you are the CEO of a major corporation or a manager heading up an impromptu company initiative— is treacherous. Crisis leadership has two distinct phases. First is that emergency phase, when your task is to stabilize the situation and buy time. Second is the adaptive phase, when you tackle the underlying causes of the crisis and build the capacity to thrive in a new reality. The adaptive phase is especially tricky: People put enormous pressure on you to respond to their anxieties with authoritative certainty, even if doing so means overselling what you know and discounting what you don’t. As you ask them to make necessary but uncomfort-able adaptive changes in their behavior or work, they may try to bring you down. People clamor for direction, while you are faced with a way forward that isn’t at all obvious. Twists and turns are the only certainty. Yet you still have to lead. LEADING IN A CRISISLEADERSHIP IN A (PERMANENT) CRISISHBR Special Issue Summer 2020 13Idea in Brief Are you waiting for things to return to normal in your organization? Sorry. Leadership will require new skills tailored to an environment of urgency, high stakes, and uncertainty—even after the current economic crisis is over.YOU’LL HAVE TOFoster adaptation, helping people develop the “next practices” that will enable the organization to thrive in a new world, even as they continue with the best practices necessary for current success.Embrace disequilibrium, keeping people in a state that creates enough discomfort to induce change but not so much that they fight, flee, or freeze.Generate leadership, giving people at all levels of the organization the opportunity to lead experiments that will help it adapt to changing times. You won’t achieve your leadership aims if you sacrifice yourself by neglecting your needs.beyond a smart marketing plan. It would demand a change in the company’s orientation. Getting an organization to adapt to changes in the environment is not easy. You need to confront loyalty to legacy practices and understand that your desire to change them makes you a target of attack. Gilbert believed that instead of simply selling technology products to mostly male customers, Best Buy needed to appeal to women by reflecting the increasing integration of consumer electronics into family life. So Gilbert headed up an initiative to estab-lish in-store boutiques that sold home theater systems along with coordinated furniture and accessories. Stores set up living-room displays to showcase not just the electronics but also the enter-tainment environment. Salespeople were trained to interact with the pre-viously ignored female customers who came in with men to look at systems.Gilbert says that championing this approach subjected her to some nasty criticism from managers who viewed Best Buy as a retailer of technology products, not experiences. But focusing on the female purchaser when a man and a woman walked into the store—making eye contact and greeting her, asking about her favorite movies and demonstrating them on the systems—often resulted in the couple’s purchas-ing a higher-end product than they had originally considered. According to Gilbert, returns and exchanges of pur-chases made by couples were 60% lower than those made by men. With the rethinking of traditional practices, Best Buy’s home theater business flour-ished, growing from two pilot in-store blind loyalty as they follow you on a path to the future but their enthusiastic help in discovering that path. And if they are to assist you, you must equip them with the ability to perform in an environment of continuing uncertainty and uncontrol-lable change.Today’s Leadership Tasks In this context, leadership is an impro-visational and experimental art. The skills that enabled most executives to reach their positions of command— analytical problem solving, crisp deci-sion making, the articulation of clear direction— can get in the way of success. Although these skills will at times still be appropriate, the adaptive phase of a crisis requires some new leadership practices. Foster adaptation. Executives today face two competing demands. They must execute in order to meet today’s challenges. And they must adapt what and how things get done in order to thrive in tomorrow’s world. They must develop “next practices” while excelling at today’s best practices.Julie Gilbert is evidence that these dual tasks can—indeed, should—be practiced by people who do not happen to be at the very top of an organization. As a vice president and then senior VP at retailer Best Buy from 2000to early 2009, she saw a looming crisis in the company’s failure to profit from the greater involvement of women in the male-oriented world of consumer elec-tronics. Women were becoming more influential in purchasing decisions, directly and indirectly. But capitalizing on this trend would require something Keep your hand on the thermostat. If the heat’s too low, people won’t make difficult decisions. If it’s too high, they might panic.14 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020formance while positioning the organiza-tion to deploy more of its people to reach wider markets. Embrace disequilibrium. Without urgency, difficult change becomes far less likely. But if people feel too much distress, they will fight, flee, or freeze. The art of leadership in today’s world involves orchestrating the inevitable conflict, chaos, and confusion of change so that the disturbance is productive rather than destructive. Health care is in some ways a micro-cosm of the turbulence and uncertainty facing the entire economy. Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, is trying to help his organization adapt to the industry’s constant changes.When Levy took over, in 2002, Beth Israel Deaconess was a dysfunctional organization in serious financial trou-ble. Created several years previously through the hasty merger of two Har-vard Medical School teaching hospitals, it had struggled to integrate their very different cultures. Now it was bleed-ing red ink and faced the likelihood of being acquired by a for-profit company, relinquishing its status as a prestigious research institution. Levy quickly made changes that put the hospital on a stronger financial footing and eased the cultural tensions. To rescue the medical center, Levy had to create discomfort. He forced peo-ple to confront the potentially disastrous consequences of maintaining the status quo—continued financial losses, massive layoffs, an outright sale—stating in a memo to all employees that “this is our last chance” to save the institution. He publicly challenged powerful medical ment that products coming to market are experiments, prototypes to be improved in the next iteration.Best Buy’s home theater business was one experiment. A much broader one at the company grew out of Gilbert’s belief that in order to adapt to an increasingly female customer base, Best Buy would need to change the role of women within the organization. The company had tra-ditionally looked to senior executives for direction and innovation. But, as Gilbert explained to us, a definition of con-sumer electronics retailing that included women would ultimately have to come from the bottom up. Appealing to female customers required empowering female employees at all levels of the company. This led to the creation of “WoLF (Women’s Leadership Forum) packs,” in which women, from store cashiers to corporate executives, came together to support one another and to generate innovative projects by drawing on their collective experience. In an unorthodox attempt to neutralize the threat to Best Buy’s traditionally male culture, two men paired up with two women to lead each group. More than 30,000 employees joined WoLF packs. The company says the initiative strengthened its pipeline of high-potential leaders, led to a surge in the number of female job applicants, and improved the bottom line by reducing turnover among female employees. Gilbert, who recently left Best Buy to help other companies establish similar programs, was able to realize the dual goal of adaptive leadership: tackling the current challenge and building adapt-ability. She had an immediate positive impact on the company’s financial per-boutiques in mid-2004 to more than 350 five years later. As you consider eliminating prac-tices that seem ill-suited to a changing environment, you must distinguish the essential from the expendable. What is so precious and central to an organiza-tion’s identity and capacity that it must be preserved? What, even if valued by many, must be left behind in order to move forward? Gilbert wanted to preserve Best Buy’s strong culture of responding to custom-ers’ needs. But the company’s almost exclusively male culture—“guys selling to guys”—seemed to her a barrier to suc-cess. For example, the phrase “the jets are up” meant that the top male execu-tives were aboard corporate aircraft on a tour of Best Buy stores. The flights gave them a chance to huddle on important issues and bond with one another. Big decisions were often announced follow-ing one of these trips. After getting a call with a question about female customers from one such group visiting a Best Buy home theater boutique, Gilbert per-suaded senior executives never to let the jets go up without at least one woman on board. Because you don’t know quite where you are headed as you build an organiza-tion’s adaptability, it’s prudent to avoid grand and detailed strategic plans. Instead, run numerous experiments. Many will fail, of course, and the way forward will be characterized by con-stant midcourse corrections. But that zigzagging path will be emblematic of your company’s ability to discover better products and processes. Take a page out of the technology industry’s playbook: Version 2.0 is an explicit acknowledg- An executive team on its own can’t find the best solutions. But leadership can generate more leadership deep in the organization.HBR Special Issue Summer 2020 15ties, and direct stakes lie behind them. So you need to act politically as well as analytically. In a period of turmoil, you must look beyond the merits of an issue to understand the interests, fears, aspirations, and loyalties of the factions that have formed around it. Orchestrat-ing conflicts and losses and negotiating among various interests are the name of the game.That game requires you to create a culture of courageous conversations. In a period of sustained uncertainty, the most difficult topics must be discussed. Dissenters who can provide crucial insights need to be protected from the organizational pressure to remain silent. Executives need to listen to unfamiliar voices and set the tone for candor and risk taking.Early in 2009, with Beth Israel Dea-coness facing a projected $20 million an-nual loss after several years of profitabil-ity, Paul Levy held an employee meeting to discuss layoffs. He expressed concern about how cutbacks would affect low-wage employees, such as housekeepers, and somewhat cautiously floated what seemed likely to be an unpopular idea: protecting some of those low-paying jobs by reducing the salary and benefits of higher-paid employees—including many sitting in the auditorium. To his surprise, the room erupted in applause. His candid request for help led to countless suggestions for cost savings, including an offer by the 13 medical de-partment heads to save 10 jobs through personal donations totaling $350,000. These efforts ultimately reduced the number of planned layoffs by 75%. Generate leadership. Corporate adaptability usually comes not from factions within the hospital and made clear he’d no longer tolerate clashes between the two cultures.But a successful turnaround was no guarantee of long-term success in an environment clouded by uncertainty. In fact, the stability that resulted from Levy’s initial achievements threatened the hospital’s ability to adapt to the suc-cession of challenges that lay ahead. Keeping an organization in a produc-tive zone of disequilibrium is a delicate task; in the practice of leadership, you must keep your hand on the thermostat. If the heat is consistently too low, people won’t feel the need to ask uncomfortable questions or make difficult decisions. If it’s consistently too high, the organiza-tion risks a meltdown: People arelikely to panic and hunker down.Levy kept the heat up after the financial emergency passed. In a move virtually unprecedented for a hospital, he released public quarterly reports on medical errors and set a goal of elimi-nating those errors within four years. Although the disclosures generated embarrassing publicity, Levy believed that acknowledging and learning from serious mistakes would lead to improved patient care, greater trust in the institu-tion, and long-term viability. Maintaining the right level of disequi-librium requires that you depersonalize conflict, which naturally arises as people experiment and shift course in an envi-ronment of uncertainty and turbulence. The aim is to focus the disagreement on issues, including some of your own perspectives, rather than on the inter-ested parties. But the issues themselves are more than disembodied facts and analysis. People’s competencies, loyal-some sweeping new initiative dreamed up at headquarters but from the accumu-lation of microadaptations originating throughout the company in response to its many microenvironments. Even the successful big play is typically a prod-uct of many experiments, one of which finally proves pathbreaking. To foster such experiments, you have to acknowledge the interdependence of people throughout the organization, just as companies increasingly acknowledge the interdependence of players—suppli-ers, customers, even rivals—beyond their boundaries. It is an illusion to expect that an executive team on its own will find the best way into the future. So you must use leadership to generate more leader-ship deep in the organization. At a worldwide partners’ meeting in June 2000, Egon Zehnder, the founder of the executive search firm bearing his name, announced his retirement. Instead of reflecting on the 36-year-old firm’s steady growth under his leader-ship, he issued a warning: Stability “is a liability, not an asset, in today’s world,” he said. “Each new view of the horizon is a glance through a different turn of the kaleidoscope” (a symbol of disequilib-rium, if there ever was one). “The future of this firm,” Zehnder continued, “is to-tally in the hands of the men and women here in this room.” From someone else, the statement might have come across as obligatory pap. But Egon Zehnder built his firm on the conviction that changes in internal and external environments require a new kind of leadership. He saw early on that his start-up could not realize its full potential if he made himself solely responsible for its success.LEADING IN A CRISISLEADERSHIP IN A (PERMANENT) CRISIS16 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020aim, of course, is for everyone to “act like they own the place” and thus be motivated to come up with innovations or take the lead in creating value for their company from wherever they sit.Zehnder did in fact convert the firm into a corporation in which every partner, including himself, held an equal share of equity and had an equal vote at partners’ meetings. Everyone’s compen-sation rose or fell with the firm’s overall performance. The aim was to make all the partners “intertwined in substance and purpose.”Zehnder’s collaborative and dis-tributed leadership model informed a strategic review that the firm undertook just after his retirement. In the short term, the partners faced a dramatic collapse in the executive search market; their long-term challenge was a shifting competitive landscape, including the rise of online recruiting and the initial public offerings of several major competitors. As the firm tried to figure out how to adapt and thrive in this environment, Zehnder’s words hung in the air: “How we deal with change differentiates the top performers from the laggards. But first we must know what should never change. We must grasp the difference between timeless principles and daily practices.” Again, most sustainable change is not about change at all but about discerning and conserving what is precious and essential. The firm took a bottom-up approach to sketching out its future, involving ev-ery partner, from junior to senior, in the process. It chose to remain a private part-nership. Unlike rivals that were ordering massive downsizing, the firm decided there would be virtually no layoffs: Individual executives just don’t have the personal capacity to sense and make sense of all the change swirling around them. They need to distribute leadership responsibility, replacing hierarchy and formal authority with organizational bandwidth, which draws on collective intelligence. Executives need to relax their sense of obligation to be all and do all and instead become comfortable sharing their burden with people oper-ating in diverse functions and locations throughout the organization. By pushing responsibility for adaptive work down into the organization, you clear space for yourself to think, probe, and identify the next challenge on the horizon.To distribute leadership responsibil-ity more broadly, you need to mobi-lize everyone to generate solutions by increasing the information flow that allows people across the organization to make independent decisions and share the lessons they learn from innovative efforts. To generate new leadership and innovative ideas, you need to leverage diversity—which, of course, is easier said than done. We all tend to spend time with people who are similar to us. Listening and learning across divides is taxing work. But if you do not engage the widest possible range of life experiences and views—including those of younger employees—you risk operating without a nuanced picture of the shifting reali-ties facing the business internally and externally.Creating this kind of environment involves giving up some authority usually associated with leadership and even some ownership, whether legal or psychological, in the organization. The Best Buy A senior vice president helped the company adapt to the reality that women increasingly make consumer electronics purchasing decisions.Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center The new CEO helped a dysfunctional organization created through the hasty merger of two Harvard teaching hospitals adapt to modern health care challenges.Egon Zehnder International The founder fostered a leadership style that helped the executive search firm adapt to the rise of online recruiting and competitors’ IPOs.Adaptive Leadership in PracticeLEADING IN A CRISISLEADERSHIP IN A (PERMANENT) CRISISHBR Special Issue Summer 2020 17opportunity to mobilize the resources of people to thrive in a changing and challenging world. EDITOR NOTE: Some of the information in this article was drawn from “Paul Levy: Taking Charge of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center,” HBS case no. 9-303-008, and “Strategic Review at Egon Zehnder International,” HBS case no. 9-904-071. HBR Reprint R0907FRonald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky are the coauthors of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (Harvard Business Press, 2009). Heifetz, the founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, and Linsky, a member of the Kennedy School faculty, are the coauthors of the best-selling Leadership on the Line (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017). Grashow is founder and CEO of the Good Wolf Group. too much from your organization, you might use the time to ask yourself, “Am I pushing too hard? Am I at risk of grinding people into the ground, including my-self? Do I fully appreciate the sacrifices I’m asking people to make?” Third, reach out to confidants with whom you can debrief your workdays and articulate your reasons for taking certain actions. Ideally, a confidant is not a current ally within your organization— who may someday end up on the oppo-site side of an issue—but someone external to it. The most importantcriterion is that your confidant care more about you than about the issues at stake. Fourth, bring more of your emotional self to the workplace. Appropriate dis-plays of emotion can be an effective tool for change, especially when balanced with poise. Maintaining this balance lets people know that although the situation is fraught with feelings, it is containable. This is a tricky tightrope to walk, espe-cially for women, who may worry about being dismissed as too emotional.Finally, don’t lose yourself in your role. Defining your life through a single endeavor, no matter how important your work is to you and to others, makes you vulnerable when the environment shifts. It also denies you other opportunities for fulfillment. Achieving your highest and most noble aspirations for your organization may take more than a lifetime. Your efforts may only begin this work. But you can accomplish something worth-while every day in the interactions you have with the people at work, with your family, and with those you encounter by chance. Adaptive leadership is a daily Preserving the social fabric of the organi-zation, crucial to long-term success, was deemed more important than short-term financial results. In fact, the firm opted to continue hiring and electing partners even during the down market. Rooted in its culture of interdepen-dence, the firm adapted to a changing environment, producing excellent results, even in the short term, as it gained market share, maintained healthy margins, and sustained morale—a major source of ongoing success. Adaptive work enabled the firm to take the best of its history into the future.Taking Care of Yourself To keep yourself from being corralled by the forces that generated the crisis in the first place, you must be able to depart from the default habits of authori-tative certainty. The work of leadership demands that you manage not only the critical adaptive responses within and surrounding your business but also your own thinking and emotions.This will test your limits. Taking care of yourself both physically and emotion-ally will be crucial to your success. You can achieve none of your leadership aims if you sacrifice yourself to the cause. First, give yourself permission to be both optimistic and realistic. This will create a healthy tension that keeps optimism from turning into denial and realism from devolving into cynicism. Second, find sanctuaries where you can reflect on events and regain per-spective. A sanctuary may be a place or an activity that allows you to step away and recalibrate your internal responses. For example, if you tend to demand Appropriate displays of emotion can be an effective tool for change when balanced with poise, conveying that although the situation is fraught with feelings, it is containable.18 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020 Illustration by KELLY ROMANALDIAT 8:45 AM ON SEP TEMBER 11 , 20 01, John Murphy, the CEO of Oppenheimer Funds, was out for a run in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park. He was think-ing about the company’s reorganization plan, which he had announced the day before, when suddenly he saw an ex-plosion near the top of the north tower of the World Trade Center. He stopped to watch black smoke pour from the place of impact—an awful lot of smoke, it seemed, for what was probably a small plane that had lost its way. He thought of his own employees in the neighboring south tower and made a mental note not to renew Oppenheimer’s lease in that building. “First the bombing in 1993 and now a plane accident,” he thought. “What’s next?” He continued jogging, now in the direction of the office.At the same moment, some 1,600 miles away, Timothy Doke was fighting LEADING IN A CRISISCrisis Communication: Lessons from 9/11When the worst happens, companies have to put their employees’ interests above all else.→ by PAUL A. ARGENTIORIGINALLY PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2002HBR Special Issue Summer 2020 1920 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020emergency action. But if 9/11 taught us anything, it’s that we can’t anticipate every contingency. Sometimes, we have no choice but to improvise. Here, too, the experiences I uncovered can serve as useful models. Improvisation, after all, is most effective when a strong corporate mission and vision are already in place to inform and guide it.Get on the SceneIn a move that would soon attain legend-ary status, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani arrived at the World Trade Center within minutes of the first attack to take charge of the rescue operation. In the days and weeks that followed, he would conduct several press conferences in the vicinity of the destroyed towers, attend many funerals and memorial services, and maintain what seemed like a ubiquitous presence in the city. His visibility, combined with his decisive-ness, candor, and compassion, lifted the spirits of all New Yorkers—indeed, of all Americans. During the crisis, the most effective managers maintained similarly high levels of visibility in their own organi-zations. They understood that a central part of their job is political and that their employees are, in a very real sense, their constituents. In periods of up-heaval, workers want concrete evidence that top management views their distress as one of the company’s key concerns. Written statements have their place, but oral statements and the sound of an empathic human voice commu nicate sin-cerity. And if the voice belongs to a com-pany leader, the listener has reason to think that the full weight of the company of their impact on business. Some com-panies lost scores of employees. Many others saw key components of their infrastructure destroyed, at least tempo-rarily. A still larger group had to struggle with secondary effects—customers requiring heroic levels of service, suppli-ers unable to fill orders, breakdowns in transportation and communication, col-lapses in demand. And every company in the country had to deal with traumatized and bewildered workers. Suddenly, crisis management was every executive’s job.I’ve spoken with many managers about their experiences and how they responded to the events of 9/11. Some of them, like John Murphy and Mary Beth Bardin, were near Ground Zero. Others, like Tim Doke, were far away from the site of the attacks but were nevertheless buffeted by their impact. What I discov-ered is that, in a time of extreme crisis, in-ternal communications take precedence. Before any other constructive action can take place—whether it’s serving custom-ers or reassuring investors—the morale of employees must be rebuilt. In the words of Ray O’Rourke, managing director for global corporate affairs at Morgan Stanley in New York, “We knew within the first day that, even though we are a financial services company, we didn’t have a finan-cial crisis on our hands; we had a human crisis. After that point, everything was focused on our people.” In my conversations with a range of executives, I was able to distill five les-sons that I think can serve as guide-posts for any company facing a crisis that undermines its employees’ com posure, confidence, or concentration. Many of these lessons relate to preparation—to establishing plans and mechanisms for rush-hour traffic on his way to American Airlines headquarters in Dallas. His pager went off at the same time his cell phone started ringing. As Doke, American’s vice president of corporate communications, scrambled to answer the phone and fish the pager out of his pocket, a sinking feel-ing came over him—a feeling made worse by a voice on the phone informing him that one of American’s flights out of Bos-ton had been hijacked. Doke passed the exit to his office and headed for the next one, which would take him to American’s strategic command center, the compa-ny’s hub for handling crisissituations.Back in New York City, Mary Beth Bardin was in a cab on the traffic-snarled streets of midtown Manhattan on her way to a breakfast meeting when she, too, saw smoke billowing into the oth er-wise clear blue skies. “Something must be on fire downtown,” she thought. The cabdriver turned on the radio, and Bar-din was stunned to hear that a jetliner had crashed into one of the World Trade Center’s towers. Traffic ground to a halt, and Bardin, executive vice president of public affairs and communications at Verizon, jumped out of the cab and headed on foot to her company’s offices at 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. She immediately thought about the 2,200 Verizon employees working in lower Manhattan, especially those located in the World Trade Center and in Verizon Wireless’s store there. Could they have been hurt? Her pace quickened, and she reached for her cell phone to let head-quarters know she was on her way in.MA N Y COM PANIES HAVE faced disasters in the past. What was unique about the events of September 11 was the breadth LEADING IN A CRISISCRISIS COMMUNICATION: LESSONS FROM 9/11HBR Special Issue Summer 2020 21Idea in Brief THE PROBLEMDuring a crisis, company leaders must prioritize employees’ safety and morale, not just the business’s needs. Communicating effectively ensures your people have the information they need to feel protected and supported.THE SOLUTIONFive strategies can help you respond to the crisis. Be visible and update employees with the latest information. Use communication channels that will reach the greatest number of workers. Show people that doing their jobs right now can be useful and productive. Have contingency plans for when your usual communication channels break down. Let employees improvise in ways that draw on the company’s mission and values.THE RESULTStrong leadership during a catastrophe can bring employees closer together, building a sense of community that remains long after the catastrophe has ended.Seidenberg himself inspected the damage to Verizon’s building at 140 West Street. Employees at the New York Times faced a particularly harrowing challenge after the attacks. They were as trauma-tized as other New Yorkers—the compa-ny’s main offices are on West 43rd Street, about three miles from Ground Zero, close enough for them to see the smoke. But it was their job to cover the attacks with the clearheadedness and distance of professional journalists. The sheer scale of the event, and its effect on friends and neighbors, shook even the most hard-bitten newsroom veterans. Russell Lewis, CEO of the New York Times Company, realized that the leadership team had to be seen acting “calmly, rationally, and humanely”— indeed, to be seen smiling—“so that our staff would mirror our behavior.” One of the first things he did was to go to the building’s fire command station and use its emergency public-address system to assure the staff that, until more was known about the attack, the safest place to be was within the Times’ fortress-like headquarters. He would use the system frequently over the next several days to reassure and update employees.“When people heard us on the speakers, they listened. Your voice must sound calm, in control and, most important, ear nest,” says Lewis, think-ing back. He, Chairman and Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulz berger, Jr., and Times newspaper Pres ident Janet Robinson became the crisis management team, walking through out the building each day to answer employees’ questions concerning such matters as building security and to thank them for their ded-ication. “Most of all, we wanted people stands behind whatever prom ises and assurances are being made. In the words of Rob Den sen, Oppenheimer’s director of corporate affairs and a survivor of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, most people engulfed in a crisis “want to be led and accordingly need to trust that you are going to lead them.” As the local telephone service pro- vider to much of New York, Verizon faced enormous business and oper-ational challenges in the wake of the Trade Center attacks. The 2,200 Verizon employees who were situated in the vicinity of the Center were involved in running the densest knot of cables and switches anywhere in the world. The attack knocked out 300,000 voice access lines and 4.5 million data circuits and left ten cellular towers inactive, depriving 14,000 businesses and 20,000 residen-tial customers of service. Within hours, Larry Babbio, the head of the company’s telecom business, traveled to the site to inquire after the safety of employees and inspect the damage. The CEO, Ivan Sei-denberg, during the week following the attack, worked closely and at length with the communications team to craft and record voice mails addressed to employ-ees who could still be reached outside the area of devastation. These messages went out daily until the stock market reopened the following Monday. “This was a time for leadership, and employees wanted to hear directly from the leader,” Bardin says. The messages focused on employee safety, those unaccounted for, the condition of the network, and how Verizon was going to get the New York Stock Exchange open for business. In addition, senior managers toured various facilities to meet with employees, and Before any other constructive action can take place—whether it’s serving customers or reassuring investors—the morale of employees must be rebuilt.22 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020tive. They read it, analyze it, question it. The media were critical for communicat-ing with our employees.”Oppenheimer’s Rob Densen concurs: “Employees take their cue from the external media, so you need to demon-strate your functionality through the media.” One way Oppenheimer did so was by publishing a full-page letter from Murphy to his employees in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Times. Some employees will trust a message that has been mediated by indepen - dent gatherers and distributors of the news more than one that comes directly from the company or appears as a paid advertisem*nt. This filtering effect is especially useful at companies where employees tend to be suspicious of statements from management. American Air lines, for instance, has had a history of troubled relations with two of its unions, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants and the Allied Pilots Associa-tion. According to Tim Doke, “In a crisis, we usually end up relying on news media to get our message out.…[CEO] Don Carty speaking directly to employees through media outlets such as CNN’s Larry King Live and the network morning shows has built bridges and created understanding between management and labor.” In the aftermath of 9/11, both unions waived a number of the rights of their rank and file to help American Airlines get its planes back in the air. Although some companies have put computer kiosks on factory floors, the continuous nature of manufacturing operations and the distance of some workers from on-line hookups make communicating via e-mail in such ven-cation. Phone lines and power lines may be destroyed. Computer networks may go down. Groups of employees may be stranded or isolated. This was certainly the situation many companies faced af-ter 9/11. To reach their people, managers often had to be creative in using unusual communication channels. Many, for instance, used the mass media to com-municate with employees. Oppenheimer Funds, which occupied five floors at Two World Trade Center, wanted to send a message to both its employees and its customers that it would be operational as soon as the mar kets reopened. So CEO John Murphy appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box to deliver that message. In fact, its contingency site in New Jersey was ready for trading before themarkets reopened.Normally, of course, the news media and corporate America have what may best be described as an adversarial relationship—one that communications officers are asked to “manage.” However, as the events of 9/11 unfolded, many of them realized that they needed to start thinking of the media as allies—in part because their failed communications systems left them no other choice. At Morgan Stanley, the voice mail system serving its 2,700 employees based in Two World Trade Center and another 1,000 in Five World Trade Center, a smaller structure, had been disabled, as had the internal Web site for its broker network. But affected companies did not view the media channel as merely a default communications system. Ray O’Rourke of Morgan Stanley explains: “[Our employees] take real-time news feeds on their desktops. They are very news sensi-to know we were all in the same boat,” Lewis says.Communicating with the people actu-ally covering 9/11 was far from unneces-sary. “If anything,” he says, “journalists need ed more information [than other Times employees] about what the com-pany was doing in response to the crisis. They are paid to be skeptical of author-ity, and if you can’t adequately explain and defend what it is you’re telling them, they won’t go along.” The presence of senior management wasn’t just important for companies in Manhattan—all around the country, bewildered and frightened employees were hungry for leadership. Think of Dell. It’s headquartered in Texas, and its people suffered little direct impact from the terrorism. Yet they were devastated emotionally. Within a few days of 9/11, CEO Michael Dell and Kevin Rollins, Dell’s president and chief operating officer, out of a simple desire to be involved and heard, decided they would meet with all of their directors and vice presidents, who were encouraged to talk about how they and their teams were holding up. To keep the meetings small and personal, three were held. The meetings were also taped and put on the company intranet for the benefit of every employee. In a stark departure from business as usual, Dell and Rollins said the focus should not be on sales or margins but rather on Dell’s people and helping affected customers rebuild.Choose Your Channels CarefullyWhether natural or man-made, disasters often disrupt normal flows of communi- Operations during a crisis should be decentralized, but decision making should not be.HBR Special Issue Summer 2020 23Company, no one had to even ask that question. Our mission is to put out the best newspaper we can so that readers can be as informed as possible. Just like a trauma surgeon, this is what we train for. There was no question that our employ-ees felt that their job had meaning. And in the end, the Times received Pulitzer Prizes for its 9/11 reporting.”A focus on work, in fact, can be enor-mously helpful to employees in a time of crisis. It provides an outlet for their desire to help, gets them back into a normal routine, fosters their pride in the company and what they do, and builds strong bonds between themselves and their customers, many of whom desper-ately need the company to keep their products and services flowing.According to Elizabeth Heller Allen, vice president of corporate communi-cations at Dell, “the key was finding an outlet for our employees’ desire to help.” The urgency of getting some 75 of Dell’s customers at Ground Zero and others in the DC area back in business pull ed the staff together. At the same time, the senior leadership knew that only a re vitalized staff would be able to deliver on Dell’s strong reputation for customer service. A Dell document stated that the objective of its response plan was “to increase employee un-derstanding of how the September 11 terrorist attacks affected Dell’s custom-ers and busi ness and how Dell would re-spond.” But, other company documents showed, top management knew that Dell’s employees could assist affected customers only if they had a sense of security themselves.Dell’s business model, which dis-penses with the middleman, puts the ues difficult. American Airlines found a way around this by using its reservation system to reach as many employees as possible. “[Carty’s] voice mails were transcribed and sent to the SABRE ma-chines—those machines that print your itineraries and tickets—as well as posted on the Internet and e-mailed to employ-ees,” says Doke. The machines are scattered all over airports, including employee lounges. While their major function is to receive messages, they do have a module per-mitting the company to communicate with employees, especially those in the field. “The SABRE machines meant that even maintenance people on tarmacs, who might not have Internet access at work, could be kept informed,” Doke says. American Airlines also recorded Carty’s messages on Internet hot lines and posted transcripts of them on its Web site.To confirm that they were safe, Morgan Stanley’s employees could call one of the toll-free numbers that fed into the company’s Discover Card call centers. The firm also put the number on the ticker display that wraps around its Times Square building. Here, too, the TV networks played a role by broadcast-ing the number. Quickly, the Discover Card call center became the call center during the crisis, even routing calls from non-Morgan Stanley employees looking for information.Stay Focused on the Business“Everyone wanted to know what they could do in the wake of 9/11,” says Russell Lewis. “At the New York Times firm directly in touch with its thousands of customers. Because of that direct contact, employees know exactly what these customers need and want. “We have complete records of what we’ve sold to every customer, so we knew what they had lost,” said Allen. “While it meant working around the clock to get the computers configured with the correct software, it was our way of giving back.”Other employees worked those hours to pack and ship systems to the affected customers, who could place orders 24/7. Dell also established service and response teams that customers could reach through dedicated phone lines and the company’s Web site, which gave instructions for obtaining immediate assistance.“Reaching out to employees strug-gling with shock, grief, and anger with a more family-like tone enabled us to focus those feelings on responding to our customers’ urgent needs. Maintaining that tone with regular updates more firmly than ever linked our customer- experience strategy to our teams’ every-day work,” says Rollins. Months after 9/11, the company tried to measure how effective these strategies were. It determined that Dell Helping Rebuild America, an internal Web site, received 54,947 hits in its first two months. The site averaged 603 hits per day, and had 11,016 unique visitors during that period, almost a third of the workforce. In addition, the company asked for feedback from employees and found that 90% thought that Web casts from the CEO and COO during the crisis were helpful and relevant to their jobs and the organization.LEADING IN A CRISISCRISIS COMMUNICATION: LESSONS FROM 9/1124 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020attack, punched in some infor mation, and activated the company’s crisis plan. Employees already knew to call into the Denver operation, which assumed con-trol of the technology running the Web sites and voice mail systems. However, the substance of all communications came from Densen, the corporate affairs director, and CEO Murphy in New York City.A widely circulated toll-free number can help ensure that employees obtain information from a single authorized source. Because Verizon had such a number, its 250,000 employees na-tionwide were able to access recorded messages containing the latest informa-tionabout the crisis. Morgan Stanley’s toll-free number was televised as early as 11:00 AM on September 11, making it, according to President and COO Bob Scott, “the first national emergency number of any organization, including the federal government.” By 1:30 PM that day, the firm’s crisis center had received more than 2,500 calls. Finally, many executives I spoke with emphasized how important it was to have experienced communications professionals on board. These people were panic proof, executives said. “The advantage of communications veter-ans,” adds American Airlines’ Tim Doke, “is that they have done everything, so in a crisis you can easily pull them out of one job and put them in another.” Improvise, but from a Strong Foundation “All of the planning that you do for a crisis helps you get through the basics,” says the New York Stock Exchange’s Rob-Having contingency plans means, among other things, establishing con-tingency work sites. Soon after a truck bomb exploded in the garage of the World Trade Center in 1993, the New York Board of Trade began planning them. By 1995, it had built two sites in the borough of Queens. For six years, they sat empty, costing NYBOT $300,000 annually in rent and utilities. After Sep-tember 11, 2001, however, these remote trading pits proved to be one of the best investments NYBOT had ever made.Web-based communications require their own version of contingency plan-ning. When the destruction of Oppen-heimer’s Trade Center offices knocked out its intranet Web server, staff moved quickly to post crisis communications on a newly created employee section of the company’s Web site. Many other companies also took that approach so that employees who had Internet access at home could stay connected.Although operations during a crisis should be decentralized, decision mak-ing should not be. Airlines have some of the better-developed crisis command centers. At American, the strategic com-mand center is a vast room featuring a large, horseshoe-shaped table with fully equipped workstations and a con-ference call line that can accommodate as many as 200 outside callers. Large-screen televisions set up to receive sat-ellite broadcasts allow command center employees to monitor all news coverage of the crisis. Messages should also be sent from a centralized source. At Oppenheimer Funds, Bob Neihoff, then manager of contingency planning, called a desig-nated number within moments of the Starbucks displayed a similar mixture of head and heart. The chain of coffee shops had a total of 250 branches in New York City’s five boroughs, four of them adjacent to Ground Zero. “A major part of what’s helped us through this was engag-ing in the relief effort,” Marty Annese, a senior vice president, told a trade publi-cation. The initial “instinctive” response of the company’s crisis management team, according to Chairman Howard Schultz, was to close all company-owned stores in North America so that employ-ees “could return home to be with family and friends,” according to a company statement. Headquarters conveyed this message by voice mail and e-mail to all the stores.But with the exception of 15 or so stores at the southern end of Manhattan, the New York City branches reopened on September 13. Several served food and coffee to rescue work-ers at Ground Zero, to people at blood donation centers, and to those at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, the command center for volunteer opera-tions during the crisis. Have a Plan in PlaceWhile many companies have crisis contingency plans and disaster recovery plans in place, few had been tested as rigorously as they were on September 11. As Gregor Bailar, then chief information officer of Nasdaq, commented, “People will have to look very care fully at their backup strategies and see whether they can communicate with everybody eas-ily, whether [critical data] are stored in that same building that could experience [a] disaster.”LEADING IN A CRISISCRISIS COMMUNICATION: LESSONS FROM 9/11HBR Special Issue Summer 2020 25succeeded in reminding its employ ees and the world of those assets. When the markets reopened, Oppenheimer, the only mutual fund manager in the towers, had one of the largest net inflows of any broker-sold fund family in the United States.The most forward-thinking leaders re-alize that managing a crisis communica-tions program requires the same dedica-tion and resources they typically give to other dimensions of their business. They also realize that a strong internal com-munications function allows them not only to weather a crisis but to strengthen their organization internally.Just as a death in the family often brings people closer together, so did the catastrophe on 9/11. Many of the exec-utives I interviewed talked about how their companies sustained that sense of community long after 9/11 by keeping the lines of communication open. At the New York Times, the strength of these bonds was tested soon after the terrorist attacks when a reporter received an envelope containing a white powder suspected to be anthrax. Once again, Russell Lewis and other senior executives went on the public-address system. “For that time period,” he recalls, “we were a family, and that doesn’t wear off, as long as you are consistent in your concern for coworkers.” HBR Reprint R0212HPaul A. Argenti is Professor of Corporate Communication at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business in Hanover, New Hampshire. He is the author of Corporate Communication, 7th edition (McGraw- Hill, 2016) and Corporate Responsibility (Sage, 2015). “Getting to work remains very difficult,” he said. “Many routes are sealed off or closed. But that hasn’t stopped you.…The police stepped in and stopped the buses [you chartered]. So one of you had the clever idea to secure ferryboats. What you couldn’t do by land you did by sea. Today, the idea of special buses with police escorts was a winner. And every colleague who needed to be in the office was here.”That may have been due, in part, to other remarks Paulson had made. “Our assets will always be our people, capital, and reputation, with our people be ing the most important of the three.…And the lesson here is that our principles will never fail us as long as we do not fail to live up to them.”Goldman Sachs employees weren’t the only ones using nautical approaches to get to the office. At the New York Times, Russell Lewis told us that one re-porter kayaked across the Hudson River to get to work.Many of the executives we spoke with emphasized that a company cannot start communicating its mission and vision during a crisis. Employees will know what to do only if they have been absorb-ing the company’s guiding principles all along. Two of Oppenheimer’s shared values, according to an internal docu-ment, are “dedication to caring” and “team spirit.” Thinking back to 9/11, CEO John Murphy says, “If you have a strong culture, you have the ability to maintain focus. On 9/11, we had a structure, a be-lief system, and a hierarchy all in place. That helped us to get through the crisis, and we haven’t skipped a beat since.” The company had one more advan-tage: a communications strategy, which ert Zito, its executive vice president for communications. Still, “people need to think on their feet and make quick deci-sions. Until the crisis comes, in whatever form, you don’t really understand how valuable all the preparation was.”There is more to preparation than training. As important is instilling in em-ployees the firm’s values. Although Star-bucks ordered its 2,900 North American stores closed within a few hours of the attacks, the managers of several undam-aged stores near the disaster site decided on their own initiative to stay open, a few all night, to provide coffee and pastries to hospital staffsand rescue workers. Others served as triage centers for the injured. People who had been wandering the streets of lower Manhattan in a daze were grabbed by Starbucks employees and pulled inside—and in some cases, lives were saved when nearby buildings collapsed.One of the eight precepts recited in Starbucks’ mission statement is, “Con-tribute positively to our communities and our environment.” Many of Star-bucks’ outlets are, even in Manhattan, neighborhood-gathering places, full of comfortable chairs in which customers may linger for hours. Essentially, they had helped bring together the commu-nity they served.Goldman Sachs’s neighborhood is, in the abstract, the global marketplace, but its employees’ dedication to this community couldn’t have been fiercer. In one of his regular voice mails, Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson saw something of the typical bond trader’s agility and coolness under fire in his employees’ ability to cope with a disabled transportation system. Employees will know what to do in a crisis only if they have been absorbing the company’s guiding principles all along.26 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020Leading in Times of TraumaCompassion heals. But it’s up to you to bring it out swiftly, spread it to every corner, and manage its impact. → by JANE E. DUTTON, PETER J. FROST, MONICA C. WORLINE, JACOBA M. LILIUS, and JASON M. KANOVORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 2002human capacity to show compassion is universal, some organizations suppress it while others create an environment in which compassion is not only expressed but spreads. (For more on our research, see the sidebar “A Brief History of the CompassionLab.”)Why is organizational compassion important, beyond the obvious and com-pelling reasons of humanity? Unleashing compassion in the workplace not only lessens the imme diate suff ering of those directly aff ected by trauma, it enables them to recover from future setbacks more quickly and eff ectively, and it increases their attachment to their col-leagues and hence to the company itself. For those who witness or participate in acts of compassion, the eff ect is just as great; people’s caring gestures contribute to their own resilience and attachment to the organization. Indeed, we’ve found that a leader’s ability to enable a compas-sionate response throughout a company directly aff ects the organization’s ability to maintain high performance in diffi cult times. It fosters a company’s capacity to heal, to learn, to adapt, and to excel. In the following pages, we will describe the actions leaders can take to enable organizational compassion in times of trauma. Before we begin, it’s worth noting that some of our examples draw from the events of September 11, 2001, because the magnitude of pain surrounding those events was unprece-dented in business history and because the public nature of those events makes the stories relevant to a broad audience. However, pain occurred in the workplace long before last September, and individ-ual and group traumas will continue to disrupt people’s daily routines—at times, ONCE IN A GREAT WHILE, tragic circum-stances present us with a challenge for which we simply cannot prepare. The terrorist attacks of last September immediately come to mind, but man-agers and their employees face crises at other times, too. Tragedies can occur at an individual level—an employee is diagnosed with cancer, for example, or loses a family member to an unexpected illness—or on a larger scale—a natural disaster destroys an entire section of a city, leaving hundreds of people dead, injured, or homeless. Such events can cause unspeakable pain not only for the people directly involved but also for those who see misfortune befall col-leagues, friends, or even total strangers. That pain spills into the workplace. The managerial rule books fail us at times like these, when people are searching for meaning and a reason to hope for the future. There is, however, something leaders can do in times of col-lective pain and confusion. By the very nature of your position, you can help individuals and companies begin to heal by taking actions that demonstrate your own compassion, thereby unleashing a compassionate response throughout the whole organization. Our research at the University of Michigan and the Univer-sity of British Columbia’s Compassion-Lab has demonstrated that although the Illustration by KELLY ROMANALDILEADING IN A CRISIS28 HBR Special Issue Summer 2020LEADING IN A CRISISLEADING IN TIMES OF TRAUMAtheir own and others’ suffering. We have undertaken in-depth studies of leaders at organizations facing all manner of cri-ses, and we have found that those who excel at leading compassionately and effectively in times of crisis adhere to a set of shared practices that help people make sense of terrible events and allow employees to move on. Meaning amid ChaosAcute trauma, tragedy, or distress can cause people to engage in intense soul-searching. We aren’t referring to the restlessness and stocktaking that are a natural and ongoing process as people mature and grow in their careers; we’re talking about the persistent and vexing questions that affect how people live their lives: Why did this happen? Could I have prevented it? How will we cope? Why me? And even, for employees who witness a tragic event but are not directly affected, why not me? It isn’t your job as a leader to answer these questions. But at the same time, it’s not realistic or reasonable to ask people to ponder these questions only on their own time, outside the office. Instead, you can cultivate an environ-ment that allows people to work through these questions in their own way so they can eventually start assign ing meaning to events and begin healing. You can start by setting an example for others by openly revealing your own humanity. You may well expe-rience the same emotions affecting your employees— from deep sorrow to anxiousness to uncertainty to anger to steely resolve. Openly expressing these feelings can be very powerful for 1940, showing her dedication, concern, and commitment to the Allied cause, and inspiring lifelong admiration and loyalty for her constant presence.In vivid contrast, immediately follow-ing the terrorist attacks in New York City, leaders at a publishing company close to ground zero refused to disrupt business as usual. The company held regularly scheduled meetings the day after the attacks and provided little or no support for people to share and express their pain. One editor told us she’d gotten a call at home early on the morning of September 12, just as she was trying to help her eight-year-old daughter make sense of what had happened the day before, demanding to know why she was late for a meeting. She went to work and sat through a four-hour conference call but was present in body only. Because she was given no opportunity to connect with her family, friends, and colleagues and was offered little organizational comfort in the face of a terrifying and confusing sequence of events, she felt her loyalty to the company eroding with every passing minute.What English and other leaders have done—and what the leaders of the pub-lishing company failed to do—is facilitate a compassionate institutional response on two levels. The first level is what we call a context for meaning—the leader creates an environment in which people can freely express and discuss the way they feel, which in turn helps them to make sense of their pain, seek or provide comfort, and imagine a more hopeful future. The second level is a context for action—the leader creates an environ-ment in which those who experience or witness pain can find ways to alleviate shattering their lives—as long as humans continue to conduct business. Beyond EmpathyWhen people
