How can you, as a leader, start to lay the plans for your post crisis recovery?

It’s time to think more positively about what you’re going to do as a leader to position your team and your organization for success post crisis.

Eventually we’re going to get through the current situation and at that point, your team is going to encounter new types of stress and pressure. It might be from reopening your organization if you’ve been shut down or it might be from adjusting to different workloads and activities going forward.

Having a game plan in mind for the post crisis period can help. Here are a few tips to capitalize on the recovery period your team will likely enter into.

Tip number one is to implement changes as you ramp back up. If your operations have slowed down somewhat, and you’re going to be ramping them up, now is a great time to implement some of the continuous improvement and operational improvements you have in front of you. In fact, you don’t have to do things the same way you did before. This is a great time to change things up and see if it can make your department run smoother, more efficiently and more productively.

The second tip is to empower your team to take advantage of their current capabilities and to build new capabilities. The reality in the pre-crisis timeframe is many leaders still shouldered most of the responsibilities for making decisions, solving problems and being experts in the technical aspects of their production lines. Now is a great time to encourage your team to become more empowered and more accountable for improvements on the line and its operation.

Your teams could surprise you with their level of capability to learn how to troubleshoot problems, answer their own questions, solve their own problems, and overall increase the efficiency and productivity of the line. So why not empower them more as you ramp back up in a post-crisis environment?

The third tip is to get ready for a different type of stress. The reality is there’s good stress and bad stress. If your organization has to go through some shrinking, that’s going to be a negative stress. If it’s in a growth mode, which keeping in mind, even if operations have ground to a halt, they will be starting to pick up again and you’ll have a different type of stress as the business starts to grow again, it’s a good and positive type of stress. You want to be capable and ready as a leader to deal with that.

You of course can do that by using some of the stress resiliency content that my colleague, Brad Coulbeck, and I put together for you. It’s in a previous episode of Leader Feeder, and we’ve also got some great tools and resources your organization can purchase on how to become more resilient and perform better under pressure.

Using these tips will help both your team and your own leadership journey as we move from having a crisis into the eventual growth and recovery phase.