Mastering Crisis Leadership: Military Strategies for Business Resilience | Scott McCarthy | Episode 302

Scott McCarthy:
Yes, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this week’s Monday military leadership insight. Now this is our new podcast segment where I heard from you listeners, and you said, hey, Scott. All these guests, fantastic. These experts, fantastic. But we wanna hear about you and your leadership experience. We want to listen and hear about the lessons you’ve learned through your military career. I’m like, what a fantastic idea.

Scott McCarthy:
Sure. I could do that. So here we are. This is military sorry. This is Monday military leadership insights. So it’s for you, by you, my experience. Are you ready for this? Alright. Let’s do it.

Scott McCarthy:
Welcome 1. Welcome all to the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast, a weekly podcast series dedicated to helping you hit peak performance across the three domains of leadership. Those being leading yourself, leading your team, and leading your organization. This podcast couples my 20 years of military experience as a senior Canadian army officer with world class guests to bring you the most complete podcast of leadership going. And for more, feel free to check out our website at movingforwardleadership.com. And with that, let’s get to the show. Yes. Welcome 1.

Scott McCarthy:
Welcome all. It is your chief leadership officer, Scott McCarthy. And as I said in the intro, this is Monday military leadership insights. And this week, we’re gonna be tackling the whole topic of leading in crisis. And if you’ve been listening to show anytime, you know this, but I’ll say it anyway. Most of my experience comes from leading teams, solid teams in highly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments. That is my bread and butter for my military career, and now I’m bringing the leadership lessons I’ve learned through that experience to you. Before we dive into talking about leading in crisises, I’m gonna do a quick announcement, and that is if you’re listening to this real time, this week, 18 September, we’re gonna be doing a webinar all about moving forward leadership.

Scott McCarthy:
That is the overarching company and umbrella’s peak performance leadership podcast as well as the leader growth mastermind and my one to one coaching program, the leader accelerator. Okay? So if you wanna learn more about, what we have to offer as well as learn some practical leadership, tactics that you can implement right away, both yourself, lean your teams, as well as lean organizations, join us at leedump boss.comforward/webinar. And for those who show up live and watch it live, there will be a free gift for you. You’ll just have to check your email later because I will send it to you personally. I’ll grab your email address and literally send you a personal email directly from me to you with your free gift informing you what that is. So you it is in your best interest to check us out live. But, hey, if you can’t check us out live, no big deal. Recreate play will be available for all those who can’t check us out.

Scott McCarthy:
They’re on social, be on YouTube, what have you. Alright. So let’s dive in and talking about leading a crisis. And there’s 3 things I’m gonna talk about this week. Okay? The first one is it’s something Hollywood actually gets right. And that is when a crisis is coming up and going on, we check our gear. It’s one of the first things we do. We check our equipment.

Scott McCarthy:
You know, you see the troops are running. They’re checking guns, ammunition, grenades, bazookas, vehicles, tanks, what have you. Yes. We go ahead and we check our gear because our gear is vitally important to our survival and our success. That being said, you know, this is one of the things you want to do as well is check your gear when a crisis is about to, you know, erupt. As you see it coming in the horizon, you want to check your gear. Now what I’m saying that I don’t mean go out and get guns and such. Okay.

Scott McCarthy:
Not what I’m saying at all, but check the equipment that you use. Right? Check your equipment to make sure that it’s operational. It’s functional. That’s good to go. If you don’t use it that often, crack it out. Dust it off, excuse me, and see how it’s going. Check your equipment. Okay.

Scott McCarthy:
And while you’re doing that, the most important part of this is you’d be thinking about a backup plan, a backup plan for your equipment that’s vital to your success. So if you’re in construction and your excavator is your number one thing that you need to be successful, then what’s your backup plan if something happens to that? Do you got, you know, contacts already for repairs? Do you have contacts already to get a rental? Do you have contacts already, to come and, you know, take it out and replace it with a new one. What is your backup plan? Because in the army, we talk about 2 is 1 and 1 is none. Okay? 2 is 1. 1 is none. Nothing. Got nothing if you only got one of it because something will happen to that piece of equipment. K? Something’s gonna happen.

Scott McCarthy:
So for you for you in leading in your environment, what are those key pieces of equipment which are vital to your success and what backups do you have put in place so that you can continue operating? That is the first thing. Second thing is is that you don’t rise to the occasion, but rather we fall back on our training. We train, train, train. Our whole raise on the letter is to be, effective in high stress, high stakes environments. Our lives are on the line. Hands down. Okay. So we build our trend up to it.

Scott McCarthy:
We don’t we fall back on our training. So higher level we train, the the less we fall back, we don’t necessarily rise to the occasion. So how can you do that in your teams? How might you build your training up, develop them further, Give them more qualifications, get them more experience, different experiences. Tying into what I said earlier. My apologies. I got a cold coming on, so starting to hit into me. But, tying back to the whole ideology as 2 is 1, 1 is none, what are those single points of failure in personnel that you have, I e, those one of’s, if they go, your whole organization is pooched. We all got them.

Scott McCarthy:
So now how would you mesh principle 12 together and train somebody to make you backup of that key person? Debbie in finance, the only one that knows how to do account payable. There’s no one else. Maybe it’s time to train Sean who’s interested in it. So something happens to Debbie. She gets sick. She decides to quit, retire, she did not her job elsewhere, what have you, you have someone who can step up. That’s whole ideology, you know, in training and having backups right there. Okay? So keep that in mind.

Scott McCarthy:
What kind of training can you do? And you can do this right now when there’s no crisis at all. You can go ahead and bring your team together and say, okay, folks. You know, it’s this type of crisis, the financial crisis again. You know, this is the scenario we’re facing. What are we going to do and walk people through it? And this ties into point number 3, principle number 3, and that is we plan. We plan for these events. We plan for them. Okay.

Scott McCarthy:
So we actually go through the planning process of this type of event, And we draft up an idea of what we’re going to do. Should something happen. And they’re called contingency plans. They’re contingency, meaning that they’re there in the event of this happening. And we have them. There are all kinds of other plans, but this one’s most applicable to this talk. Okay? So we have contingency plans where we take the plan off the event occurs. We take the plan off, we dust it off.

Scott McCarthy:
We overlay the current situation to the plan. We fill in the blanks and poof away we go. K. Couple of things to keep in mind though. One is that you actually have to do the plan. I’ve been involved too many times when I’ve seen something happen that we’ve had a contingency plan, and the leader said, we’re gonna do this. K. Like, you have to follow the plan.

Scott McCarthy:
You took the time when you had you had the time. There was no crisis. You had, you know, you had mental clarity because in the event of crisis, the one of the first things that gets foggy is your mind because you’re you’re under high stress, high demand, high pressure, short timelines, and trying to achieve an effect. It gets really hard to think clearly in those circumstances. K? So when you do the contingency plan to have all this at your fingertips, why not use it? And the second thing to consider is don’t blindly follow the plan, the opposite side of the coin. K. You need to look at the situation and look at what the plan says and identify those things where it doesn’t make sense and alter those. Okay.

Scott McCarthy:
Not change the plan completely, but modify slash adjust where it makes sense. And that’s it. A great way to start at this, and you don’t have to go through this big formal planning process like military does. A great way to start at chipping away at the plan is developing SOPs, standard operating procedures, or standing operating procedures, whatever you wanna call them. Either way, these are, you know, steps written out for team members so that they know what to do the inventive of a crisis. Pargos out of the building, got employee there. They have no idea. They crack open the book, physical book because the power’s out.

Scott McCarthy:
Look at the page, you know, invent the power outage, call so and so. Joe at, you know, 555, what have you. K? And that is a standard operating procedure. Joe then or or the employee can call Joe, get him in, get the power back up, and crisis done. Avert it. Over with. And then you carry on with operations. Those are the free tips.

Scott McCarthy:
Check your gear. Fall back on your training, not rise to the occasion. 3, for love of God, actually make a plan for it when you have the time now in no crisis. So that is it ladies and gentlemen. Again, don’t forget about our webinar coming up in just 2 days time. You can sign up for it now at lead don’t boss.comforward/webinar, and I’ll see you next time. Take care, and remember, lead don’t boss. And that’s a wrap for this episode, ladies and gentlemen.

Scott McCarthy:
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Scott McCarthy:
Finally there’s always more there’s always more lessons around being the highest performing leader that you can possibly be. Whether that’s for yourself your team or your organization. So why don’t you subscribe? Subscribe to the show via movingforwardleadership.comforward/subscribe. And until next time, lead, don’t boss, and thanks for coming out. Take care now.