Caring for Your Team in Crisis
When a leader makes a mistake, you take your whole team.
In this post, I wrote about surviving a crisis where I personally disappointed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
I described my actions in managing the crisis with the executives above me.
Now I want to write about caring for the team.
As a leader under fire, you may feel it is all about you.
It isn’t.
You must simultaneously manage the crisis *and* take care of your team.
In my Jeff Bezos failure, I did some things well and some poorly.
The engineering manager below me saw I was taking a beating from disappointed leaders. He asked if he could step up and take responsibility. I thanked him, told him it was my job, and asked him and his team to focus on the fix, not take the blame. That said, I am proud of the fact he would have taken the heat for his team had I not been there.
At the same time, I failed to encourage the engineer who wrote the bug. He stepped up and supported the effort to fix it, but shortly after the crisis passed he resigned. I failed to be clear enough that he was a welcome, valued team member, leaving room for fear and doubt to creep in that we blamed him for the problems. Perhaps others also blamed him directly and I, busy with the situation, never knew.
11 years later I still regret this.
As a leader, your team is your only vehicle to get things done.
No matter how bad the situation, they must be your first priority.
Give them what they need to feel safe and they will move heaven and earth to fix the problem.
What you can do:
Take the blame. The captain goes down with the ship. Do not allow others to be blamed. In some cases, we refused to let the name of the engineer who owned the code be known or spoken externally to the team, to ensure they were safe.
Realize that whoever was remotely involved in the problem feels bad. We all want to succeed and none of us want to let teammates down. You do not need to tell any good performer they fell short. They have already told themselves this much more harshly. You have to show them the path to growth and success from where they are.
See crisis and problems as learning and growth, not personal flaws.
Separate fixing the problem from the later process of figuring out why it happened.
No leader has the luxury of a private crisis.
Your team comes with you.
Bring them along and they will carry you through it.
Why was there a focus on blame?
I agree that in an ideal circumstance, the focus would have been only on fixing the problem, but in this case, that wasn't so.
A public launch had failed.
Leaders above me wanted to know why and since they considered the failure to be bad, who had allowed such a mistake?
There was anger and judgment.
I think we can pretend that people will never feel a need to blame, but we had best not expect it.
Enlightened leaders either restrain this tendency or get over it quickly, but in 2011, Amazon had some culture of "pain discourages you from touching the hot stove again."
That said, I recovered from the problem and moved on successfully.
So while I need to address "taking the blame," ultimately it was a passing phase.
What would I have done differently to the engineer who resigned?
Make it very clear to him that we did not blame him and let him know we wanted him to stay.
I did not skip over the levels in between to personally reassure him; I left that to the people in the middle and do not know if it was done, or worse if some of the opposite was done.
I wish that at the time I had the presence and skill to do what I now see would have been a great response.
Hopefully, others can learn from this story and do better.
If you are new to management, I co-wrote 10 hard truths about tech leadership with a former Twitch colleague.
Audience Insights
I have consolidated additional ideas worth considering from my LinkedIn audience, including:
A Cause of Errors (COE) document is to get to the root cause of the errors so that you can fix the problem at the core, not at the surface. The challenge is COEs come after the problem is fixed. The COE in this case (as most do) showed several problems, the three main ones related to this story:
We lost the SDE III on our team and so there was no senior reviewer.
We never load tested.
We never had a PE review. We essentially wrote the code, tested it in the lab, and then rushed it out to hit a committed date. Shortcutting the quality process was a mistake.
As a leader, closely look for:
Was the error accidental, negligent, or nearly willful (intentional)?
What systems were in place to avoid relying on human diligence (which we know will always fail in the end)?
Sometimes peer pressure outweighs manager support. Clearly communicate the message to the entire team and coach your direct reports on how to handle team engagement on a day-to-day basis.
Become A Scaled, Deep Leader
Of the many changes to become an effective executive, this may be the hardest.
Why?
Because it is hard to let go of relying on your own personal ability and instead begin to rely on your team.
In my course, Level Up: Breaking Through to Executive, I teach you what it takes to scale yourself, how to prioritize, realize that the leaders on your team are your freedom, executive level delegating, and how to expand your personal expertise.
Watch the highlight clip below to get a sense of what you will get.
Live online version of the course.
On-demand version of the course.
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