Simple Steps to Improve Your Change and Crisis Leadership

Lead long enough, and you’ll inevitably guide yourself, your team, or your organization through change. Ideally, it’s a proactive shift—the kind you initiate to drive growth or success. But seasoned leaders know that, sooner or later, change will arrive uninvited, often in the form of crisis.

So, how should a wise leader prepare? Take a crisis management course? Devour books on the subject? Hope for the best and do nothing? At RiverWalk, we’ve seen leaders take various approaches, each with some merit. However, if you truly want to elevate your leadership during uncertain times, there’s one skill you must cultivate: the ability to be curious.

Steps to Cultivate Your Leadership Curiosity

1. Use Stable Times to Learn: When the waters are calm, learn about the power of curiosity in crisis leadership. Wonder about leaders you admire and analyze how they navigate challenges. Find colleagues to discuss and study change and crisis leadership with. And, notice that the key to all of these stable time activities is your decision to proactively spark curiosity as a way of preparing for the inevitable shifts ahead.
2. Expand Your Decision-Making Approach: Crisis demands swift yet wise decisions. Strengthen your ability to think creatively by breaking binary choices. Instead of defaulting to either/or decisions, push yourself to generate four or five viable options. Collaborate with others to challenge assumptions and expand your perspective. Sharing your curiosity will enhance not only your leadership but also your team’s problem-solving abilities.
3. Develop the Habit of Reflective Thinking: Great leadership isn’t about making instant decisions for efficiency’s sake—it’s about making wise decisions. Cultivate the habit of self-reflection. Read case studies, journal your thoughts,, mind map ideas, and explore different scenarios. Crisis will suffocate imagination – unless of course you teach yourself to contours of creativity. This will enable adaptive and flexible leadership when you need it most.

Check out RiverWalk’s leadership fable, Life on the River: Leading Effectively When Everything’s Changing. Follow Lisa’s journey through crisis and transition, and engage built-in Inflection Points designed to challenge and expand your thinking.