Leadership during a crisis

IN TIMES of crisis, people want calm and confident leadership, and as one would expect from an ex-Commandant of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Major General Patrick Marriott exudes these qualities.

Commissioned as a regular officer in 1977, his lengthy military CV is hugely impressive, and he says he’s learnt crisis management skills from the army that are easily transferable to the business world.

‘You don’t want to be planning on the move if you can possibly avoid it,’ he says.

‘I’m quite sure a lot of the current planning [regarding coronavirus] will have been done in advance.

‘It’s what the army would call ‘‘war games’’ – they [the government] will have worked out what might happen given the various options and they’ll have contingency plans in different areas.

‘Planning on the hoof is always difficult, and of course we don’t quite know how coronavirus is going to evolve.

‘But from what one sees and hears through the media, a lot of that planning has happened, and very cleverly, too.

‘There is a strategy of four or five levels, and we’re going to go through each of those levels. It creates order out of chaos – the public can understand that we’re in this phase or that phase, but at least we’re not going into chaos. We’re going into another phase.

‘It’s very clever planning and I’m actually very confident. It’s obviously going to be very difficult, but I do think we’ve got the best people at the helm.

‘I’ve listened to the various chief medial officers of the three countries of the United Kingdom and they’re really quite joined up. We should be reassured.’

Planning

Planning is key. Larger organisations tend to have the infrastructure to plan their crisis management strategies.

But what about the one-man bands, the smaller family businesses, whose day-to-day activity may often be spent fire-fighting and reacting to events – such as an employee being off work sick – rather than being proactive?

‘Let’s look at a battalion of say, 1,000 people, run by the Lieutenant Colonel who has a small staff of say five or six junior officers. He can delegate things to those officers.

‘If, on the other hand, you have got just a couple of people running a company, then they’re going to have to do a task that’s extremely difficult, which is to both plan and execute almost simultaneously.

‘What I suggest they do is divide their work so you’ve got plans and current operations.

‘You always need to allocate time for plans, because if not, it will be subsumed in the day to day business of what they’re trying to do.

‘It takes courage and confidence to say: ‘‘right, I’m afraid Thursday is for planning’’. It doesn’t matter what else is going on, an individual needs to sit down and plan. It’s as simple as that.’

Integrity, courage and trust

Likening leadership to a fictitious castle with foundations, a moat, towers, walls, a gate, stairs, steps and a keep, he refers to each as a separate element of leadership.

‘The three most important are integrity, courage, and trust,’ he says.

‘Integrity is the foundations of the castle.

‘It’s playing it straight; it’s the moral element where the compass must be absolutely perfect.

‘If a leader does not have that bit set correctly, all else will fail.

‘The second one is courage. Courage is an inestimable quality, without which you can’t do all the other ones.

‘Courage has both a moral and a physical clarity.

‘The final one is the glue that holds it altogether, which is trust. Without trust, things go toxic quite quickly.

‘It’s the vital element of leadership which goes in all directions. If an organisation has trust, it’s like a good marriage.

‘There’ll be arguments but ultimately there’s trust.

‘And a leader needs to be able to generate trust.

‘Run your command with as loose a rein as you dare.

‘Control less, lead more – and that means lots of trust. You can always constrain later.

‘All of this is, of course, is at the heart of mission command. In peacetime the army can tend, very sadly, to spawn process-minded controlling leaders; in war we sack the lot.

‘It would be much better if we bred them out before the bullets start to fly.

‘So, trust, delegate – and thus lead properly. Do not become a control freak.’

In these difficult and challenging times, when the battleground is changing hourly, we could all heed Patrick’s words.