Overview:

This course focuses on crisis leadership and how leaders, their teams, and organizations rise to the challenges of unexpected, high-stakes situations. More specifically, it examines how the exigencies of intense turbulence act as crucibles in which ordinary people (and their teams) make themselves capable of doing extraordinary things—first, internally, and then, in terms of what they achieve as they pursue larger, external objectives.

The class concentrates on different leaders and situations. Some of these people and contexts are from the past; others are much more recent. In each instance, the relevant people are enveloped by a profound crisis that they did not see coming and which was not of their making. But once each of these actors was in the middle of calamity, he or she recognized they could not falter and then fail to recover; they couldn’t give up (although each came close.) Instead, these men and women resolutely navigated through the storm and were transformed. Each became more resilient, stronger, braver, and more self-assured in the high waves and strong winds they confronted.

Understanding precisely how these people did this is the overarching objective of the course. We will pay particular attention to the larger “rules of the road” of crisis management and leadership. We will also concentrate on the more specific insights, tools, and behaviors that these leaders developed—often, on the fly—and then used to steer through the crisis and to accomplish their ambitious goals. In each instance, we will assess which of these resources are useful to leaders in today’s world of non-stop crises.

By the last session, each of us will have assembled a toolbox of concrete insights, actions, and personal behaviors to help us be consistently more focused, resilient, confident, and courageous in our anxious, uncertain time.

3 Traits of Effective Leadership

Why I Wrote Forged in Crisis

3 Times it is Best to do Nothing

Career Focus:

The course will be of particular interest to those who aspire to lead others toward a worthy, significant mission—either in an established organization or in an entrepreneurial endeavor. It is particularly well-suited to those interested in the non-stop crises of the present moment and what this broader context means for leading courageously.

Educational Objectives:

This course has three principal educational objectives.

First, to understand the principles of crisis leadership. We will concentrate on the general components of steering an organization through unexpected disaster, paying close attention to how these aspects of leadership differ from those relied on in more stable environments. We will examine the “rules of the road” or “dashboard” of crisis leadership with reference to several widespread emergencies, including the Covid pandemic, evaluating the successes and failures of different teams as they tried to navigate the large storms they faced.

The second objective is to understand how crises always contain the possibility of substantial innovation. Some of this innovation occurs at an organizational level as the time pressures and high-stakes nature of crisis situations (literally) force creativity in staffing, problem-solving, teamwork, collective purpose, and other features of performance. Some of the innovation unfolds at a deeper level as individuals realize—internally—they must raise the level of their respective games and begin leading themselves with new resilience, commitment, humanity, clarity, and courage. We will examine this process and its results in several leaders, distilling the relevant lessons for our respective paths forward.

Third, to analyze the insights, tools, and behaviors that the men and women we are studying developed in crisis situations. Many of these resources were created “on the fly,” in the crucible of a crisis, but most of these tools transcended the disaster in which they originated and became key elements of these individuals’ leadership playbooks. What were these tools and what function did they serve that proved so longstanding and significant? As we shall see, these resources were forged from the “inside out” in each of these people; consequently, they played important roles in fortifying each leader’s self-belief, wiping away anxiety, clarifying purpose, and stoking their bravery. We will pay focused attention to which of these insights, tools, and behaviors are useful to our leadership going forward.

Grading / Course Administration:

Grading is based on class participation (50%) and the final paper (50%).