Crisis Management for Busy Leaders in Fintech — Part 2

A NodeWomen post by Emma Channing, Melanie Girton, Aya Kantorovich and Shari Noonan

Introduction

As we explained in Part 1 of this series on crisis management, the origins of these posts flowed out of a need to hustle to get a panel together. What we put together was the culmination of a Summer of ruminating on how best to handle crisis management in 2020, particularly from the perspective of Fintech, which brings its own challenges. This is all through the lens that we are active members of a networking group for women in Fintech, digital assets and blockchain called NodeWomen, which Emma founded a couple of years ago, which has been highly active since April in facilitating these conversations. In Part 1 we pulled together an advice slam — a storehouse of thoughts and resources — in short format, that we turn to during the hardest times, including over the course of this year. In Part 2 we delve a little deeper into the whys and the wherefores, as well as the easy wins and the hard risks.

1. Traditional Crisis Management — Melanie’s perspective:

When we developed as leaders, we understood crisis as an event to manage within the confines of our business lives. It still holds true today that the stages of a typical crisis draw on different leadership abilities:

• Pre-crisis — preparation, vision
• Response/Reassurance — integrity, empathy, communication
• Recovery — resilience, creativity

Today’s Crisis Is Different

What happens if the crisis doesn’t go away?

Advice for the classic business crisis won’t meet today’s demands. It now exists layered on top of multiple, ongoing catastrophes. We differentiate these two types of crises with the terms interstitial and pervasive.

• An interstitial crisis is the classic limited-in-time one above, for which there is a distinct arc that follows a familiar pattern; it’s experienced by a limited affected group and as often as not, internally-generated (um, Gucci turtleneck, anyone?).
• A pervasive crisis is something universally-experienced, usually directly, for an extended period of time and is caused more often by external factors. It’s important, six months in, for our leaders to incorporate that our current pervasive crisis state is going to go on for a long time — and the complexity of what we’re facing is presenting deep challenges to teams and companies and their leaders.

Current pervasive crises impact us both in institutional and personal ways. They include the explosion in the number of natural disasters impacting the West and Southeast, the upheaval resulting from the tragedy of social inequality, the widespread illness and death from SARS-CoV-2 and the severe economic fallout from all of these. These crises are extended, so solutions must be focused on building the middle- and longer-term stamina necessary to operate under these circumstances.

Stamina is made even more important when you realize that new crises are quite likely to emerge on top of and extend existing problems. Just those we can predict today include the strong possibility of vaccine resistance and confusion, election difficulties, another pandemic and the longer-term consequences of these and current crises (like education gaps, mental health issues and housing shortages).

The response to all of these pervasive crises must be layered in with the response to the inevitable interstitial crisis that hits your business in the form of a regulatory shift, product failure, or employee action.

But Now You’re Messing With My Money: Crisis In the Fintech Sector

Leaders in Fintech have signed on to a business sector that demands high tolerance for ambiguity, complexity and high-stakes decision making. Leaders have to juggle fast-moving technology, market and clients and understand the nuances of overlapping, global, arcane regulatory regimes, all combined with the challenges and mercurial path for fundraising and exits. It makes for a witches’ brew of potential problems that can bring down the most promising ideas with solid execution behind them.

Because of these underlying factors, Fintech crises tend to endure for longer and are more complex than other industries. You won’t make them go away by tweeting an apology written by a crisis PR firm.

Trust and confidence are essential in finance, and any given crisis has the potential to destroy them, depending on how effectively it’s handled by an organization’s leaders. Management of these situations requires a deep understanding of not only effective crisis management, but also of the needs and sensitivities of various stakeholders and clear messaging of the current situation, steps taken to remediate, and an eye towards rebuilding trust over the longer term.

2. Other ways to keep a team motivated in today’s, perhaps this decade’s, remote work environment? Aya’s take: It. isn’t. Easy.

In addition to modeling boundaries and balance, remember to encourage and remind employees to make that same space available for themselves and take the time to clear their minds. As employees try to find ways to gauge what ‘work life balance’ entails while the office sits next door, you may find them trying to workout during the day, meditate, take long weekend trips, go on periodic walks, try to eat outside, you name it — encourage it.

Keep highlighting the goal, the values of the company, and the milestones. As it becomes more cumbersome to dress up for a day of work at the kitchen table, these little things at work will help not only engagement at work, but also overall company culture.

Ask questions, specifically: how are things going personally, how have you been feeling lately? Make sure to check in and create a culture where teammates support each other. This has long term implications for building a work space that fights burn.

Know your employee’s love language. This is gender neutral and adaptable to the cultural vernacular of the workplace. It is important to know which environment your employees thrive best in: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and In-Person Connection. If your teammate responds best to words of affirmation, be sure to compliment them on a work well done, provide feedback on ways to improve, and have a consistent line of communication available.

Manage employee burnout. It is human nature to want to feel valued, respected, and have a support system. While COVID creates a more difficult environment to engage employees, I have seen great talent leave because there wasn’t enough: support, guidance, direction, and consistent feedback. What causes burn? It is always through lack of asking the right questions.

Over Aya’s career as the founding member of a few different startups, a common mistake is when supervisors fail to engage their employees’ personal career goals with professional development. We underestimate how much a push in the right personal direction creates loyalty to a companies’ team and vision. Enduring crises make the stakes even higher. Ask:

• What are your personal goals while at X company over the next 3 / 6 / 9 months?
• How can I help you reach this goal?
• And with every weekly / monthly check-in, see what the progress has been to that goal.

One of the things Aya has found to be a challenge is for leadership to find the right balance between pushing for bottom up idea generation vs. top down decision making. Asking for help is empowering for employees, but knowing when to make a decision and move a company forward past doubt and unknown confusion is also critical.

3. Fintech is a risky business — Emma’s take as a leader is that your first responsibility is to not “feed the fire”

Deescalate the situation

Emma comes back to the idea that being a leader through crisis is ultimately rooted in being the person who, however provoked, calms rather than continues the escalation. Whether it’s a team member, or a business partner, client or investor — you have to not rise to the daily nastiness that people are slipping into. Every day brings most everyone frustration, exhaustion and grief — and that more often or not bubbles up into a sharp word or indeed whole paragraphs and unpleasant behaviors. People also lean towards following the rollercoaster of emotion that is 2020, and that’s not very productive, either. There are a bunch of ways to approach that, from just not responding — a bit passive aggressive but it works and is my often go to — to full on, take the time, deconstruct the issue. Above all offer yourself and others regular reminders that patience is required and will be required for some time to come. I know it sounds a lot of additional emotional work in a long and busy day — but it’s worth it even if your day becomes a string of counting to ten and writing emails that you’ll never send or halve in content — or occasionally a full on vent to someone you trust.

Find people to vent to

As a leader, those people are sometimes best found in a trusted resource outside your organization (and if you’re the CEO, those people are almost never inside your organization). So organizations like the one we connect through called NodeWomen have made an enormous difference for each of us. So wherever you find your own resource, the point is to be the person that provides support rather than feeds the fire — and ultimately you will be respected as that person who led well at an extraordinarily difficult time with a calm head — and you will be the person that people want to help and support and work with going forward.

A calm head is a rested one

One of the best things you can do at least within your team is ensure they rest, we can’t just run on cortisol for the next three months, never mind years, and as we’ve said before Cortisol is Not Your Friend. At Satis Group we have something called “Phones Down Friday” which basically means we don’t take calls as a general rule on Friday afternoons, and as soon as each person is done with what they have scheduled in the morning, they tidy up, make a list for the strategy next week (we are big planners and pivoters) and hopefully then get out of the house and definitely away from the keyboard. We do this in part, because although not deeply in crypto, ours is still a 24/7/365 business, and inevitably the weekend will probably involve some work; but even if it doesn’t, this means that everyone starts the weekend rested and in a frame of mind to relax and enjoy the time and is fresh and enthusiastic on Monday. A late Friday night at the end of a long work week will guarantee a cranky Monday morning.

Reputation is Everything

Finally, for Emma, it’s important to consider reputational risk to the success of the massive shift that Fintech is poised to bring — because there is a very real flip side to being seen to lead well. While there is a spotlight on everyone in a leadership position right now — in Fintech it’s blaring, bright white, with nowhere to hide — everyone from legacy financial institutions to Fortune 500 companies to large chunks of government are looking with an intense focus at Fintech and especially blockchain right now — and you would be a fool not to be conscious of that and we have a collective duty to one another to not mess up. This is our pivot point; this is what we worked for.

It’s a good time to recall the old saying that “the sage battles their own ego; and the fool battles everyone else’s”. If you are that person who loses their temper, says something irresponsible, rude or worse, especially in large chunks of text . . . well, that’s going to stick and people are going to remember this year in astonishing clarity. What’s more, if it becomes a repetitive behavior from you, then your team is likely to take your lead, and then your company will get known for it. So just don’t be that person — take care of yourself first and foremost, be in a healthy frame of mind, don’t allow yourself to be provoked, and push come to shove, step away from that keyboard and go for a walk. Whatever it is, it can wait, trust me, and your reputation is everything.

If you find you can’t step away, or you are going through a phase when everything flips your lid, then maybe it is time for either an enforced digital break, or for someone else to take on more of that frontline facing role.

4. A classic primer for crisis management in tech is “The Struggle” by Ben Horrowitz — this is Shari’s take:

For Shari, during a severe crisis, a few key tenets that have always worked well have been to act fast and over communicate with the team, clients and regulators. Of course, following that you need to prepare for the fallout. There will be employees who make the decision to leave, morale will suffer and it is critical at these times that you understand your team and have built trust before the crisis.

Don’t wait until the crisis for your team to find out your commitment to them or that you are trustworthy — it will make your job that much harder or impossible. However, coming out the other end, the team will be stronger because of the experience. It is the leader’s job to know your team, know your clients, and manage the fallout. It is also the leader’s job to make the hard decisions: sometimes they are painful.

Ben Horowitz wrote a brilliant piece in the voice of a woman founder eight years ago, and it couldn’t be more germane now. Titled “The Struggle,” it gives voice to the sense that you’re at the end of the road but have to keep going somehow, which is why the article is still so relevant.

From the article, I found the following pieces of advice to be helpful:

• Focus on the road, not the wall.
• Don’t put it all on your shoulders.
• Don’t take it personally.
• This is not checkers; this is m@&^%*ing chess. There’s always a move

We’ve gathered our wide-ranging conversation about our experiences, resources and thinking into these two pieces and we hope you find it useful. As we said at the end of Part 1, the upshot of all of this is to find what works for you, and don’t stop trying new strategies to increase your self-awareness and connection to your team. Leaders are forged during the most difficult of times, which means that there is enormous opportunity for personal growth. We’re facing this shared challenge daily. In the spirit of the NodeWomen group-sourcing strategy, we’d love to hear what works for you in the comments.