Recent Research Reveals the Most Important Elements of Crisis Leadership
By: George S. Everly, Jr., PhD, MA, ABPP, FACLP
Other than religion, leadership is the most studied and written about topic in human history. But why? Effective leadership is the glue that creates a community from a crowd. It is the force that harnesses social energy into a social force. It creates an organization from a group of workers. Leadership in times of crisis can foster resilience and even growth, or can spell defeat and disaster fostering chaos and even anarchy. But perhaps most importantly, the decisions leaders make, or fail to make, in times of crisis are those most likely to have the greatest lasting impact on the overall and enduring health of the organization or community. Currents events point this out poignantly so. The greatest failure a leader can make is the failure to lead. Let’s take a closer look at leadership in crisis.
The Impact of Leadership
On a personal level, effective leadership (guidance or mentorship) can be the catalyst that turns dreams into the realities we could not otherwise achieve on our own, as the research of E. E. Werner has shown. Poor leadership, on the other hand, has been demonstrated to be a toxic predictor of poor performance, low job satisfaction, intentions to quit the job, burnout, stress, and ruminative concern amongst individual employees.
At the organizational level, poor leadership stifles organizational productivity. Careerism and clueless incompetence can be devastating. Careerism is where the leader is devoted primarily to personal career advancement. They pursue this tact by emphasizing “safe leadership” wherein they lack decisiveness, are loathe to make high risk decisions, or delay decision-making to the point of lost opportunities and otherwise frustrating subordinates. On the other hand, careerism can also manifest as an aggressive, unethical and toxic self-serving leadership style wherein the leader’s sole focus is personal advancement while doing anything necessary to achieve that end. Clueless incompetence is a troubling and increasingly prevalent phenomenon in leadership. It may be thought of as a constellation of influentialness, incompetence, and cluelessness—a combination that represents an insidious plague in leadership and beyond. Clueless incompetence isn’t just about lacking skill—it’s about being unaware of that lack while still exerting influence. The danger lies not just in being incompetent, but in being unaware and influential—a combination that can cause significant harm in decision-making, team dynamics, and organizational resilience. At the community level, it’s adverse impact can be transgenerational. The crippling effects of careerism and clueless incompetence are increased exponentially in times of crisis.
Resilience and Growth-focused Crisis Leadership
So where do we go to seek guidance on effective leadership, especially crisis leadership that fosters resilience and even growth, not in spite of adversity, but because of adversity? The first prescriptive Western treatise on crisis leadership was written around 700BC by Homer. It described the successes that can follow effective leadership, while detailing the disasters that follow in the wake of poor leadership. The earliest prescriptive leadership treatise to arise from Asia was written by Sun Tzu around 500BC. There was surprising concordance in the recommendations made by Homer and Sun Tzu.
The golden age of modern leadership literature was likely the 1960s and 1970s. Writers from that era such as Maslow, MacGregor, Bennett, Fiedler, Burns, and Bass shaped the leadership practices largely used today. Little has been written since that time which would be considered fundamentally new and based upon the conduct of controlled empirical inquiry until recently.
Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is a powerful statistical technique used to analyze complex relationships among variables, especially when those relationships involve latent constructs (unobserved variables inferred from observed data). When strong theoretical foundations support a specific causal model, SEM can provide estimates of the magnitude and direction of hypothesized causal effects. Smith and colleagues at Salisbury University have conducted SEM research on the effects of stress and organizational behavior for over 30 years. Their research has shown the adverse effects of poor leadership on organizational satisfaction and performance. In addition, they have generated results suggesting the importance of promoting organizational resilience in preventing or attenuating the adverse effects of stress.
It has been said the most challenging leadership role in the world in that of President of the United States. As such, it has been studied and held out as a proxy for what constitutes effective and ineffective leadership in any setting. C-SPAN, a public affairs television network, has analyzed presidential leadership over the span of 2000 to 2021, The survey process aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of presidential leadership by gathering insights from experts in the field analyzing each president’s performance based on ten key leadership qualities.
Meta-analytic research of the C-SPAN survey data has shown that crisis leadership is a strong predictor, perhaps the single strongest, of overall leadership effectiveness. Analysis identified five key traits that best predict effective crisis leadership:
- Decisiveness: The courage to act swiftly and persistently, especially under pressure.
- Ethics / Integrity: Leading with honesty and moral clarity, which builds trust.
- Communication: Transparent, timely, and truthful messaging during uncertainty (sometimes referred to as the 3 Ts of crisis communications).
- Building Supportive Relationships: Fostering collaboration, empathy, and mutual support.
- Positive Vision: Offering a hopeful, future-oriented perspective that transcends the crisis.
These traits were first postulated by Everly, Strouse, and Everly in their text Resilient Leadership. Later, Everly & Athey expanded the analysis in their book Leading Beyond Crisis which consisted of analyses of presidential performance during adversity using C-SPAN’s leadership surveys as a proxy for broader leadership dynamics while analyzing the amazingly few prime exemplars of effective leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. Leaders who excelled in crisis tended to:
- Inspire confidence and order amid chaos.
- Mobilize communities and organizations toward recovery and growth.
- Enjoy greater growth and prosperity in the wake of adversity.
- Leave lasting legacies of resilience and transformation.
The most important decisions that will ever be made whether personally, organizationally, or societally will likely be made in times of crisis. While there exist hundreds of classes on traditional leadership, there exist but a handful on resilience-focused crisis leadership. Until this trend changes, we are likely to experience a Groundhog Day-like future. Indeed, if we do not study the past to inform how we will actively shape our future, we will be relegated to simply enduring a future dictated by the crisis Du Jour.
