HOW A LEADER DEALs WITH MOMENTS OF EXISTENTIAL CRISIS
Jay
Myers didn't start his video conference technology company
Interactive Solutions, Inc. in 1996 thinking it would be easy. But he also
didn't imagine getting to the point a few years ago when he’d be reeling from
so many crises that he’d be scared to turn off the lights at night in his
bedroom.
A gloomy pattern had emerged for Myers. Hit the lights. Crawl under the sheets
for a few hours’ sleep. The shuteye meant it’s much closer to a new day, when
fresh chunks of sky would fall, and more bad news would land atop the pile he
thought had already stretched him to his limit.
All at once, a
handful of sales and customer service representatives at the Memphis-based
company he founded resigned, which simultaneously threatened to vaporize a big
piece of the company’s income if Myers didn't do something about it.
“You feel
almost traumatized,” Myers says. “I was feeling kind of lost at first and had
to gather myself. Thinking about this leadership-wise, though, the one thing we
didn't do is we didn't panic.”
Also around
that time, a technician at ISI went into the hospital for a liver
transplant--and never left. While changing shirts so he could attend the
funeral of a close friend, Myers got a call from one of his managers warning
him the technician had taken a turn for the worse. He’d soon be attending two
back-to-back funerals.
If that wasn't
enough, doctors diagnosed Myers’s wife Maureen with breast cancer around the
same time. In addition, the Great Recession was gearing up to tear a big hole
in the balance sheets of companies like his.
"When is all this bad stuff going to end?" Myers remembers thinking.
"How much can one person take?"
Uncertainty is
part of a start up founder or small-business owner's career path. That
uncertainty includes crises; everything from typical ups and downs to dangers
more existential. This is when one wrong move--such as a big customer
departure, or just a run of bad breaks like Myers experienced--can make it seem
like an untimely end is in sight.
Entrepreneurs say these experiences have taught them a variety of lessons about
leading in a crisis.
The departures
en masse at ISI left Myers stuck with many challenges to grapple with,
including how to replace several million dollars in annual sales revenue that
had basically walked out the door.
His immediate
battle plan:
·
Don’t
waste time
·
Reevaluate
business strategy
·
Figure
out what resources are on hand
·
Immediately
get to work squeezing the most out of them.
Myers recalls
ISI had hired some younger sales professionals, so the way forward partly
involved giving them “a good pep talk and intense training,” and bringing them
up to speed--fast.
“I grabbed some sales accounts, too,” he says. “I improvised. Engineers pitched
in to fill the gaps. People can look at a crisis, and panic and fall apart. We
said: ‘Let’s look at this as a clean slate.’”
