Every two years, end-of-session and election demands conspire to create a workload crunch at the end of the year. You'll encounter a troubling set of threats and challenges to your office and your Member. Unfortunately, many managers respond to this "planned crisis" by just asking more of employees. But there are steps you can take to get ready.
- 6 Most Common Mistakes in Managing Crises
- Crisis Management Model
- Managing the Labor Day to Election Day Crisis: The 8-Step Process
6 Most Common Mistakes Organizations Make in Managing Crises
- Management and staff spend too much time attacking the problems and too little time understanding the problem and developing a plan for solving it.
- Because of a lack of focus and an abundance of anxiety, organizations tend to try to do too much, spread their resources too thin, and pay the price of accomplishing too little and making avoidable but costly mistakes.
- Organizations facing a crisis – expected or unexpected – assume that they can deal with the additional work and problems through their normal organizational structure. Unfortunately, this structure was not designed to handle the greater work demands and the shorter timeframes. Consequently, the added burdens and pressure tend to overwhelm the present structures and further escalate the problem.
- Managers frequently allow themselves to get pulled into doing line work during crisis period and neglect their management duties which creates other unanticipated but avoidable problems.
- Decision-making processes, which is so critical during intense work periods or crises, all too often fail when greatly overloaded. In an effort to avoid critical mistakes, top managers tend to centralize decision-making which frequently leads to organizational gridlock. In addition, decision-making authority is not clearly delegated leading to confusion, frustration, in-fighting and costly delays.
- Organizations fail to train individual staff on how to handle their new duties or train newly formed teams on how to operate effectively as a team. Consequently, staff work hard but don’t perform particularly well during the crisis.
Crisis Management Model
(Note: This model applies to the management of known, anticipated, and unanticipated crisis.)
Step 1: Analyze the Problem
- Determine what specific issues will emerge or events will occur – externally or internally to the office – over the next five months that will have an impact on the Member or your office.
- Determine which of these events or issues represent problems (threats or vulnerabilities) to your office and its effectiveness.
- Determine which threats are the most dangerous and deserve priority attention.
Step 2: Develop Mitigation Options
- Determine what resources are available to offices to address these problems (e.g., permanent staff, temporary staff, interns, money, time, equipment, contacts, experts).
- Develop possible preventative or damage control tactics for addressing the most dangerous threats/vulnerabilities identified in the previous step.
- Develop possible preventative or damage control actions that can be taken to address the less serious threats/vulnerabilities identified but that merit attention.
- Decide which of these mitigation options are the most promising and should be implemented.
Step 3: Plan the Solution
- Clarify office priorities for this critical time frame. What is most important for your office to accomplish over this critical and stressful period?
- Develop a plan or written strategy for responding to this critical Labor Day to Election Day crisis.
Step 4: Office Preparedness: Pre-Crisis Preparation
- Redefine staff and Member roles and responsibilities for the "crunch period" as far ahead of time as possible to reflect staff changes created by the campaign and the burgeoning workload.
- Clarify the management structure and decision-making process for the office.
- Address the internal systems and operations identified as vulnerable to the stress created by the end of the session and increase in campaign activity.
- Communicate expectations clearly to the entire staff concerning expectations (e.g,. hours, vacation, performance) and planned changes (e.g., staffing, structure).
- Develop a system for ensuring effective two-way communications between the personal office and the campaign.
- Train staff on how to handle new responsibilities.
- Develop a rapid response team or clear procedures for dealing with unanticipated problems and determine how the team will operate.
Step 5: Respond to Crisis: Implementing Your Plan
- Carefully monitor and manage the implementation process.
- Don't hoard information and don't conceal decisions. Fight the political instinct of compartmentalizing information or holding information very tight; it runs contrary to good management practices and the building of a loyal, informed, and empowered staff.
- Solicit and encourage feedback and comments on how things are going, what is working and what is faltering.
- Find ways to promote team play and a feeling of shared responsibility for the work of the office.
- In times of stress and anxiety where everyone is expected to make added sacrifices, it is critical that management increases positive feedback to staff.
- Develop some ongoing "stress management" activities that can be employed in your office to keep the stress at a manageable level and to reduce the likelihood that staff productivity is affected by the workload pressures.
- Regularly modify plans based on assessment of progress.
Step 6: Recover from Crisis
- Convert your office organization and operations back to a non-crisis state.
- Show appreciation to the staff for the hard work and sacrifices they made.
- Evaluate the overall performance of the office during the crisis and determine what improvements the office should make when confronting the next crisis.
- Determine how, if at all, you want to modify your normal operations based on the lesson learned from the crisis.
Managing the Labor Day to Election Day Crisis: The 8-Step Process
Use the information on this page to identify a series of questions you want your staff to discuss and resolve.
- Determine who you should include in the session but, if possible, try to include everyone. Also, have the district office engage in a similar planning process.
- Schedule 2 – 4 hours to address selected questions from the first four steps in the process.
- Assign one or two staff to write up the general plan that was developed in both the district/state and DC office planning sessions.
- Integrate the two plans. (May need a separate meeting of top management staff to complete this task.)
- Present and talk through the plan with the Member (… or not) and staff.
- Implement your plan and be sure to create a regular mechanism for monitoring the implementation process and taking corrective actions where necessary.
- Recover from the crisis … a couple of weeks after Nov. 5th and conduct an After Action Review to assess what you learned.
For more information on any of this information, please contact us.
