Webinar: SAS Guide To Leading In A Crisis

Ex-SAS soldier turned author, turned corporate leadership coach, Martin Murphy, joined Hiring Hub to take us through: how to lead a team in a crisis, in episode three of Hiring Hub’s live-in-lockdown, interactive webinar series.

An expert on leading teams in volatile environments, Martin focused on what good (and bad) leadership looks like in a crisis, and the session was packed full of advice and practical tips to help managers and business leaders adapt through the Covid-19 pandemic, including:

• How people react to shock; how it affects their ability to make decisions
• How you can stay calm and make good decisions when others panic
• How to adapt, evolve, and take advantage of a crisis

The interactive session also gave the audience a unique opportunity to ask Murphy questions on leading their own teams during this pandemic. Murphy also kindly shared a Leading your team in a crisis PDF guide, which you can download here. Our main takeaways from the 45-min talk were:

1. Good leaders look after their people first
2. Don’t stare at the fire, look for opportunities
3. Top behaviours of effective leaders: emotional intelligence, learning agility, humility, courage
4. Good leaders in a crisis: engage with their teams; align them around common objectives and goals; evolve if things change; practice radically open communication
5. Leaders often cannot escape the storm, so they must be able to create peace and tranquillity within the storm to allow them to think clearly and make great decisions. The SOAR model is a way to slow down the reactive thinking process and induce a creative interlude in which higher-order thinking is possible:
   
   
   • Suspend snap decision making
   • Observe the problem
   • Allow wisdom to percolate up
   • then Respond decisively
6. Your mood is contagious, so promote positive behaviours within your team by adopting a HERO mindset. Try to be: Helpful, Effective, Resilient, and Optimistic.

If you have a question for Martin that we didn’t get a chance to cover in our webinar, you can find him on LinkedIn.