Work Got You Stressed? Good.

How crises and demanding projects create opportunity

If you’ve ever been involved with a crisis or other high-stakes business project — something that requires grueling hours and an always-on, high-stakes mentality — then congratulations. You love what you do enough to help your colleagues accomplish something great, or persevere through something not so great. And loving what you do is one of the few things that can buy you both happiness and material success.

Working in corporate and financial communications, I make a good deal of my living working on these types of projects: crises, issues management M&A, etc. The more I do, the more I realize how valuable special projects are to developing and honing regular business skills — the same way running a marathon will make it easier to run a mile. More than anything, they teach you about the power of brevity, the importance of accountability and supremacy of ambition.

1. THE POWER OF BREVITY

The moment one of the these situations begins, something very interesting happens with email traffic, people’s messages start getting shorter, more direct, and to the point. As soon as the high-stakes dynamic is turned on, pleasantries, overly complex descriptions and flowery “up-fronts” disappear and are replaced with just the information needed to advance business objectives.

Dear _______ , per our conversation please find attached the competitive analysis you requested. If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Becomes: Comp. Analysis attached, forward to the PMO. This process, repeated hundreds or thousands of times, creates a massive amount of efficiency. It gives people more time to think and get things done than they would have spent reading and writing things that are not essential to work product.

Brevity filters its way into other things too. People become less concerned with process and more concerned with product. Less concerned with form and more with function. When the stakes are high, people don’t want tours of the sausage factory. They just want the sausage.

The communications skills required to work in a crisis can help teach people how to reach out to CEOs and other influential people. When trying to interact with someone more powerful than you, being concise is the key to engagement.

2. DON’T JUST BE PRESENT, BE ACCOUNTABLE

These situations always create two groups of people. Those who raise their hands to take on more responsibility, and those who don’t. This dichotomy is not created by laziness, or indifference, it’s created by those with a sense of ownership, purpose and accountability. The best colleagues are those with the confidence to take action. A major problem or challenge creates hundreds of little problems and challenges, each of which needs to be owned, managed and solved. The only way to do this is take complete ownership of your part of the project, both in success and in failure.

In consulting and professional services, this is especially true, and illustrates the biggest difference between the leaders and the rest of the pack. Good consultants help their clients solve problems. Great consultants take their clients problems, and make them their own.

3. IN BUSINESS, AMBITION REIGNS SUPREME

Special situations require long hours, tremendous responsibility, and come with inherent risks. To take them on, and take them on with gusto, you must be ambitious. You must be willing to exchange short-term pain for long-term gain. Leaders in their field got to where they are by taking on more than they can handle — by saying yes and stepping forward before they even really knew how they were going to get the job done.

Life affords you a certain number of opportunities, and they usually present themselves in the form of a challenge that appears to be insurmountable. The best way to make the most of these opportunities is to take them all head on, and use each one as a stepping stone to the next.

In a WSJ article about the recent surge in high-profile acquisitions, George Bason Jr., head of the M&A practice at David Polk sums it up nicely: “I want business that gives me a splitting headache to do, because I know that work is not going to be commoditized.”

It is from these splitting headaches that opportunity is often born.