Matthew Brackett of Brackett Alliance: Five HR Strategies On How Companies Can Turn A Crisis Into An Opportunity or Advantage

An Interview With Rachel Kline

Offer decision-making, ethical leadership and crisis management education and training to all levels of leadership on a regular basis in a workshop format with case studies and exercises. This strengthens the awareness and the necessary muscles. Let’s go back to a military example of how they train, they train and they train so as to be mission ready, even if the mission never knocks. Let’s be crisis ready, crisis fit, in as much as humanly possible.

As any HR leader can tell you, crises are an inevitable part of the job. Tough situations pop up, often at the least convenient times, and these situations need to be handled efficiently yet delicately. Whether it’s dealing with a new employee, wages, or internal conflict, there are ways to come out on top. How can companies learn to take a crisis and turn it into an advantage? In this interview series, we are talking to HR leaders who share their strategies about “How Companies Can Turn A Crisis Into An Opportunity or Advantage.” As part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Matthew Brackett.

Matthew Brackett, a Senior Leadership Coach, Educator, Mentor and Founder of Brackett Alliance, has 30 years of experience in the field of education and development of individuals in successful personal and professional leadership. Trilingual, he has enjoyed broad international and intercultural experience in leadership, educational and consulting roles in Italy, Ireland, England, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico as well as being a special Staff Officer in the United States Navy serving both with Sailors and Marines. He helps build resilient leaders, cultures and couples by working with leaders who want to positively influence their inner circles, leading better, loving better and living better.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this specific career path?

Everyone is unique, however my background usually turns heads as I was in the field of formal religious ministry for 30 years holding leadership, mentorship and educational roles in a variety of countries, cultures and languages, including time in the Navy as a Chaplain. People often don’t realize that religious organizations are similar to any other organization or company. In my case, I held leadership roles in the longest standing, and largest global organization in history. I have decades of experience in the management of people, the complex dynamics of organizational culture, mentality and hierarchy, and in the care of people. When I stepped away from ministry and into coaching, advisement and education, the goal continues to be the same: serve and support individuals and organizations so that they can lead better, love better and live better.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I am launching my coaching and education practice which is exciting. These services will include individual coaching, education and mentorship for senior leaders in any sector, along with conferences and workshops that touch on healthy personal leadership, functional leadership of teams and organizations. Add DE&I training for teams and organizations into the mix given the importance this plays in organizational culture, growth, innovation and effectiveness. All of this, building on my knowledge and experience, is my way to continue to support and enrich the human element, and essentially improve leadership. Leadership, when exercised in a healthy and wholesome manner, is life giving and empowering. When leadership is unhealthy, dysfunctional and toxic, it is deeply damaging.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

There are so many people that have been there for me along the way, and many have been there in an unconditional manner, boosting me up, offering strength, mentorship and counsel. We lean on others to get to where we want to go. During a time of deep confusion and crisis in my personal life, I was living and working in Rome, Italy, and a good friend of mine from Chile, who I had not seen in perhaps 4–5 years was visiting London. He grabbed a flight to visit me for a day in Rome, and I recall that he had some problems with the flights, cancellations and delays, and ended up spending maybe a full day in the airport getting rerouted or whatever the situation was. He arrived, we spent the day together and then off he went back to London and then back to Chile, which as you are well aware, is very far from anything that isn’t South America. That gesture was meaningful, unconditional, impactful.

Fantastic. Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview about HR strategies for turning a crisis into an opportunity. Can you share your story of when an organization you’ve worked at entered into a crisis? What happened? What did you do?

I will preface this with clarifying that I am not in HR and that turning organizational crisis into an opportunity requires a team effort which includes quality HR directors and others, depending on the nature of the crisis. I have experienced personal crisis and organizational crisis, and I firmly believe in the transformative nature of a well managed crisis. An organization that I was part of for 30 years had a number of unhealthy practices and policies and I envisioned that something had to give. However the legs were knocked out from under it by unexpected revelations regarding the longstanding founder and CEO. The quake shook deep and wide. Being an organization of faith, the tremors and damage touch very deep fibers of the people involved. In my national leadership role, I ensured clarity of communication with the information I had available to me, encouraged the understanding of this tragedy in the bigger picture while not making excuses, and dedicated most energy caring for and supporting my people. Corporate was very poor in the management of this crisis. They saw the tsunami coming and preferred to continue to smile, downplay it and hope for the best. Leadership is often not prepared to manage a crisis. It is a crisis, precisely because it hits hard, deep and unannounced. Crisis shifts our mind and brain to protection and survival mode. Our options and viewpoints are drastically narrowed. What is called for in these circumstances, is naturally a broader vision of the bigger picture and of more options. Leadership can get stuck in the pickle of safety and impulsive decisions to ease the pain, or on the contrary take a breath, lift up their eyes, bring more wise counsel and vision into the picture and then execute a plan while exercising flexibility along the way.

Hence, why a team approach is so important and bringing outside resources into the management of a crisis to enable a better vision and clear steps to manage it the best way possible and grow through it! Often times a person or organization is about protecting the corporate ego and image, which leaves many casualties in its wake and in the end, one of the casualties is organizational credibility and trust.

What was your mindset during such a challenging time? Where did you get the drive to keep going when things were so hard?

I think I do well in storms and crisis, although they take a toll, especially if prolonged. My mindset was always to hold the big picture in front and center, not to mince words, avoid extremes as well as impulsive decisions. Brave the storm, pay attention, gather valuable information and lessons, keep the end goal in mind and continue to right the ship. A lot of my attention was given to serving and supporting others. As a Navy Chaplain I dealt with crisis on almost a daily basis, whether personal or organizational, and all the lessons learned prior served me greatly to bring calm, assertiveness, support and confidence to the often time unclear circumstances and troubled waters. Caring for people, mission and vision keeps me going. I remember even when going through personal crisis that keeping the bigger vision and goal in mind helped me to keep walking and making appropriate decisions. Admittedly, I also made some poor and stupid ones along the way as well.

Can you please tell us how you were able to overcome such adversity and how the company ultimately turned the crisis into an opportunity or advantage? What did the next chapter look like?

In this particular case, I cannot say the organization capitalized on the opportunity that the crisis gifted them with. It was not managed well. Personally, it led to a lot of soul searching, honesty, vulnerability and vision in order to step into what was the answer for me. Awareness, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, the components of a resilient spirit are key elements for proper response to crisis. These can be lacking in organizations, in the corporate world, and in leadership, and when leadership lacks all of this, they are definitely ill-prepared for healthy functional leadership and definitely ill-prepared for crisis.

Here is the main question of our interview: Based on your experience, can you share five actionable pieces of advice for HR leaders about How Companies Can Turn A Crisis Into An Opportunity or Advantage? (Please share a story or example for each.)

There are a few ways I can go with this question. Let’s go in two directions, first talking about healthy practices that can help us be ready for a crisis, and secondly, how to turn on into an opportunity.

1. The studies on resilience show that resilient people and organizations confidently know that challenges and crisis will come their way, therefore, they have the mentality, training, plans and policies in place to be ready. Military missions are meticulously planned with the best scenarios and mission completion, along with as many bad possibilities and scenarios along the way. Plan for the best, prepare for the worst. As an organization, just as you do fire drills, it is important that the HR teams, communication teams, leadership teams, IT and any other departments are prepared for crisis to knock at the door of their department. Are you prepared for a the least expected thing to go wrong, or for something or someone to sabotage your progress?
2. Offer decision-making, ethical leadership and crisis management education and training to all levels of leadership on a regular basis in a workshop format with case studies and exercises. This strengthens the awareness and the necessary muscles. Let’s go back to a military example of how they train, they train and they train so as to be mission ready, even if the mission never knocks. Let’s be crisis ready, crisis fit, in as much as humanly possible.
3. Thorough resiliency training is another element to help individuals and organizations exercise the necessary muscles to be better at managing challenges and crisis. This is an excellent topic for off-site training, a retreat, etc.
4. Often times, fewer people are involved in a crisis, there is a lot of pressure, hurried decisions can be made and often focused on safety and protection of some sort. When a crisis hits, involve a larger rather than smaller team of diverse areas of expertise into the conversation and planning for how to best address, make decisions and collect valuable data. This will enhance the process and the collection of valuable information that otherwise would never have been gathered.
5. Keep the principal goals and values front and center. This means our goals and vision as an organization or as an idividual. This also means our guiding values. This will help improve decision making and crisis management. Along with this, I suggest a helpful envisioning exercise: we are a year from now, five or ten years from now, looking back on this moment. How would we like to see ourselves facing this and coming through on the other side? When we are looking back at this event or moment, what would we like to see we got out of it? Achieved? Learned? As we look back, what potential ways of managing this and outcomes do we want to avoid?

What are a few of the most common mistakes you see leaders make when their company hits a crisis? What should be done to avoid them?

This is difficult to answer as there are so many variables. We have already discussed a few of the mistakes and tendencies and how to prevent them. A common tendency is to protect the organization, save face and save the brand. While this is important, when this becomes the goal, leaders are missing the point of the crisis, missing important messages, and may even lose face, damage the brand by focusing on saving face and the brand.

What advice would you give to HR leaders and organizations who have yet to hit their first real crisis?

My two pieces of advice would be to befriend crisis and secondly, to read or listen to everything we have already spoken about.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

A big question that looks for big answers. A few come to mind. I believe the nuclear family and the home are the foundation of society and that being in a committed relationship and being a parent are two of the most important things that the majority of humans will ever do. Therefore, having a movement that creates sensitivity, education and possibilities for committed couples to be better at their relationships and parents to be better parents. Secondly, a movement for the training and education of true public servants in the federal and public sectors of local, state and national government. Leadership in government and the public sector in all countries is a source of great goodness or a source of deep damage.

I believe that, across the globe, these two action points would make so many things better.

How can our readers continue to follow your work online?

They can follow my social media accounts or invite me to meet and/or speak to your people.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.