How to Build Teams, Solve Problems, and Get Results During a Crisis
The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative is collaborating with Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Coronavirus Local Response Initiative to support mayors as they manage COVID-19. This article covers key points from session five of the Coronavirus Local Response Initiative, drawing on the work of Howard Koh and Jorrit de Jong.
The basics of cross-boundary leadership are straightforward: your task is to build teams, solve problems, and get results.
We can break those tasks down a bit more.
Building Teams
Work to develop trust among team members. Ideally, you can model trustworthy behavior to set the tone from the beginning. Ask yourself:
- How can I encourage empathy in this crisis?
- Am I listening to other perspectives?
To align motivations and values, focus on the outcomes you are pursuing and who has the capacity and motivation to help you achieve them. Ask yourself:
- How do I identify and work with new, unexpected allies?
- How can I leverage different stakeholders’ motivations/values/ resources to create value?
Be proactive in your efforts to manage power dynamics and conflict. Jim Collins warns against raising the importance of the task over the importance of “getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” Ask yourself:
- Who needs to be on the bus? In which seats?
- Who isn’t being heard?
Everyone on your team is an individual with a unique set of strengths and weaknesses — including you. Capitalize on that uniqueness. Building trust means making the team a safe place to take risks and make mistakes. You can set the tone by modeling vulnerability, setting norms that ensure everyone talks and is heard, giving credit to the team when results are favorable, and heading off attempts to lay blame when they are not.
Solving Problems
Take a systems approach to understand the problem through a wide lens. Ask yourself:
- How do I encourage each stakeholder to view the whole system?
You are coming together to work on a problem collaboratively because the usual ways of working could not fix it. But that is just the beginning of innovation. Foster innovation at every step along the way. Ask yourself:
- How am I actively encouraging new ideas and solutions?
- How are we continuously improving (learning from failure)?
Finally, you cannot manage the problem-solving process if you don’t know what success looks like or whether you’re making progress. If you are going to get anywhere, you have to define success and use data. Ask yourself:
- What does success look like at the system level?
- What data would tell us we are making progress?
Wayne Gretzky famously advised hockey players to “skate to where the puck is going, not to where it has been.” Parts of the problem you are trying to solve with your collaborative team will be familiar to some or all of you, but other parts are new and evolving, and a flexible team itself represents an innovation in governance around the problem.
To collaborate effectively, acknowledge that many or all of you are finding yourselves in unfamiliar roles, taking on new responsibilities, integrating new values into your understanding of the problem, and adjusting to new ways of working. Actively seek out opinions that are different from yours; challenge your assumptions. A good team practice for keeping your eye on where the puck is heading rather than where it’s been is to establish a weekly “proactive hour” for brainstorming.
Achieving Impact
One of the biggest (and most common) mistakes in efforts to tackle complex problems is a failure to engage people directly affected by the problem. Ask yourself:
- How are we engaging those most directly impacted in problem solving?
- Do we understand what success looks like for those suffering the most?
Understand where your team has leverage and use leverage points effectively. Ask yourself:
- Which levers have biggest impact in the short term?
- Which levers have the greatest potential for improving the problem over the long term?
Finally, you will learn hard lessons and claim hard-won victories along the way. Don’t let the lessons learned wither on the vine; share your learning. Ask yourself:
- How am I communicating the story, and to whom?
- How do we acknowledge and celebrate progress and “quick wins”?
To maximize your impact, have everyone on your team working to identify resources — human or otherwise — that are underutilized. Be honest and transparent with the data and what it means, but don’t let disappointing or incomplete data tell the story alone. Share human stories to connect emotionally and demonstrate to the public that there is a system in place, working hard to protect people.
About the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative
The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative is a collaboration among Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Business School, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Its mission is to inspire and strengthen city leaders, as well as equip them with the tools to lead high-performing, innovative cities. Learn more on the Initiative’s website.
