CRISIS AND LEADERSHIP

• While Crisis makes managers bitter, it makes leaders better. Crisis distinguish between managers and leaders.

• Leadership is not all about how you hold on without adversity, any manager can do that. Instead, it is all about how you turn up and respond amidst  Crisis and adversities.

One of the things  we have  to know about crisis situations is that they are not peculiar to anybody. As a matter of fact, from the moment any individual is born the person starts getting exposed to various degrees of crisis and adversities. What we turn out to be, after a certain period of time, is determined by how we handle all the crisis and difficulties and challenges and adversities and ups and downs that we have been facing from childhood and through our developmental processes.

Crisis does the following to us:

1. It brings to the fore the hidden characters and unspoken attitudes: There are always some hidden characters, attitudes and capabilities individuals that have been "developing well" have within them. Many of these are not readily apparent until they're exposed and brought to the fore by crisis situations. At times, the individuals are compelled by situations to call them up. And when they're not there, adversities reveal their absence as well.
2. It reveals our levels of preparedness for unforeseen circumstances and life. And this does not always mean that the leader particularly anticipates those particular crisis situations and so got prepared for them. Rather, there's a hidden attitude of preparedness in the leader that gets his mind continually ready to brace up to any adversity and crisis that might surface at any time.
3. It reveals the adaptability of our minds: God actually created us to be adaptable, and not to be comformable. He wants us to change and adapt as necessary, and not to be swallowed up and overwhelmed by situations and circumstances.
4. It reveals our resilience. An ability to bounce back, and stronger: There's a general inertia in every individual. They would rather stay the way they are than change. Some people are more resilient than others. Crisis and adversities reveal how resilient a leader's mind is.
5. Crisis reveals our choices. Actually the tenets for making of choices in life are already there within us even before we make them. What crisis do is that it reveals what we have within us whether we have the capability to make good choices or not. We can pretend when there is no crisis but once crisis hits, there will be no more hiding place for us.
6. Crisis also reveals the leaders willingness to learn: This means that it shows his depth of understanding of situations and his mental capabilities to absorb new knowledge and embrace new and better ways of doing things.

These all show that crisis distinguishes between a leader and a manager. This shows that leadership is not for the rigid, is not for the lazy, is not for the unadaptable, is not for the week, is not for those who are emotionally and mentally immature and unstable.

• Crisis makes the leader to start asking the necessary questions to review his stance and to concentrate his energy and resources on what is really important and not on frivolities. 

• He eliminates some bottlenecks, which a manager would rather hold on tenaciously to, in order to effect the needed change in his organisation. 

While the manager comes out of crisis battered and wounded and impoverished the leader comes comes through crisis better and enriched and wiser and more sophisticated.

In conclusion it is up to you as an individual to decide what you would rather develop: the manager in you or the leader in you. If you want to be a great manager, you can; it does not involve much risk to be one. It only demands your ability to conform to the status quo to be a great manager. 

However if you want to be a great leader, you can as well decide; only that you must embrace a different paradigm: a paradigm of positive change as against dogmatic status quo, a paradigm of adaptability as against conformity, a paradigm of innovation as against renovation, a paradigm of positivity and seeing possibilities in every adversity and crisis situation. This is a choice everyone has to make, but the latter pays better.