The Psychology of Crisis Leadership

Contributed by Dr. Larry Richard, PDC Trusted Advisor and founder and principal consultant at LawyerBrain LLC

Law firm leaders are intensely focused on responding to the CoronaVirus crisis. However, despite their best efforts, many leaders are telling me that their people are experiencing high levels of stress, anxiety, fear, and emotional overload. That’s not surprising, given the pace and magnitude of the changes affecting us all.

This crisis definitely has psychological consequences—specifically, it has upended our basic needs for predictability, control and human connection, and has thereby generated enormous stress while reducing our sense of well-being.

In this article, I’ll explain why and how the crisis disrupts these needs. I’ll then explain what you as a leader can do to help restore that well-being and ensure that your decisions and actions land in the best possible way.

The Crisis Disrupts
Any crisis creates disruption, but the disruption is usually limited to one realm or another. The CoronaVirus crisis has disrupted almost every aspect of our lives all at once, and it’s done so fairly suddenly. We’re all feeling potential threats to our health, our finances, and our relationships.

While you can’t control the course of the virus and the global consequences it causes, many of you are already taking wise remedial steps to respond to the disruption, such as insuring social distancing, providing tech resources for working remotely, ensuring continuity of service to clients, increasing communication, and making sure that your people are ok.

Read the rest of Larry's blog here.

You can reach him at drlarryrichard@lawyerbrain.com or at www.lawyerbrain.com.