How to become good at crisis management
Home versus corporate crisis management
How do you cope when sods law hits. Sods law being when everything that can go wrong does. Most of us resort to headless chicken, fire fighting mode. If you were in a corporate environment this would be called crisis management.
Considering yourself a manager, well actually more of a CEO (Chief Executive Officer), of a family is a pretty good way to recognise all the roles you play and how pivotal you really are.
Of course everyone has their own style of management whether in the home or the corporate environment – but there are some lessons we can take in “home management” from the corporate world.
The Corporate definition of crisis management
The definition of crisis management in corporate speak, is if you find that your life is pretty well continuously governed by uncontrolled external issues, which you have to constantly react to.
If that sounds slightly familiar putting a business hat on might just revolutionise your life and reduce your stress levels.
How you get into the habit of crisis management
Generally the reason that you get into patterns of crisis management is because you fail to plan, plus you also set unrealistic time requirements on yourself and others, so you are always running late, or running out of time to get stuff done.
The underlying cause for this maybe you have too much to do and too little time, or conversely you simply like living in fast paced environments, with lots of things going on and lots of balls in the air.
The problems you can predict and the ones your can’t
The trouble is that if one thing is certain, from time to time you are going to drop one of those balls. Now there are two sorts of problems, those that you can predict will happen and those that you can not predict.
Having a well-developed plan which makes allowances, or has solutions for the problems that you can predict will help you avoid most of the crisis which happen on a day-to-day basis.
What are the pressure points and what are the solutions
As most day-to-day crisis are the result of external factors, it is worth stopping and evaluating what external factors are likely to cause you the most problems, and what pressure points crop up repeatedly. Work out ways that you can avoid these incidents happening on a regular basis.
Take a notebook and write down the mini crises that occur on a regular basis in your house. It maybe losing the keys, waking up late, or not having any milk for breakfast.
Creating a plan and putting systems in place, whether it is a post-it note, an extra set of keys, or another alarm clock. Find solutions to that will help ensure a particular problem is not likely to happen so often.
Ignore this at your peril, crisis management is tiring and stressful. Most of the time with a little planning many crises can be avoided.
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