Invitation To a Crisis

Sometimes, a little added pressure can help your team scale new heights.

- By Bill Shapiro

Jonathan McBride knows something about how teams behave in a crisis. For five and a half years, he had a ringside seat in the Obama White House as an oil spill swamped the Gulf Coast and an earthquake devastated Haiti; as the H1N1 virus and Ebola threatened the U.S.; as the government shut down. Same at BlackRock, in the high-stakes sway of the financial markets, and, before that, as a co-founder of a small business where dramas unrolled every day, from cash-flow squeezes to personnel flare-ups to can-this-really-be-happening-now? tech failures.

In those tense, swirling moments, he’s seen plans botched, messages mishandled, and opportunities squandered. But he’s also watched as teams responded to a crisis in ways that were flatout exhilarating: Communication quickened, hierarchies flattened, turnaround-time evaporated, talent blossomed, MacGyver-like fixes got the green light, mission-alignment reached 100 percent, and what truly matters suddenly truly mattered.

Which has led McBride, who served as the director of the White House office of presidential personnel and then as BlackRock’s global head of inclusion and diversity, to ask an against the-grain question: What if a leader were to invite a “controlled crisis” upon her own organization—and then weaponize it? McBride believes that carefully injecting a little pulse-racing, brow-mopping crisis into the system will not only spark moments of epiphanic insight but may also lead to electrifying growth.