7 things to do when the proverbial s&^? hits the fan
Or how to be your best self in any situation
Ever been in a situation when it’s all gone wrong? The sinking feeling you experience, the worry, fretting, the catastrophizing, and how we can truly feel like nothing is fixable. It really does feel like it’s a disaster. At some point, we’ve all been there.
When things go wrong or don’t turn out the way you pictured them in your head, you just have to go with the best intentions defence. I have a lot of good intentions. - Blake Shelton
We originally wrote this when we thought we had been hacked. We had been informed by a couple of clients that our emails were bouncing, and we noticed that we could send internal emails to the team yet not get any responses from the ones sent or receive any!
The first point of reaction could have been:
“Oh, this is a disaster; what will our clients think of us?”
“How did this happen? Who’s opened a dodgy email?”
The questions and accusations can flow immediately
“Why today, we have a full day, typical.”
“What will the team do? How do I get them to work now”?
“What is the impact on our clients? What will they think of us? “
“Technology is so difficult; it must be the software. Who installed it?”
“We must have been hacked; this will make life difficult for us.”
“What can we do without email?“
For us, what did happen was great.
In our case, we spent an entire day working on what must have gone wrong. We deleted the whole software and reinstalled it. We got everyone to change the passwords and be wary. We went through every attachment that could have created a virus or a breach, and we checked DNS records and all the intricacies of an underworld of code and computer language. We had a moment of uncomfortable uncertainty.
We saw the team come together.
We talked through all the options, and everyone brought ideas on how we could fix it.
We talked to all our clients and had some fantastic unplanned conversations.
We saw skill and patience that we hadn’t seen before.
We experienced our culture from within that we don’t blame or shame. We support, guide, and nurture (fortunately, we do what we coach).
We walked through from start to end and saw an opportunity to improve our work.
We thanked everyone and gave “Soul Food” our RLC feedback of thanks, making it genuine, personal, and specific to each person that helped us. Thankfully we weren't hacked yet as we thought we had been.
We weren’t hacked. We weren’t comprised. We had a basic and obvious oversight our domain had expired!
Simple as that. It wasn’t on auto-renew, and it had fallen into the email mire of notifications and been missed. This also allowed us to share the learnings and how we used them to help us get it right, deal with a mini-internal crisis and ensure we retain our values and behaviours no matter what happens.
7 THINGS TO DO WHEN THE S&%$ HITS THE FAN.
Or how to be your best in any situation.
Step by step. Check the obvious. We all know the turn off your computer, close it down and turn it back on. However, the computer only acts on what we do with it (just like our brains, computers only do what we tell it,) so do the obvious first. Keep it simple and plan to change passwords as a business too regularly. We had kept using the same ones. So, we now have it as a company-wide action each quarter.
Responsibility. Reference to check the things that you have done yourself. Taking responsibility first for your own actions is key to resolving issues quickly.
Connecting is impactful, so talk more. Make time in your diary to follow up via conversation verbally. We use email as an affirmation of a conversation, yet we still feel unstable without having the access to it. Making us realise how powerful our follow-up is, the power of conversation and how we need to be able to be clear, concise and listen intentionally.
Communicate. We don’t need technology. It’s help. It’s a bonus. It’s amazing. Yet our reliance is built on habit. So, it is beneficial to reflect on how you communicate and always look at how you can get better.
Share. Technology is a shared story connected to all our actions. Being reliant on just one person means losing sight of what and how we can fix things. Share what you do, and by default, have another great conversation.
Skill. Find your specialisms and skills in your people and know them. We are fortunate we are surrounded by awesome people, and we had this validated more when the “suspected” hack happened. We see the best in people when we are challenged. Skill is not expertise as we see it; it’s multi-disciplined competency and being open-minded to not being the expert (potentially limiting and biased), being willing to learn no matter what you choose to specialise in.
Appreciation. Easily dismissed as we assume people know they did a good job. Thank people, make it relevant to them, not a generic well done. Personalise it.
Overall we focus on working as a team to solve and fix anything without blame. It’s a problem. Let’s fix it together.