The Company’s Struggles as a Reflection of the Leader’s Personal Challenges
After many years in finance, I have come to realise that corporate finance is not pure mathematics or a set of laws. As in other areas of life, you have to put things in context and look at them from a broader perspective. Wherever the world goes and artificial intelligence makes its way, the role and responsibility of humans is inescapable. After all, people write the programs. Thus, the desires, feelings, ambitions and solutions born in humans are ultimately mapped out and automated. At the same time, the performance and well-being of any community is an average of the individual performance and well-being of its members.
As leaders, our most important task is to select the members of our organisation on this basis. A well-adjusted, balanced and demanding person in his or her personal life will be well-adjusted in his or her work. If the balance in one’s life is upset by any personal crisis, it will almost immediately affect one’s performance at work. It is fortunate if these personal crises come to light quickly, so that as a manager we can support the individual and avoid a decline in his or her work effectiveness. Proper communication and trust within the organisation is therefore of paramount importance.
But what happens when the manager himself is in a personal crisis?
The smartest thing to do is to ask for help and temporary support from someone inside or outside the company until we feel we can sit back at the helm with full sanity and strength.
Coping with a death, divorce, illness or any kind of personal crisis that is testing a person’s life can take a long time. If we act at the beginning of the problem and put someone by our side/in our place, the crisis in the company can be avoided. If we realise too late that our work, performance and sanity are being affected by the problem, then unfortunately our company will go downhill. The question is how quickly we realise that we cannot solve the problem on our own.
Corporate crises are caused by a lot of bad decisions or a complete lack of taking vital decisions! It never happens overnight and is never caused by external circumstances!
So, to sum up, I cannot deny the very painful truth for business leaders: when a company goes into crisis, it always means a personal crisis for the leader! Because if it were not, he would have overcome the difficulties or they would not have arisen at all by taking the right decisions and taking the right action.
