This guest blog is a contribution from William Roberts is, an interim leadership and business development consultant who is currently Interim CEO of Venture Community Association in west London. You can contact William about this blog at awillroberts@gmail.com.

It’s a fact – charities operate in a constant state of crisis. We haven’t got enough money to survive the year, the heating hasn’t come on, the receptionist is off sick, there are no blue pens. Everything is a crisis. And crisis is addictive!

I am a leadership consultant who works with charities and social enterprises that have, for one reason or another (and it is usually a combination of about 100 reasons or another), got themselves stuck.  Stuck in what feels like a cul-de-sac, out of which they have been trying to reverse, only to find themselves ever more stuck. What I almost always see is that when pens are a crisis – this real crisis seems impossible to move on from.

Given that as a world we have been in a very well documented crisis for the last two years, the sector has faced funding crises for decades and the communities we serve have needed our help for centuries, what chance is there to ever move from crisis to calm? The kind of calm that means that we can deal with mission related crises without drifting the mission into every corner of the building.

I have seen that this transformation is possible.  It’s not easy, it takes time, and it can be very uncomfortable.  It also needs a commitment from the CEO and the board of trustees, and it needs a moment that marks the time of change. The process of driving out of a tight cul-de-sac is a focussed series of forward and reverse moves, each one getting you closer to the open road.

So, what are those forward and reverse moves? Although the exact moves will be site specific, my experience has shown me that there are four principles to move from crisis to calm:

Get the right people doing the right thing. Fundamental, uncomfortable and unavoidable – if you have the wrong people, you are going nowhere.  They are usually the ones who are draining the energy and the temptation is to shuffle them around and work around them until they are no longer the wrong people.  But that is never the end result.  And if your right people are not fully pointed in the direction of your mission, if your structure is wrong, if you are putting all your resources into surviving the day and not moving you forward, you stay in the cul-de-sac. You cannot compromise on this principle – both parts have to be in place.

Give yourself a chance of succeeding. Calm, planned and thoughtful decision making requires systems, processes and time to plan.  But don’t try and solve every problem in one go. Organisations in trouble usually have an omni-problem, made up of 320 seemingly complex, interrelated and endemic problems that generations of CEOs have been trying to fix.  List them, rank them and address them only when you can fix them fully.  Live with the moderate ones – they are on the list and their time will come; invest in success.

Model the behaviour. Perhaps the hardest and most resilient issue is behavioural culture. It lives in the woodwork and can appear to survive a nuclear winter.  Culture starts from the top but is fuelled by the influencers throughout the organisation. If you want all around you to be calm, you must display three times the calm.  A whole team, Herculean effort to write a bid or mobilise a service is exciting and motivating but don’t make this the way you get through Wednesday. But you can’t do it alone. Find the sparks that think like you and acknowledge them; avoid the drains and don’t acknowledge them.

Repeat the mantra.  Keep saying it – we are a calm organisation; we plan and draw breath before diving in. Covid taught us many things and one of them is that real crises take a moment to show their true shape.  As leaders, we too need to take a moment and we need to make sure those around us take a moment.  That’s not procrastination, that’s being calm, even in the face of crisis.