Y2K czar offers advice on crisis control

Federal managers facing crises at work might want to follow the advice of the man who is managing the federal government's biggest potential disaster: Stay cool.

John Koskinen is the president's point man on the year 2000 computer problem, coordinating the job of getting the nation to fix its computer systems before they shut down on Dec. 31, 1999. In his previous job as deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, Koskinen guided the executive branch through two government shutdowns. Before that, he spent 20 years rescuing private sector companies from management disasters.

Koskinen shared crisis management lessons with top federal executives at the Government Technology Leadership Institute Wednesday. He stressed that dealing with a crisis requires a level head.

"If you spend your time looking at the almost insurmountable nature of it and how much has to be done in the time that's available, you can actually get quite dysfunctional," Koskinen said. "If you do what needs to be done one step at a time, one day at a time, one project at a time, it's amazing after a short period of time how much you can accomplish. It's the difference in planning and thinking about doing things and doing things. Clearly if you're managing a crisis or disaster, you don't get credit for having neat ideas, you get credit for actually implementing them."

Not every manager can handle a crisis, Koskinen said. He recalled an excellent chief financial officer at a private sector firm who was brought on to help save a company. Though the man was a superb chief financial officer in a stable company, he was almost useless in a crisis situation. Some managers are better at long-term jobs, while others enjoy the pressure and excitement of short-term problem solving, Koskinen said.

Sometimes, no executives in an organization can effectively deal with a crisis because they were the ones who caused it, Koskinen said. In those cases, fixers from the outside need to come in to manage the crisis.

"If you're running an organization and things start to go wrong, your natural inclination is to blame outside factors and to say whatever we did is the right thing to do," Koskinen said. "You spend a lot of time psychologically justifying or explaining how you got to where you are instead of trying to figure out actually where you are and where you're going."

Koskinen gave four pieces of advice for managers faced with crises:

• Be candid. "Candor is your best friend" in crisis situations, Koskinen said. People often think they will protect themselves during crises by not revealing problems. If managers are not bluntly honest with each other and themselves about problems, then crises will will continue-or intensify.
• Get advice from front-line employees. When Koskinen saved private companies, the previous executives were usually all gone when he got there. So to find out what went wrong and how to fix the situation, he talked to front-line employees. He found they usually had the best information anyway. Leaders who think they are above taking advice from employees are doomed to fail, Koskinen said.
• Be flexible. You need a vision of where you're headed, but it shouldn't be set in stone. By assuming you know all the answers at the start, you may create new problems trying to solve the old ones. Be open to feedback and evaluate your strategy's performance, adapting it as you go along.
• Have a sense of humor. If you don't take the opportunity to laugh at the odd ironies around you, you'll grind yourself down, Koskinen said.

Koskinen is able to joke about the year 2000 problem, even though the century change is less than 400 days away. Koskinen said that at the end of this crisis, he plans to enter the federal witness protection program, so no one else with a disaster brewing will ever be able to seek his assistance again.