Leading During A Crisis: Lessons from the 2008 Wall Street Meltdown

Today, we sit back and reflect upon the actions taken that caused this meltdown and all we can really see is the leadership failure at the Wall Street. Why? Because these senior managers and executives knew the potential risks with prime and sub-prime mortgages and yet approved the lending to low-income individuals.

At the end of September of this year, The Wall Street Journal sponsored and Yale School of Management co-sponsored a roundtable discussion regarding the financial sector crisis. During the discussion, Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld shared some leadership lessons that can be summed up into the following five high level leadership lessons:

1. Blaming the System. “We have become political hypochondriacs. We seem eager to declare that the system has come down with some dread disease, to proclaim that an ideological center blessed by the heavens no longer exists, and woe unto us.” In essence, every time something goes wrong in the economy we tend to blame the system; however, the system is controlled and managed by the society or rather said organizational leaders who develop policies and procedures which shape an organization. Policies and procedures either enable or disable an organization. Unfortunately, some leaders do not realize that policies and procedures govern the system and the organization and therefore continue to blame the system for organizational failures.

2. Financial literacy matters but courage and character matters the most in the Wall Street crisis. Instead of blaming the systems for failure, management should and must recognize that taking the accountability and responsibility for failure will ultimately lead to success. The best example is Jamie Diamond at JP Morgan Chase to include a few others. Their leadership recognized that they were doing something wrong and instead of pointing finger and blaming the system, they decided to conduct an organizational assessment and reengineer certain processes and procedures to prevent future failure.

3. Getting caught up in the systematic finger pointing and overregulation which creates additional performance pressures and increases the competitiveness within all industries regardless of size and geographic location. A human resource term often used within an organization is a performance scorecard.

4. Risk management is essential because the goal of any organization should be to minimize the potential levels of risk and determine how to best handle such exposure. Understanding risk form micro level is the key but at Wall Street, many were not able to look and think outside the box causing such failure. Leadership and management must be able to make sound business decisions and fully understand and manage risk.

5. Intentional lack in transparency and accountability. Board decision making was poor and as mentioned previously, the message from the loan officer or leadership to the borrower or consumers and employees was not very clear leading to mixed messages and creating a world of uncertainty.