Leadership tends to be formal, followers wait for others to contribute and, as a result, there are fewer avenues of communication and teamwork suffers. Fear of taking risks tends to cause action paralysis. In contrast, organizations that experience the pressure of a crisis situation tend to develop a clear sense of mission. Precious time is devoted to the most important issues and everyone must be aligned with the mission and contribute to fixing problems and making improvements. Formal leaders make way for other input and more communication channels open up to embrace creativity wherever it is found.
Teamwork prevails and fear of risk-taking gives way to gutsy actions to weather the storm.
Something was needed to push Yankee Energy back into a crisis mode to capture the advantages of crisis thinking and action. To shake things up, the company brought its Outlaws into the spotlight. In order to improve Yankee Energy, honest communication was required. On the one hand, people in the organization needed to feel free to criticize the status quo and tell it like it is without fear of offending those with a vested interest in the status quo. On the other hand, those with vested interests needed to learn how to take criticism as an attempt to help the organization succeed and not as a personal attack.