Question: How should a leader react when an employee has a personal crisis?

Answer:  Putting one’s employees first is never more evident than during times of personal crisis for the employee. These occasions inevitably arise because people are human and difficult circumstances (death, divorce, illness) do at some point arise. When they do, the leader’s response either cements or breaks the bond between the leader and their people.

I have two examples which illustrate the case, one positive and the other negative.

I found myself in hospital once with a young person who was going through brain surgery for two tumours in her brain. She was the manager of a car rental agency and she told me, with humility, that she regularly received offers at twice her current pay. The reason that she was never tempted however was because of her boss who, at this moment, entered the ward. “Where else could I find this?” she said. “He is not only doing my job and his for as long as I am incapacitated, but he comes to visit me at least twice a week, even though he lives on the other side of town.”

A young man was washed off a pier on a Sunday afternoon while fishing with his mates. He plummeted down to the rocks below, miraculously did not die, but as a result of his injuries spent many weeks in hospital. He confronted his boss upon his return to his work: “Why, in all those weeks, did you not come and see me?” His boss’s response – that he asked after him at least three times a week – simply did not hold water. The bottom line was that the relationship was over. There was nothing the boss could do to recover from this. His only hope was to behave very differently when personal issues impacted on the lives of other people in his team.

I once spoke to a woman in a retail branch in a bank. She had the following to say. Firstly, that she had had a horrendous year from a personal point of view (she did not give details). “Throughout the year,” she said, “my manager was there for me … now there is nothing that, if my manager (not the bank) asked of me, I would not do it.”

People give their all at the end of the day for someone (who truly cares about them), not some organisational entity or thing.

Simon Sinek sums it up when he says that people follow leaders who have chosen to look after them. This is what a leader is.