After 9/11, Laura Bush gathered her staff and asked how each of them was doing.
observation — attributed to Anita McBride
The day after the 9/11 attacks, Laura Bush gathered her entire staff. She wanted to hear from each of them: what happened, where they went, how they were doing. She brought in a Methodist minister to pray with the staff and give them strength. The gesture set a tone for what followed. McBride notes the empathy shift across the country in the weeks after. The country was experiencing grief and shock. Empathy moved into spaces it had not occupied before. The implication for any leader in crisis is operational. The first move after a shock is not to issue a statement but to gather the people closest to the work and listen to them. The work that follows depends on whether that listening happened.
For leaders managing teams through crises and for first responders to organizational shocks. The observation generalizes to any context where the leader's first instinct should be listening rather than statement-making.
laura-bush, crisis-leadership, staff-care, empathy-shift