Advantages of Tiger Teams in Response to Critical Events and Crisis

Maybe that complex problem and challenging decision making would be best solved with a team of specialists instead of just one.

This Tiger Team, offers distinct advantages for individuals and organizations, says Stephen Grossman, chief consulting officer at HALO Global Response and a crisis and critical event response consultant.

“Tiger Teams have been around since World War II,” he says. “NASA is credited with its popularity and one of the best known uses of Tiger Teams were the ones NASA deployed to deal with the Apollo 13 crisis.”

He says there are important differences in how a small specialized group is composed and operates as opposed to a common crisis management team.

“A Tiger Team is formed from individuals with disparate but compatible skill sets and expertise who are brought together to overcome a specific threat or critical issue or to achieve a specific goal,” Grossman says.

This can be beneficial he has learned when the combination of expertise, competence, confidence, conviction and humility are the practiced standard.

“An effective Tiger Team consists of individuals with superior capabilities and strong personalities who can think through a problem and fight it out within the team if necessary to come up with optimal solutions, putting aside rank, politics, ego, etc.,” Grossman says.

Where the expertise originates, he says, can vary as it can come from inside or outside the organization or be a combination of both.

The process resembles how the military operates on certain missions.

“They operate similarly to a special forces team that is trained to operate as one under a team leader but with the contributions of each member heard,” Grossman says, adding “and the agility to adapt should something happen to one or more of the team members, including its leader.”

What is of great importance is that these critical yet temporary teams are assembled in a small group.

(Stephen Grossman, chief consulting officer at HALO Global Response)

“It may reach out to additional resources for specific assistance but the core team addressing the threat should not be more than five or six people,” he says. “And once the objective has been achieved the team should disband.”

Grossman stresses that such special units have but one major challenge assigned to them so as to maximize focus, problem solving and achievement.

“A company could have multiple Tiger Teams operating independently across the enterprise at any given time, provided a single critical event is not being addressed by more than one Tiger Team. One team per event,” he insists.

This is wise Grossman says in that it prevents what too regularly occurs, to organizational disadvantage.

“Many traditional CMTs (Crisis Management Teams) quickly morph into an ever-expanding corpus, made up of several decision-makers, a number of experts who are invited in and pushed out intermittently and an audience of second and third tier experts with very specific walk-on roles and stakeholders vying to get in or concerned about the outcome,” he says.

This proves highly problematic, including the emotions it often evokes in individuals and the collective, and negatively affects judgment and decision making.

“There is a great deal of chaos, politics, jockeying for power or performance credit and muddled decision-making,” Grossman says.

Shifting the mindset from internally-driven critical events or crisis response to building a Tiger Team is an arduous task that leads to different decisions.

“I see clients in a crisis reacting in three ways,” Grossman says.

Rapid formation of a pre-established CMT as a result of crisis management training and having had problems in the past.

Reaction with no plan in place and a quasi-CMT formed over the course of addressing the issues, primarily consisting of top management, legal, PR and sometimes security or I.T.

A first-time victim open to anything that works and confident enough in their leadership abilities to trust the selection of the team or a consultant to lead through the event and to allow that consultant to put a Tiger Team together and to disband it when the objective has been reached.

Tiger Teams, if chosen correctly and working cohesively, might be specialized expertise, competence, excellence and security that leadership and organizations most need in a critical event or crisis, yet are currently unaware of, choose not to use or in error, reject.

Michael Toebe is a specialist for reputation, professional relationships communication and wiser crisis management. He authors and publishes the Red Diamonds Newsletter, a weekly publication on Medium, as well as Red Diamonds Features and hosts the Red Diamonds Podcast.