This document discusses how leaders facing a crisis should identify and utilize "Change-Leaders", or employees with a high "Change-Leadership Quotient", to help address the crisis. It recommends leaders identify Change-Leaders through testing, involve them in senior strategic meetings, allow them to develop alternative strategies, and empower them to help develop insurgent strategies for future crises. By drawing on these rare change-oriented assets even during times of stability, leaders will be better prepared to address crises when they occur.

1. The Leadership Campaign 1
“Who Ya Gonna Call?”: CLQ
Okay, it’s officially a crisis. Doors on the executive floor are
slamming shut. The CEO, chief counsel, group of senior
managers and some lawyerly-looking types are huddled in the
board room while the breakfast coffee turns cold.
It’s a major screw-up. It’s a rogue trader or regional sales
manager. It’s the bad stuff that somehow got into the grain
bins. It’s what somebody forgot to tell somebody who forgot to
tell somebody, or worse, what somebody was afraid to tell.
You’re this CEO. You call your COO, the chief counsel and
your spouse. It’s going be a long night, maybe a long weekend.
And God knows what you’ll see on CNBC on Monday morning.
It could be a long, long quarter. Somebody will call your team
from McKinsey-Bain-BCG. And somebody will call your PR
agency. They have that woman who was in the White House
for those bimbo or ISIS or interest rate explosions. If you
absolutely have to, you’ll call Charlie or Madeline on the
Board.
You put the same old team together. But you expect different
results. Einstein would say that constitutes crazy behavior.
Still, how can you try something different with stakes as high
as these? This is no time for improvising.
“Who ya gonna call?” The Ghostbusters are long gone.
There must be somebody out there with a better and different
approach. Actually, we bet there is somebody in there. There
are people in your company ideally suited not just to manage
this crisis, but to solve it. It’s too bad you haven’t already
identified them and prepared them for this, like a Navy Seal
team.
Who the hell are they? They are people with a high “Change-
LeadershipQuotient” or “CLQ.” They are only a little
smarter than the average rising management-bound

2. The Leadership Campaign 2
employees. But they are more disciplined, creative and
ambitious. And they are chafing under the leadership of their
current managers. These Change-Leaders are probably a year
or so away from bolting from your company to start their own
(the “disloyal bastards,” as you’ll call them then). Meanwhile,
they just might be able to turn this ugly situation around.
If you’ve read our stuff, you know the term “Change-Leaders.”
That’s the category of companies and leaders we identified
years ago in our work with Steven Jobs and Mike Murray at
Apple. And today, it is a remarkably relevant concept—
borrowed from the insurgent political campaigns we’ve done
and continue to do. Talk about crisis: big time campaigns
present a new reality every day. To succeed, you must be
what Alabama’s legendary coach Bear Bryant wanted in his
football players: “Mobile, agile and hostile.”
Today, change itself is changing: In fact, change is in control
of the dialogue in your markets and probably in your
company. Leading change is the best and only way to win.
That’s why this model is so ripe and relevant. And that’s why
Change-Leaders do well in today’s crises—because they are:
 Win-oriented: They want unequivocal results, not just
results. All their lives, they have resented plastic
participation trophies.
 Difference-focused: These people care less about
performance reviews than they do about results and
breakthroughs. They want to make a difference.
 Future-driven: They don’t focus on heritage or expect the
best strategy to come from last year’s crisis management
manual. They are vision-driven, working toward a better-
world goal. They want to be a part of something great.
 Informal and Heretical: To these people, corporate
bureaucracy provides nothing but an unending
colonoscopy.

3. The Leadership Campaign 3
 Change-focused: They love it. Others fear it. To others,
change is threatening. So they fear it and fight against it.
But, to Change-Leaders, change means opportunity. And
they know every crisis presents opportunity for
somebody.
The crisis war-room is kind of like the “safe place” where these
people mentally go to calm their nerves. In chaos, they can
create control. They are the most important unrealized assets
your company has. Oh, sure, they’re part of your future
leadership. You already know that. They perform. But they
could do a lot more, and do it now.
Here’s what you should do:
1) Identify them. Do some testing for high CLQ. We can
show you or your head of HR a template to use. Just do
it online. Then compare the results of that testing with
the perceptions of people you know better and trust
more. Identify six to ten of them; maybe more, depending
on the size of your organization.
2) Gather them. Bring one or two of them into any key
senior strategic meeting. Rotate that opportunity among
the identified Change-Leaders.
 JFK did this when he reinvented the National Security
Council and formed the EXCOMM for the Cuban
Missile Crisis. He didn’t bring those young Turks in
for career development. The fate of the world was
hanging in the balance. He brought them in to
challenge traditional or conventional answers provided
by the usual suspects from the White House, Pentagon
or State Department.
Get your Change-Leaders used to the feeling of these
high altitude meetings. Make sure to ask their opinions,
inside and outside the meeting. They may be a little

4. The Leadership Campaign 4
reluctant at first to speak up around the brass. Make
sure they know these sessions are unplugged. Make
sure everybody knows it.
3) Focus them. Allow them to develop a minority report, an
alternative strategy, or suggest an alternative set of
tactics to execute the consensus strategy. Give them an
impossible deadline to produce these reports in a big
hurry.
4) Utilize them. Allow them to provide an offline analysis
for your eyes only about how they perceived the process,
the people and the result.
5) Empower them. For your own learning, develop with
their help a set of insurgent strategies for crises of
challenge and opportunity—they are both equally
important and equally fast moving.
This is how you draw on the value of this rare corporate asset
and help develop it at the same time. Also, remember another
lesson from politics: loyalty is developed as much by what you
ask of people as what you give them. Think of Bernie Sanders’
volunteers slogging through the Iowa snow to urge people to
the caucuses. They’d have walked to New Hampshire if he
asked them.
It’s likely that our U.S. Army in five years will consist almost
entirely of Special Operators. They are the supreme Change-
Leaders. They have learned through intense training and
honed instincts to become comfortable with discomfort. They
are totally goal-focused.
There are special operators in business, too. Like those in the
military, they must self-select—but rigorous testing and
training identifies and sharpens their unique abilities. Don’t
wait for the next crisis to realize you need these Change-
Leaders. Identify, gather, focus, utilize and empower them.
And then, as Nike says: just do it.