Crisis Management In the Face of a Storm

Crisis management is a containment discipline. 

Crises take many forms without warning or incident. From a wayward executive to natural disasters, from criminal tragedies to nationwide product recalls. Sometimes they start as an incident with the potential to become an impacting crisis. Other times, they originate as a full-fledged crisis and our intent is to prevent it from becoming a disaster.

Often times, crises are caused, or at least fueled, by motivated adversaries - those companies, groups, or individuals with a position that is counter to your own. Sometimes they are expected and sometimes unexpected. Any company finds motivated adversaries among their competitors.

In the first few hours after a crisis, you have to communicate. You can’t allow a vacuum to be created. In today’s rapid-fire media landscape, conventional and alternative news outlets will fill the vacuum with whatever they believe to be true or worse what fits their preconceived narrative, and that can lead to a communications clean-up effort. Too often an initial crisis is followed by a crisis of misinformation that is flooded into the vacuum such that the misinformation becomes a "reality" that has to be addressed. 

You should communicate progress, early and often. One of the ultimate goals of crisis management is to make your crisis as unsexy and uninteresting as possible. That is accomplished through regular updates of incremental progress and, as I routinely advise my clients, relentlessly pursuing the facts. 

A crisis is a distraction to normal operations and nowhere is it more distracting as with customers who want answers from front-line sales and service personnel. In an environment where you are giving updates to the market or press every few hours or seeing an unfolding situation that is likely to take months to resolve, it can be tempting to lean on one-way communications, but that can also damage trust and undermine the ongoing effectiveness of the crisis management.

Good companies allow the crisis to be a catalyst for positive operational change. Poor leadership can allow the crisis to drive the company to free fall. Some go through a crisis and try to go straight back to normal. But the best companies recognize that there is a new normal. They intend to learn from their experience and not let it repeat, with worse consequences.

Regardless of what steps you take and what tools you use, your attitude matters. More often than not, you can keep the relationships intact, if there are honesty and continuity.