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Crisis management is a have to have skill because every single manager and leader will have a crisis. That’s the way businesses today. There’s just no more routine or predictability. Something’s going to come in and it’s going to wreck your day, and you’re going to have to handle it. There’s just, you can’t say, “Oh, I hope this goes away.” It’s not going to go away without you managing your team through it. And you’ve got to manage a whole bunch of stakeholders all at the same time. Your customers, your employees, your bosses. And if you improvise, you will feel the pain of having improvised. So it’s more important than ever to have a philosophy and have some tools in your back pocket about how you’re going to handle this when it happens.
The first hard truth of crisis management is assume the crisis is worse than you’ve heard because it probably is. When you’re a leader or manager and you hear about something, “So-and-so stole something” or “I think there might be a problem with the numbers,” you’re like, “Okay, we can probably fix that up.” And you really do a very human thing, which is stick your fingers in your ears. You don’t want to hear it and you think it can be managed. You should go into every crisis assuming it’s gonna blow up. That’s your best defense. Maybe it won’t, but it probably will. So put on your armor and get ready.
So the first thing you have to do is you have to assume it’s going to be the worst case scenario, and you have to get all the information you can. You have to start digging. You have to start picking up the phone. You have to start going and seeing people, and you have to say, “I’m not going to hurt you. You’re not going to be punished. Tell me everything. I need to know. Our best defense is a good offense.” This is why you need to have good relationships before you get into a crisis because you’re going to need them when you are in the crisis. You have to go to your trusted team members and say, “Certainly, you’ve heard about this before. I have. Let me understand it better now.” And then you’ve got to start talking to everybody in the organization so that you have full information.
So the second hard truth is that there are no secrets in this world, and eventually everything is going to get out. If you think you’re going to contain or keep a secret, you are mistaken. So you definitely shouldn’t try to hide anything. It’s generally wrong to try to hide things. And if you’re trying to keep something a secret, I would ask myself, why am I trying to do that? Maybe you’re trying to protect somebody’s privacy. That’s understandable. But if you’re trying to hide it to protect your guiltiness or somebody’s culpability, then you’re going say, “Well, I’m going to take the hit for this. I did something wrong.” But your best bet is to completely open the cupboard so people can see inside.
The third hard truth, and it’s terrible, but you and your team will be portrayed during this crisis in the worst possible light. You will have your reasons and you will be thinking to yourself, “I am doing everything right here. I am telling the truth here. We are trying to hold it together here. Why are why is everybody picking on us?” And you’re going to be portrayed as, in the worst cases, liars, as people who are trying to cover something up, and you’re going to get beat up. That’s the way it goes. Nobody cares about what you did right. They only care about what you did wrong.
So you have a few choices. One is keep the story that you’re telling focused on solutions. “Here’s what we’re going to do to fix this. This is how we’re going to move forward.” Now the second thing that happens, and a strategy here is, you’re going to feel like there’s certain stakeholders who are out to get you who are saying particularly mean things. Maybe it’s a particular reporter or maybe it’s a particular vendor, and they’re really mad, and they’re the loudest voice, and you’re going to pick a fight with them. You’re going to say, that’s the enemy, and you’re going try to, you’re going to get into a public spat with them. Well, just don’t do that. It never works.
And while you’re being portrayed in the worst possible light, you’re going to stop thinking about the people that you should be thinking the most about. You should be thinking about your employees and your customers. Instead, you’re going to start thinking about the media. You’re going to start thinking about people that you wanted to hire. You’re going to start thinking about your competitors and what they’re saying about you. But during a crisis, your most important audience is the hardest one for you to pay attention to. That’s your own people. They’re hurting. They’re embarrassed. They are terrified. All those things. And your customers who are wondering, are we going get our product when we want it? What does this mean for me? And you’ve got to pay attention to them and them first and foremost.
The fourth hard truth is often the ugliest and it’s terrible, but it’s reality and that is with every crisis, typically, there’s blood on the floor. What I’m saying is someone’s going to be punished. Sometimes it’s you or sometimes it’s someone who you know shouldn’t be punished. But the facts are the way business works, the way organizations work is that there’s almost never a crisis where there’s not somebody who’s held up as the poster child for “look what we did to clean up this mess.” And then the organization typically thinks, “Okay. We did it. We did it. We, we let someone go. Now we hope it’s over.”
I love the fifth final truth about crisis management because it’s not quite so hard as the others. And that is even though it’s very hard to believe while it’s happening, in the long run, crises do make organizations better. Crises happened ninety-nine percent of the time because something was broken or something was wrong, and there was some kind of typically human error or there was some problem buried in the organization that should have been attended to a long time ago and it wasn’t. And crises have a way of cleaning those out and of organizations doing some soul searching and some correction of processes and sometimes some correction of people. Like, sometimes a crisis happens simply because there was a really bad boss who never listened as much as he or she should have. And the crisis will clean that out. And even though it’s like going through hell while it’s happening, and a crisis can be a terrible thing to go through as an individual and an organization, on the other side, things are usually better, and that’s something to hold on to.