I’ve had the opportunity to see a few crisis management situations in my time. (I’m old.) The ones that have worked out the best had less to do with the actual crisis and a lot more to do with the company’s plan for crisis management. The specifics of every crisis are different, but what’s important is that your company has someone in charge whenever a crisis emerges, and that they have a plan for dealing with the crisis, whatever it is. That plan can take many forms, but there are three basic pieces to every crisis management plan that apply almost universally. Does your crisis plan address them?
Whatever industry you are in, no matter what your company’s size, here are the three things that you have to do in any crisis:
- Fess up. If your company is in crisis, it is likely it is because you did something wrong. If you stonewall, you will just make things worse. Find out immediately what happened and go public with your apology and your promise that it won’t happen again. If you are lucky (and credible), that will at least halt your reputational feeding frenzy.
- Clean up. Whatever you did wrong must be rooted out at its source. You must truly understand what happened and remove every trace of what went wrong. If you just handle things on the surface, you leave yourself to the drip, drip, drip of a slow death to a story that looks a little worse every day. Instead, get ahead of the story by cleaning up the whole problem right away.
- Wise up. It’s tempting to apologize and clean up your act and then go back to business as usual. Don’t. Business as usual is what caused the crisis. If you had a systemic failure, you need to address the system. If you had employees compromise their integrity, you need to turn down the pressure on performance that caused the bad behavior. If your crisis was caused by a rogue employee, how did the behavior go undetected? Whatever went wrong requires a deep investigation that truly finds the root cause and addresses it. If you don’t figure out how to prevent a similar event in the future, you’ve missed a huge opportunity.
How many of the three “ups” do you have in your crisis management plan? You need them all to “up” your game.
