Best-selling author, speaker, executive coach; peer advisory boards #ChampagneMoment www.ExactlyWhereYouWanttoBe.com.
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Business leaders are faced with challenging situations every single day. Some routine issues can be resolved with relatively few negative impacts on the company. However, from time to time, companies can face a major crisis that threatens their reputation and the survival of their business.
Crises can come from a wide range of sources, including natural disasters that disrupt operations, financial issues that shake shareholder and investor confidence, cybersecurity breaches that leak sensitive data and product failures that are potentially dangerous to consumers.
Whatever crises your business faces, business leaders need to understand how to address them quickly to minimize risk and impact on the company.
1. Identify the crisis and act quickly.
It’s critical to identify a crisis early before the situation escalates. Building safeguards into your processes, such as establishing business KPIs, can help identify potential issues ahead. Many companies establish risk management teams to help support these efforts by developing monitoring and escalation practices.
Many businesses are unprepared for a crisis. In fact, only 62% of companies reported having a crisis management plan. If you don’t have a crisis management plan or playbook, you should consider creating one now. That can help your team respond faster by having a detailed plan of action at their fingertips.
2. Alert your internal team and set expectations.
Once a crisis has been identified, you need to let your internal team know and keep them informed along the way. Make sure they are clear on who is authorized to speak on behalf of the company to the media, government regulators or customers. You want your team to take ownership of supporting the crisis resolution process, but you don’t want them to go rogue.
You may also need to request that certain team members adjust their regular routines for the duration of the crisis event. For example, you may request that your sales team hold off on sending client communications or posting to social media platforms.
3. Utilize media monitoring tools.
During a crisis, it’s important to stay on top of what people outside the company and the media are saying about the situation. This information can help you develop a strategy to address their concerns and respond to their questions.
Media alert tools can automatically scour the internet in search of new articles or other posts related to the crisis. You may even assign someone to monitor and summarize customer sentiment on top social media platforms like Google, LinkedIn or Facebook.
4. Develop your messaging.
Companies need to stay ahead of rumors and negative messaging that can happen during a crisis. Your executive and public relations teams can provide guidance on how to best craft and develop talking points and responses that might come from the media or major clients. In addition to developing your messaging, consistency is important. It’s wise to appoint a specific spokesperson or another single source of truth (such as a company website) to ensure you don’t have multiple conflicting sources of information.
5. Identify and prepare any deliverables.
Businesses may need to take actions toward resolving the source of the crisis, such as severing a relationship with a vendor, issuing press releases, scheduling press conferences or recalling products. Work with the team to create a plan for how and when deliverables will be executed. In many cases, you may need to take multiple actions simultaneously.
6. Consult with your legal and executive team.
Before releasing any message to the public or acting on deliverables, it’s critical to ensure that your legal counsel and executive team are supportive and on board with what your team is proposing. The last thing you want is to make the situation worse by doing something that could be illegal or perceived negatively.
7. Execute your deliverables and crisis communication plan.
Once you have legal and executive approval on your chosen messaging and deliverables, you need to act quickly to minimize any damage or risk. Depending on the source of the crisis, stakeholders across the organization may need to be engaged. For example, your IT department will need to help manage cybersecurity threats, while your engineering team may need to develop a solution for a product malfunction. Assembling a cross-functional team can streamline the process to access these resources.
8. Monitor for additional coverage or responses.
Once your deliverables have been executed, the crisis management team will need to monitor the temperature of the situation and identify areas where more efforts are needed. Have customer concerns calmed? Has the media moved on to another hot story? If you find any gaps in your resolution, you may need to pivot and address those individually. There may also be additional questions or concerns that arise based on your initial response that require clarification or more details.
9. Reassess the situation and confirm the crisis is over.
With any luck, your first attempt at resolving the crisis will be successful. If so, congratulations! However, you may find that your initial plan was ineffective or didn’t work as expected. If this is the case, you may need to jump back to step four and take another approach based on any new information you have learned along the way.
10. Perform a postmortem.
Smart businesses take the opportunity to learn from negative experiences and crises. After the crisis has subsided, gather your crisis management team together to identify what worked well and what you could have done better. This will give you the information you need to improve and update your crisis management plan for the next event.
Unfortunately, business crises can happen at any moment and are unpredictable. The best time to prepare for a crisis is before one happens. Developing and updating crisis management plans, providing crisis and risk management training to your company leaders and running crisis simulations are great ways to prepare your team for an uncertain future. The time and effort devoted to these precautions may pay significant dividends if and when the next crisis arises.
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