Crisis leadership

Building a crisis capability to respond and thrive in adversity

Responding to a crisis in a way that represents the purpose, vision and values of your organisation isn’t easy. But failing to get this response right can be far more damaging than the crisis itself. Handling a crisis successfully can only come from effective crisis leadership.

Tackling any crisis in a pro-active and meaningful way challenges many organisations. But the consequences of getting it wrong are proving more severe with every instance.

A major event, one that truly threatens an organisation, forces leadership to step in and respond. Without the right thinking beforehand it is incredibly difficult and to build a successful response in the midst of the crisis.

The leadership team relies on supporting structures, teams and plans which enable their response. This means that any crisis efforts need to be more than just compliance driven; they need to be focused on organisational capability and provide leadership teams with confidence in that capability. Our experience has given us a unique insight into what behaviours and environments best support leaders during crisis.

The challenge of trying to plan for true crises

It’s far too easy to plan for incidents and emergencies that occur on a relatively frequent basis; server failures, denial of access to premises or supply chain failures. But these events don’t threaten the survival of the organisation.

Unfortunately planning for these more minor events can hide the fact that when true crises hit, the leadership is simply not prepared or integrated with the rest of the business.

However, with good tactical or operational plans as a foundation it only takes a few more steps to build a crisis leadership capability. The mechanics of a response can now be challenged to move beyond scenarios and skills to build strategic thinking, leadership and behaviours that reflect the values of the organisation into any response.

So why is all this important?

Organisations who have pre-agreed what they want to be known for during a crisis, do better following a crisis. They can better represent their values in their decisions and ensure a joined up response from the boardroom to the shop-floor.

Our Crisis Management Insights:

• Crisis management: Your employees, customers and stakeholders have high expectations
• Crisis is inevitable, failure doesn't have to be: Paul Robertson at TEDxBristol