Art Markman

It’s easy to be in a leadership role during good times. You’re the equivalent of Oprah telling everyone in the audience that they just got a new car. But, when times are tough, that’s when you have to look in the mirror and say “that’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

To be prepared for these times, you should make sure that you have a plan for how to address a crisis, when one inevitably arises. Obviously, the details of that plan will have to be developed on the fly, because the specifics of most crises are hard to predict in advance. But, you should have the outlines of a crisis plan well in advance so that you’re not scrambling for how to get started. Here are the basic things you must have in order before a crisis hits:

COMMUNICATE EARLY AND OFTEN

It’s easy to get mired in the details of dealing with a crisis situation and to ignore the needs of employees and external stakeholders, including customers and clients. So it’s important to have a communication plan and a designated lead for communication.

Your communication plan must include the key audiences who will want information. Employees will want to know that key issues are being addressed, whether there is risk to their jobs, and any affect a crisis is likely to have on their daily work life. External stakeholders will want communications about any service disruptions or other influences a crisis may have on their experience.

In a crisis, it’s important to communicate quickly to assure key stakeholders that you are addressing the problem and then to communicate often enough to maintain people’s confidence in your leadership. Do not give an overly rosy summary of the situation or your prospects of addressing the crisis successfully. You will undermine trust in your leadership if you minimize significant problems or express overconfidence in your ability to fix a problem that you cannot ultimately address.

KNOW YOUR VULNERABILITIES

In crisis situations, it’s important to be aware of your most significant weaknesses, because those are the ones most likely to fail when there is a problem. It’s no fun to catalog weaknesses, but that awareness enables you to check immediately on the elements of your business that are most likely to suffer.

One of the most significant vulnerabilities you may identify involves single points of failure. In our drive to make organizations more efficient, we often eliminate redundancies. That strategy is often favored as a cost-cutting move. However, the fewer redundancies in an organization, the less resilient the team. In a crisis, the thinnest parts of the organization are most likely to suffer.

It’s valuable to develop plans to ensure that you minimize the cases in which a single individual or single channel of communication is responsible for an important function within the organization. When you cannot eliminate these vulnerabilities, you at least need to be aware of them to ensure that they do not cause problems in a crisis.

HAVE YOUR DECISION TEAM READY

When a crisis hits, decisions need to be made quickly. The best way to handle a crisis is to have a plan in place already to address the basics of the situation. Many organizations will engage in tabletop exercises in which they simulate likely problems that can occur to practice addressing the situation so that the actual crisis is not the first time that the team is trying to manage a problem.

A central part of these exercises is determining how decisions will be made. It’s important to know which people have responsibility for particular categories of decisions in a crisis. It is also crucial to ensure that several people aren’t making contradictory decisions. Otherwise, different parts of an organization may work at cross purposes wasting valuable time and resources.

Ultimately, the best way to handle a crisis is to prepare for likely emergencies before they happen rather than scrambling to address a significant problem without any forethought.

Fast Company