Crisis Leadership Blog

Critical Takeaways Insurance is available to cover crisis communications support in a crisis. Check to see if you have this in place and understand what is covered. Establish a rapport with the providers before an event.   The simulation was going incredibly well. The data breach had been identified and the technical teams were responding. The...

Critical Takeaways CEOs need an honest view of the situation in order to be able to manage a crisis. This requires those who support them to ‘speak truth to power’. Crisis communicators are in a unique position to bring the external perspectives into the discussion. Communicators must learn to share their views with clarity, courage and conviction, even in...

Critical takeaways A shelf of plans in ‘white binders’ gives a false sense of security and can be worthless. A crisis plan is not a step-by-step guide for every possible eventuality but should lay out the basic procedures for managing a crisis and some standard steps to address crises by type. This generates valuable speed in the early stages of a crisis....

Critical Takeaways Reputation risk is becoming better understood and more explicitly linked to corporate value but CEOs still lack the requisite tools to manage this risk. Lessons learned from compliance in the 1990s / 2000s provide a roadmap for CEOs to build a culture that creates and values reputation. Reputation is built from the top down and CEOs need...

We all love to use the word strategy and this is the natural level at which a communicator should be thinking.  Our efforts are a major part of what makes strategy - the way in which the organization will realize its objectives - work. But much as we like to talk about it, it’s also easy to forget what real strategy looks like.  I recently had a valuable...

  I'm often asked, "What are the keys to crisis response success?".  After 25 years in the field, I have a ready stock of answers (a whole book’s worth in fact).  However, many of these articles have been from the standpoint of what the company should do, how fast they should respond or who should be in the room. However, I’m a communicator at heart...

Don’t be a gazelle – how to manage fear in crisis I was recently watching Animal Planet with my daughter. The show was about predators hunting their prey, in this case a lion and a herd of gazelle. Gazelles have keen hearing and a good sense of smell but sensing the lion, their immediate response was to freeze out of fear. Quickly, most of the gazelles...

  In my experience, at some point in the discussions during a crisis someone will utter a phrase that will kill the conversation. “We need to think about litigation.” This sounds like a pertinent and important thing to think about but this statement is as useful as the head of communications saying ‘it’s blowing up on Twitter’: that’s to say, not very...