Crisis Leadership Blog
Insights and perspectives on being the lighthouse during a crisis.
Holding Statements: What Are They and Why Are They Critical to Effective Crisis Response
Speech is silver, silence is golden. According to this proverb, saying nothing is more valuable than saying something, even if the something itself has value. As a crisis management expert, I believe those are backward, and I’d add one more phrase to the proverb:...
Scaling Your CEO for Better Crisis Response
At Kith, we have seen CEOs rise during a crisis and we have seen others stumble. The difference often comes down to what they focus on during the crisis at hand. As your most senior leader, a CEO can be one of the most important assets your organization can deploy...
How to Dig Out of a Mess of Your Own Creation
The headlines were unsettling, not shocking at first. But when UnitedHealth, the healthcare behemoth responsible for processing 50 percent of all US patient medical claims annually, revealed it was the victim of a ransomware attack described as “the most serious...
When a Publicity Stunt Backfires
There are times (April Fool’s Day, I’m looking at you) when a company decides to pull a publicity stunt to see how big a splash they can make. They engage in intentional misrepresentation – of their business’ product, service, or brand – pushed out as a cheeky,...
Are You Warm Blooded or Cold Blooded?
At Kith, we often say that a crisis does not develop your leadership skills – it reveals them. It also reveals what type of creature you are: warm blooded or cold blooded. Now, obviously, humans are warm blooded as a matter of biology, so what we’re really asking you...
By definition, Kith means a cadre of peers who shape opinions and attitudes while instilling sophisticated habits for action. As a way to live this value, we like to share resources that are building blocks to good crisis management and can help you start the path of protecting your reputation.
More Recent Insights
Gone, But Not Forgotten
The damage of a crisis is not always immediate and not always front-page news. A couple of months ago, CTV News/Bell Media fired Lisa Laflamme, a national icon and trusted news source in Canada, because she stopped coloring her hair. It was sexist or ageist or both according to basically everyone except CTV. Everyone took a side, from Katie Couric to...
We Need to Talk About Potential Litigation
If you’re ever looking for a way to kill a conversation, raise the specter of litigation. It’s more effective at ending a conversation than feigning death, belting out “Don’t Stop Believing” or pulling the fire alarm. Worries over litigation can stymie productive discussions over how to proceed strategically during a crisis. This worry – very real as it is...
Values Are the Bedrock of Your Organization
Many of us will have rolled our eyes when we've received an invitation to join our colleagues in a meeting room to discuss our values. Writing the same tired old tropes on a whiteboard or flip charts can seem like a waste of time. The values are written up at the end of the session, immortalized in a few documents, and promptly forgotten. It seems like a...
How to Make Decisions in a Crisis
Speed is at a premium at the outset of a crisis, and being able to trust your gut and having good pattern recognition helps you move fast when facts are scarce. However, once you get farther into the response, the challenges are more complex, and patterns become less clear: your gut can start to let you down here. So you need a better way to make...
Your Crisis Beach Body
The sun is shining in Austin, Texas, and many of us are thinking about plans for the beach this summer. I've written before about the notion that a healthy body is a combination of diet and exercise, and the equivalency that I see with healthy organizations, which will have a mix of ability - crisis skills - and understanding - risk acuity. Health-wise,...
The Kith Method: Why – And How – We’re Changing Direction
Loyal readers of this blog will have seen that we've spent a lot of time talking about speed, clarity, and trust recently. For us, these represent a new approach to helping organizations: less of a focus on crisis response and more on risk awareness and crisis readiness. Overall, we're focused on building what we're calling Crisis Confidence. Crisis...
Redundancy: Add Spare Capacity to Make You Faster in a Crisis
I'm fond of the old military saying: "two is one, and one is none." It reminds me to have a backup or a spare for critical equipment when I'm on the boat. I can't run to the corner store if something goes wrong when I'm at sea, so I need to be able to replace or repair critical parts of the boat. Otherwise, we could be in for a long, hard, and potentially...
Time to create good habits
I’m on my way back from Austin where I gathered with a group of female founders. We all belong to a group called Fyli (pronounced Fee-Lee). Our purpose is to support female founders as they launch their next big thing. The idea is that support must be 360 degrees. Need access to an investor? Done. Need to find a CMO? Done. Need help ensuring you are...
Crisis Plans Can’t Be Time Capsules
A friend of mine just returned to his office for the first time in more than two years. It was exactly how he left it – albeit cleaner – when he abruptly left work on a Thursday afternoon in March 2020 to retrieve his sick kid from school. He stayed home with the kiddo Friday. The world shut down on Monday. “It’s amazing what I thought was important on...
Mobilization: How to be fast off the blocks in a crisis
Mobilization simply means getting the right people in the right place with the right information to allow them to start managing the event taking place. The term 'mobilization' can sound very operational and, therefore, a little out of place in a communications environment, but that's the point. It's meant to convey a sense of purpose and deliberateness...
The Kith Method
Good crisis management comes from a plan. Great crisis management comes from capability – and starts before you even smell smoke. That’s why we developed the Kith Method. We can help build and maintain a flexible capability that works for you.
Your reputation is an investment; time-consuming and costly to build and expensive to repair. Protect it.