A crisis is like a shark attack. One moment you’re swimming through calm blue waters, the next a risky predator torpedoes from beneath your feet, clamping you in its jaws. In this moment of terror, you must make multiple decisions and your survival will depend on them.
“Staff look to management for clear leadership and guidance in crisis situations, therefore it’s down to leaders and management to ensure their teams have the infrastructure, skillset, knowledge and training to feel like they are well prepared to execute the required actions in difficult situations,” says Pamela Ghosal, head of marketing and communications EMEA at OKI Europe.
Fortunately, most have a crisis management plan, which although won’t cater to all eventualities, does offer a framework on how to react and guide staff and customers through the tumult.
“More and more businesses are realising they need to have something in place should a crisis occur,” explains Lisa McGauley, head of PR and content at Fox Agency. “I’d be incredibly surprised if any of the FTSE 350 didn’t have a crisis plan in place.”
Keeping your cool
Right now you might already be breaking into a cold sweat as you realise that you’ve not thought this through. You’ve no masterplan for disaster. Should your product be deemed unsafe or your CEO be charged with fraud, you’ve got nowhere to go but into panic mode.
First of all, take a deep breath. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed in the heat of the moment, but that will distract you from dealing with the incident logically and efficiently.
If you’ve prepared for the incident, panic won’t be the instinctive reaction. Abby Mangold, founder and MD of crisis management agency, The Mangold Consultancy, is keen to point out it’s often an emotion that arises as a result of a lack of planning. “The source of panic is usually from the unknown,” she says.
She urges that it’s important leaders guide their teams in the same way they would usually. Familiarity creates a sense of calm. “There really shouldn’t be a change in leadership technique, and if you’re a leader who takes time to think things over, you need to buy some time because there’s so much pressure from every layer of the business,” she says. “The way you do this is by having a great team set up with a clear set of processes in place.”
By maintaining this sense of calm, a team will most likely assess the situation better and propose more logical steps to tackling it. It will create the space to think and respond quickly and appropriately.
“Any leader needs to set the example in a time of crisis,” Lisa explains. “They need to be seen as calm, confident and collected. At the end of the day, they’re the figurehead and ideally they’ll be first on the scene in terms of response.”
Staying connected
There’s safety in numbers, but only if you’re all heading in the right direction and that won’t happen without good communication. Crises will exercise your cross-department communication skills and if you haven’t got this nailed, your hopes of retaining your company’s reputation will end in tatters.
“Your staff need to know what’s going on very quickly,” warns Lisa. “You must have intranet, internal emails, newsletters and a really structured internal communication system to get your message out.”
Second, your message must be consistent – not just in terms of information but in tone. Mismatching and poorly constructed internal messages will shout loudly about your team’s panic under fire.
It can be helpful to create a set of messaging that will be the foundation to all communication produced during the crisis. But Abby suggests that this should translate into a tone and language that suits the person you’re talking to. “Use the language that you usually speak to them in, don’t use very corporate, very dry, grey language if it’s not what they’re used to hearing,” she says.
It’s also important that you don’t do so much communication that there’s no time to resolve the actual crisis. You can buy time by setting boundaries, says Abby. “It’s about setting up regular calls and sticking to it. You need to say ‘our next call is in two hours and that’s when I’m going to update on the information’.”
The dangerous currents of a crisis
When a crisis breaks, a whirlpool of challenges will threaten to pull you down. Here’s what you should look out for:
Reacting to negativity. A company is likely to come under fire when it’s seen as neglectful or dishonest. Don’t get off on the backfoot by letting that negativity multiply as you craft a perfect response. Seize control of the problem by responding immediately with genuine compassion and concern. Connect at an emotional level until you can reply with the facts.
Getting the right people together. Bad news hits at any time. It may be while you, or your boss, are on holiday. Plan a crisis community that includes reserves for all eventualities. If only one person can manage any given aspect of a crisis then you need to upskill your team.
Looking after your team. It can be tempting to sacrifice your well-being for the sake of a swift resolution, but nothing will be completed efficiently if your staff aren’t sleeping or eating properly. Ensure you look after them, and yourself.
Fact-finding
A crisis will leave everyone clawing for information but when dispersed through word of mouth it can often be a mix of fact and fiction. It’s imperative you don’t act on information unless you know it’s true. “Information can often come through on an ad hoc basis, so it’s important to have sight of the whole picture before commenting to external sources, particularly the media,” confirms Pamela.
It’s crucial that as soon as any potential crisis breaks, the senior management team including the CEO get around the table or on a conference call to assess the nature of the incident. This will usually include people from operations, legal, financial and HR in addition to marketing.
Pinpointing the facts can be one of the most difficult steps in the process. “You often know very little at the beginning and conversely later on in the crisis, you end up having way too much information that you’ve got to go through,” explains Abby.
Emphasise the facts you’ve established, but don’t ignore the gaps in what you know. “You need to acknowledge the situation and keep updating as often as you can. And sometimes that means you haven’t got the information that you need,” says Abby. From there, you’ll be able to assign the right people to gather the information you still need.
Types of crisisCrises take many shapes and you’ll need a plan that adapts to them all. This could be:Major political changeTerrorist attackEnvironmental disasterFatalityPR blunderIT equipment failureSupply chain failure
How B2B brands coped with a crisis
BP: The explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon killed 11 people, injured 17 and the resulting oil spill took nearly five months to clean up. During the crisis, the company used social media to provide regular updates, which gained 58,500 followers. In the aftermath of the incident, marketing spent £60 million on a blitz campaign. Its CEO Tony Hayward featured in a TV advert apologising for the spill and promising to clean it up. A further 100 TV adverts have been uploaded to BP’s YouTube channel since, and adverts were posted in local and national magazines, newspaper and television.
Jaguar Land Rover: Programmatic ads for the manufacturer started appearing next to extremist online videos. The company suspended all UK online advertising until an investigation found how the incident had occurred, including how they could advertise without making the same mistake. Online advertising resumed fairly quickly and JLR spoke to the press to promote the fact that they had carried out a full review.
Volkswagen: The car manufacturer hit an epic crisis when it was revealed that it had misled authorities and the public over its products’ carbon emissions, leading people to falsely believe in its environmental benefits. Early communications and a video featuring CEO Martin Winterkorn were criticised for failing to fully acknowledge the depth of the scandal, which led to his resignation. Online marketing that referred to clean engines was deleted and its ‘Das Auto’ slogan was dropped. Volkswagen’s first campaign since the scandal was emotive, promoting it as a ‘lifelong companion’.
The crisis checklistA crisis plan must be a well-thought out process. Talk to your CEO and the board to get their input on what they think the potential risks are. Here are just some aspects you should consider:Identify and evaluate the crisis. Which team members need to be on the response team? If you identify a potential crisis, how will it be escalated? How will you ensure consistent communication and messaging across the company?Assess and evaluate. Who is the next layer of management you need to tell? How will you find out the facts? Whose responsibility will this be?Scenario planning. Have you drafted holding statements and communications templates? What is your media protocol going to be? What’s your social media strategy?Communications. Who’s going to be the spokesperson on the issue – and their back-up? How are you going to deal with internal comms and who’s responsible for that? Who will be responsible for updating your senior team, website, social media and suppliers?
