6. Assume that there are no secrets and share public information in a uniform manner. While getting blasted in the media is no fun, if you are proactive and seek out public forums for telling people about the crisis and what you intend to do to address it, you will help manage the message instead of it controlling you.

7. Take Responsibility. When appropriate, apologize quickly and broadly. You don’t need to snivel or grovel, but if you had a part in this crisis tell people that – and tell them what you’re doing to fix it.

8. Conversely, do not blame others. The crisis at hand may be something not caused by you or your organization, but defensively (or worse, offensively) placing blame on others is a very risky strategy. Do your best to remain neutral and helpful, regardless of the circumstances.

9. Be solutions-oriented and future-focused. Once you’ve dealt with the problem at hand, be immediately ready to tell people what your organization is doing to ensure this situation is not repeated (or if it’s an unavoidable or uncontrollable external situation, how you’ll handle it even better next time).

10. Post-crisis, as appropriate, continue to reach out to those affected by the crisis and involve them in developing your future strategy. Engaging with customers, donors or others who may have been “wronged” in some way is never easy or fun, but damage control from a crisis doesn’t end just because you’ve tentatively solved the problem. Rebuilding trust with stakeholders takes time, effort, dedication and humility, but even in the worst of crises, if you act with good intentions and an open mind, you may come out stronger.


In the end, handling a crisis should really be common sense human behavior:

• Don’t do wrong
• Don’t hurt others
• Don’t lie
• Don’t hide from the truth.

Sure, you can complicate it much more than that, but if you keep some simple ideas in mind, you’ll be just fine. And hopefully, even better than that!



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Diana L. Reid, Conscious Communications

When a crisis hits, communicate directly, honestly and frequently.

1. Focus on safety and security first. If the crisis at hand has the potential to harm people, animals, property, the environment – make sure you do everything in your power to address, mitigate, reverse and/or compensate for this damage.

2. Develop a set of key messages, facts and figures and speaking points for the crisis and ensure these are rigorously adhered to. This is especially important if your crisis has any potential legal ramifications. While you need to communicate quickly and often, you don’t want to create more problems for yourself by saying things you should not!

3. Address key stakeholders – employees, board, customers and constituents – as immediately as you can. There will be certain times you can’t disclose all details right away, but the best and most important thing you can do is recognize publicly that there is a crisis and let people know what you are doing to deal with it.

4. Designate one or two key executives or board members to serve as spokespeople and make them available to answer questions from employees, donors, media, etc. Keeping your public front small but united helps you ensure the message you’re delivering is consistent and allows others in your organization to focus on their own job or role. A crisis is a stressful time and while everyone might want to help, a smaller, focused communications and response team is likely going to serve you better.

5. Be honest, straightforward and forthcoming in all communications. You may not know all the details and/or may have legal or other reasons for not sharing everything publicly, but do not lie, hide, spin or otherwise avoid telling the truth. Your reputation will never recover, nor will your employees’ or donors’ loyalty.


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Diana L. Reid, Conscious Communications

Create a cross-functional team tasked with crisis management.

This might sound a bit “corporate” and arduous, but it doesn’t need to be. The goal here is to pull together key people from all of your appropriate departments that may be called into action should a crisis occur. The exact composition of your crisis team will depend on your organization, size, structure and focus, but some folks that should likely be high on your list will be:
- Executive Team/CEO/ED
- Board of Directors and/or Advisors
- Operations (including Human Resources and Finance)
- Legal
- Communications/Public Relations
- Manufacturing/Suppliers
- Customer Service
- Investor/Donor Relations

In addition to the team tasked with dealing with a crisis, also consider how you’ll set up your organization to monitor issues that may become crises. For customer-facing or product-centric organizations you may delegate this to Customer Care or Quality Assurance, and for issues of reputation and image, you’ll have Public Relations and Legal keep an eye out, and so on.

Make SURE you not only have systems in place to cope, but early warning systems that help you buy team to deal with a crisis, or better yet, avert one!

Develop a written escalation path and process for alerting others to potential risks. A crisis doesn’t always have to be a crisis; and if you don’t see it coming, you’re not likely to handle it well.

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Diana L. Reid, Conscious Communications

Now that we’ve discussed what may constitute a crisis and the risks and rewards of handling a crisis well, here are some tips for handling a crisis:

Plan, plan, plan

Like a bad performance review, a crisis should rarely sneak up on you. The best organizations and corporations out there *know* what their risks, exposure and liabilities are, and plan for contingencies and unknowns. This doesn’t mean that you need to be omniscient, just smart. Sit down with your board of directors, advisors and colleagues and make a list of all of the things that could potentially befall your organization. Consider the internal and external environment of your organization and take stock of where a crisis might come from, and how it could impact your organization and constituents.

As part of your planning process, walk through each type of potential crisis and rate it according to (a) the likelihood it will actually happen, and (b) the severity of the impact if and when it does. Then you’ll want to “stack rank” these potential crises in priority order and start to build scenarios and action plans for dealing with them should they occur. You don’t need to detail every single step you’ll take for every possible crisis that might rock your world, but you should know how you’ll handle the most likely crisis and have at least a skeleton action plan in place for your top 5 most likely/high priority crises.

A crisis management plan will include several components – again varying by type of organization/business and type of crisis. Some common aspects of a crisis plan include:

• Communication plan. Who needs to be communicated with and when? Who will own creating, managing and delivering all communications?

• Action plan. What needs to happen to avert, divert or manage the crisis? What steps are needed to deal with, fix or address any negative impact or harm brought on by the crisis? Who needs to take each particular action? You’ll likely divide the action plan into phases and departments – each step of managing a crisis may require different people (see recommendation #2 next week for additional discussion).

• Decision tree. Depending on the scope and scale of the crisis you’ll have major decisions to make at various points. Think back to the Tylenol crisis; there were any number of steps Johnson & Johnson could have taken – from denying the problem was theirs, to settling lawsuits quietly, to recalling just a certain lot number of Tylenol capsules that may have been linked to the deaths, to their final decision/action: recalling all Tylenol capsules and replacing (at no charge) customers’ current bottle of capsules with a new packages Tylenol tablets. For your plan, identify at what points in your crisis response you’ll need to make decisions, what they might cost/gain your organization, and who will take the lead on that decision.

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Diana L. Reid, Conscious Communications

As we’ve discussed previously, the true raison d’être behind Public Relations is to develop and/or manage your organization’s image and reputation in the eyes of key publics. Even in the best of times this isn’t always easy, and in the worst, well, it’s obviously going to be no picnic.

Thus, one of the smartest things you can do for your organization’s longevity is to create a “crisis” communications plan – well in advance of when you might ever (and hopefully never) need one.

So what constitutes a “crisis”? Well, that’s obviously going to depend on your organization, industry, geographic location, key stakeholders and the like, but the bottom line is that a crisis is any situation that can threaten the integrity or reputation of your company and/or cause harm (physical, environmental, financial, etc.) to your stakeholders. These situations can be caused or influenced by your organization or completely external, yet with significant impact on your organization, employees, constituents and/or other individuals.

From a communications and reputation perspective, a crisis is when the stakes are inordinately high and you have a chance to really shine – or fall flat on your face. If handled well, damage can be minimized and your organization can even be strengthened; remember the Tylenol tampering scare back in the 1980’s? Or Wal-Mart’s rapid response to communities in the New Orleans region after Hurricane Katrina?

Conversely, if a crisis is handled poorly, your reputation and/or your organization may never recover. Consider the current U.S. Administration’s lagging response and/or disjoined relief efforts following Katrina -- the November 2006 elections show us this has certainly not been forgotten. And the makers of Kryptonite bike locks perhaps now wish they’d not been so slow or somewhat flippant in their response to Internet videos in 2004 that showed how to easily open Kryptonite bike locks with a ball point pen. Only after tremendous public outcry, threats of lawsuits and extensive media coverage did the company issue a recall, and even then it was limited, with company spokespeople blaming the problem on the style of lock, not their company.

So how do you ensure positive crisis management? (And no, that’s not an oxymoron!). It all starts with a clear vision, excellent long-range planning, strong organizational structure and governance, easily mobilized resources, proactive communication and a cool head. I’ll provide some more specific tips for crisis management in my next post.

In the mean time, be thinking about what crises could potentially befall your organization and how they might impact you, your employees, your world… To be sure, that ought to get your creative communication skills flowing!

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Diana L. Reid, Conscious Communications