Managing Uncertainty Podcast - Episode #117: What Successful Crisis Management Looks Like Internally

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Managing Uncertainty

Business


In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses what successful crisis management looks like inside of an organization – including some philosophy about how the team at Bryghtpath thinks about leading in a crisis. Related Episodes & Blog Posts Blog Post: How 3 companies have managed the COVID-19 pandemic Blog Post: The Importance of Having a Crisis Communications Strategy Episode #59: All roads lead to one – Crisis Management Framework Episode #88: What is the goal of crisis management? Episode #93: Crisis Management Plans – What your executives really want Episode #96: Crisis leadership in the time of Coronavirus Episode Transcript Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. And this week, I want to talk a little bit about crisis management philosophy. I want to hit on really two big topics. One is, as we’re demonstrating to clients in a lot of conversations, what does successful crisis management look like? When you’re inside of a company and you’re watching the company react to a crisis situation and go on to manage that crisis well, whether it’s an IT disruption, it’s a natural disaster like a hurricane, a violent attack like an active assailant, or active shooter situation or it’s a reputational crisis, what does that successful crisis management effort look like inside of a company? The second is I want to talk a little bit about our crisis management philosophy here at Bryghtpath, how we think about structuring crisis management programs and leading through crisis situations. I’m going to have kind of five key points to make as we talk about that. So let’s start by talking about what successful crisis management looks like. So, again, you’re inside of a company and you’re watching the company react to a crisis and if you’re managing it well, there are some core key factors that you’re going to see. There’s going to be some key things that will really stand out to you. The first one is rapid response. The company is going to quickly move to react to the situation. And if they can, if it is a situation where they can prepare for it, if they can be on the left side of the boom, as Harvard professor Juliette Kayyem likes to say, like a hurricane where you know it’s coming, you have three, four, five, maybe even seven days to prepare for that, you’re going to position that response in advance of that incoming storm so you can move as quickly as you can. But no matter what the crisis is, you’re going to see the company respond rapidly. They’re going to get geared up and they’re going to activate their crisis process and they’re going to start to prepare and react. The second thing you’ll see is that inside of the organization, there are clear roles and responsibilities. Again, there are clear roles and responsibilities. Someone is in charge of the response, the incident leader or incident commander if you want to use an incident command s