The Need for a Crisis Culture


15 February 2011


Being prepared for crises can bring increased morale and efficiency. Leading communications expert Richard Levick outlines the logic behind maintaining a flexible crisis culture.


What are your crisis plans? If you cannot at least begin a thorough, logical, and orderly response to that question, you're in trouble already. To succeed these days, all companies need to operate in a crisis culture and live in a state of nonstop readiness for the next unexpected event.

It's important to qualify what we mean, and don't mean, by "crisis culture." It does not mean that you and your employees live in constant dread. A crisis culture is emphatically not the same as a fear culture.

Quite to the contrary, a climate of fear is just what may result in the absence of a crisis culture. Fear, after all, stems mainly from the unknown. When emergencies arise and people lack a basic plan of how to respond, how to communicate internally and externally, and what the next step might be, they have no choice but to make it up as they go along. That's when panic sets in.

By contrast, a crisis culture is one in which everyone knows what he or she is supposed to do in an emergency before it happens. Compare it to working out. You wouldn't set out on a two-mile swim across a channel without having first done some serious laps at the Y over a period of time. So why put yourself in a position of figuring out how to respond to a crisis at the very moment you're trying to respond to it?

Just like exercise, crisis preparation makes you healthier even if you never face that crisis at all. There's a fine line between crisis and change. A company ready for crisis is a company ready for change. A company riding along on cruise control without considering the possibility of crisis may be missing opportunities for positive change. You will not know the exact specifics of the crisis until it happens, nor can you know for sure when it will happen. But with a chain of communication and response in place, you and your colleagues will know how to adapt calmly, decisively, and flexibly to most any situation.

Turf war is a human instinct

As the chief executive of Global Rescue, Daniel Richards is never surprised when he hears from a company that needs help rescuing employees stuck in a foreign battle zone. As his company name makes clear, helping people out of serious, often life-threatening jams is what they do best.

"Quite to the contrary, a climate of fear is just what may result in the absence of a crisis culture."

What does surprise Richards, time after time, is how many companies face perilous situations totally unprepared even though they're the ones who sent the employees into a troubled area to begin with. "Those are the 2 a.m. phone calls that come into our operations center from a company with 10 people in Lebanon as the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict is starting, and they've got no idea what to do. We've actually had that happen," Richards says.

Chaos and panic are two of the expected results of such unpreparedness.

Even more insidious is when different departments in a company form silos to protect their own interests. "When it comes time to actually mobilise a response, different departments in the company can even act in an obstructionist way, interfering with people trying to solve the crisis," Richards says.

Such obstructionism is extremely destructive under any circumstances and all the more tragic when lives are at risk. The bottom line is that you cannot assume that your teams will do the right thing (even when they are well-meaning), especially when the right thing calls for change. Crisis response is not about self-preservation, but about team preservation. It requires a coordinated effort to save the most critical things first, regardless of territory. If people fight turf wars when lives are in jeopardy, imagine how much more fiercely self-interested their behaviour in non-life-threatening crises will be.

"We had a Fortune 25 company call us and retain us to go get their people. The way they approached retaining us, from the beginning, was not dissimilar from the way they'd approach retaining a company that supplied nuts and bolts. Purchasing was involved, and procurement, and legal, and everybody wanted something," he says. "Finally…a C-level individual had to assert himself in order to get through all of the crippling bureaucracy that was going to prevent us from doing the things that needed to be done. We've seen that over and over. Sometimes these organisations get out of their own way and let the problem be solved, and sometimes they don't."

While not all situations are so life-critical, more commonplace crises can be just as debilitating. As Richards says, "All you have to do is pick up the paper to see that a lot of companies aren't prepared for financial crises either."

Too often, companies go through elaborate motions by preparing an exhaustively detailed crisis preparation plan, only to file the plan away and return to business as usual. "There's a very big market today for crisis consultants, disaster preparedness, redundancy of systems, and other things," Richards says. The real test comes in putting the plan to use during an actual event. If only one or two people in your company remember the contents of the plan, that's as good as having no plan at all.

To make the plan viable, you'll need an ongoing crisis team that actively and regularly trains for a variety of emergency situations. "The saying is that generals are always fighting the last war," Richards says. "Well, people are always preparing for what they have experience with, and that typically is the last crisis they faced. The problem is that, as the nature of the future crisis changes or the amplitude or magnitude changes, you may not be prepared."

"While not all situations are so life-critical, more commonplace crises can be just as debilitating."

As such, training should include specific scenarios (a natural disaster, an accounting crisis, a mishap involving your products and customers, etc.) but should be general enough so that the lessons can be transferred from one type of crisis to the next. And all scenarios, regardless of specifics, should include the assumption that digital media can, and will, take the story viral at any moment. In the end, what you are trying to achieve is a sense of teamwork and togetherness that allows you to meet and overcome exigent circumstances. You are trying to build trust and an instinct for the overall mission rather than self preservation. That's why it is your responsibility to make clear to everyone exactly what you mean by teamwork.

By so doing, you also communicate to your staff that you are prepared, savvy, and committed to protecting them and the company. You will be rewarded with increased loyalty, Richards says. "When it comes to morale in the organisation, if you're not going to respond and support your people, it becomes very difficult to lead and motivate."

This feature is an exclusive extract from Richard Levick's new book 'The Communicators: Leadership in the Age of Crisis', available in hard, electronic, and Kindle copies via Amazon.com, Levick.com, Bulletproofblog.com, and Watershed Press.com.

Richard Levick is President and CEO of Levick Strategic Communications and is a columnist for top business blogs such as Forbes and Fast Company. He is the co-author of The Communicators: Leadership in the Age of Crisis and Stop the Presses: The Crisis & Litigation PR Desk Reference, and writes for Bulletproofblog. Mr. Levick is on the prestigious list of "The 100 Most Influential People in the Boardroom," which is compiled by the NACD and Directorship Magazine.