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Sunday, September 18, 2005
Responsibility goes with crisis management.
They're not telling me anything!That all-too-common cry was heard repeatedly for days, even weeks, following Hurricane Katrina--a painful, classic example of lousy crisis management and crisis communication on many levels. The exact opposite is happening now with Hurricane Rita.
The most fundamental component of crisis management is fast, effective communication. The void in communication creates more fear, stress and outright panic. And this compounds the event, whatever that adverse event might be.
Responsibility goes with crisis management. It’s not just the responsibility to reduce lawsuits or protect stock advisories, it’s the responsibility to humanity. Crisis management is not just a buisiness, not just a skill or trade. It also is a service to the people affected by our business, organization or government.
When planning (I can only hope each of you has a detailed, practiced and reviewed plan) responses to crises, how often does that sense of responsibility enter the discussion? I’m willing to bet it’s not often enough. There isn’t a religion I’m aware of that doesn’t admonish us to be kind to our neighbor, to help each other. How does your crisis management plan take that into consideration?.
No, it’s not a given. It must be spelled out in the written plan that there is concern for the effect on people, whether disaster victims, stockholders, accident victims or terribly inconvenienced customers. Putting it in writing and making it a point of discussion is an ethical consideration too easily overlooked when the greater concern seems to be protecting budgets or politics.
Certainly protecting financial stability is important to crisis management because employees are another group of individuals to consider. And we owe our jobs in public, media or stockholder relations to the business, organization or government for which we work. A little self-interest is to be understood. But where do we draw the line between our jobs and internal politics?
For most of us who have even a modicum of morality, caring about the effect of our crisis management on the people likely to suffer from incompetent communications allows us to sleep at night. Or perhaps you're not sleeping too well?
Why not, and what can YOU do about it?
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