CRISIS MANAGEMENT - THE TOP TEN THINGS ONE SHOULD KEEP IN MIND

Crisis is usually defined as a moment of ‘intense difficulty or danger’ or ‘a time to take an important or a crucial decision.” It could be personal, institutional, organizational or societal. It is usually associated with an unanticipated, unplanned, natural or man-made situation which disturbs the equilibrium of the processes and the engagement of the people. It sets in a series of alarms whereby people feel emotionally disturbed and often lose sight of the environment in which they function or a sense of discomfort with the system with which they are engaged, and feel high levels of insecurity. The situation pushes them into a sphere of intense fear and the mind seeks all avenues of seeking security either for the self or for operating circle in which they are placed. Such a situation could arise in any profession, at any level of engagement or at any stage of an operational process. Oftentimes, even the most diligent, competent, experienced and seasoned people set themselves on emotional fire with a sense of helplessness. Or they could drive the people working with them or associated with them to a level of madness which they may not have anticipated. Managing a crisis has always been a matter of serious debate in any management forum. The tools and techniques required for managing different types of crises might vary depending on the uniqueness of the process, geography and the operational universe. However, there are certain fundamentals one should remember to effectively handle such situations.

1.NEVER PRESS A PANIC BUTTON.

In almost all types of situations that relate to a crisis, the first reaction appears to be to push a panic button. This is a natural selection of a human mind as a reaction to an extreme sense of fear, insecurity or disturbance to an equilibrium state. In doing so, they often lose their balance in behaviour and radiate a lot of stressful energy, thus disturbing not only the equilibrium state of all others but setting in a chain reaction. In this process, the core issue is often lost sight of and the focus on controlling the causes that led to such a crisis is not attended to. There is quite a possibility of the people involved moving away from the nucleus of the problem. Hence it is very important to understand that pressing a panic button really doesn’t help the management of a crisis, but could indeed add more fuel to the problem.

2. NEVER BELIEVE IN RUMOURS

It is usually said the quantum of the smoke is always more than the quantum of the fire. People often tend to see the spread of the smoke and start interpreting the cause of the fire based on their own perceptions even without seeing the fire. These perceptions are articulated into stories which are caricatured on some of their intense feelings about the past history of a similar situation to which they had been familiar.  These stories and the imageries associated with them have their locus far from the reality. But they often tend to excite the much-needed emotions of the listeners. Rumours, thus tend to play a devastating role in creating falsified pictures of situations and tend to provoke actions which are unwarranted, uncalled for, unethical or sometimes negative. It is therefore important that situations of crisis should be insulated from rumour mongers. Those who are dealing with solving issues that brought about the crisis should ensure that they don’t believe in rumours.

3. NEVER YIELD TO SELF-PITY

There are occasions when the seriousness of a crisis may lead an individual or the team to self-pity as a reflection to the occurrence. In trying to advocate themselves that they could have been a little more cautious or alert in avoiding a crisis of a given nature, they might lend themselves to self-pity or a sense of self-defeat. The crisis manager or the team has to consciously or deliberately avoid such situations or expressions of self-pity yielding to defeatism. They need to get up and raise to face the situation with courage and conviction. Losing the morale on such occasions is an avoidable possibility.

4. MAKE PRUDENT DECISIONS

Most situations of crisis will call for one’s urgent attention and a quick decision to be taken. While decisions need to be taken quickly and contextually, it is equally important that decision are not taken on an impulse or under a force of circumstances or without proper consideration of the emergent situation. Oftentimes, it will be like throwing water to quench an electrical fire which would rather aggravate the situation rather than work as a healer. Possibly, taking a collective decision with the help of a core group would be much better, as collective wisdom often wins over an individual’s wisdom. However, there may be situations when a crisis is handled by a single individual and hence it might be a call of the time. On such occasions, with not much time left to get over a crisis, the individual will have to quickly enlist a set of priorities and put in place the action plan. It may also be useful to consider an alternate action plan simultaneously.

5. REDUCE REACTIONS; FOCUS ON ACTIONS

During times of crisis, it is seen that a number of people feel wise enough to offer views, opinions and suggestions which are absolutely out of context and sometimes they might irritate the person handling the crisis. Also, one could find people who would say “If I were in your place,”. There are also people who might provoke you to react with statements which are aggressive, unethical and provocative. It is important to keep oneself cool and engage in actions rather than formulating reactions. Reacting to such people would not only shift the focus from the core issue, but also would be waste of most purposeful time on such occasions. Reactions tend to sap the energy of the people, who should be using it productively during such occasions. This is not a time for justifying to people what went wrong and why it went wrong.

6. DON’T ENTERTAIN OR ENGAGE IN A BLAME GAME

One of the most immediate happenings after an event of crisis or even during its own course is an active” blame game”. Rather than addressing to the problem on hand and offering the much-needed support, a few people engage into a blame game. They either feel it is important to move away from the zones of responsibility or accountability, or consider this as the most opportune time to target a few others for the cause of the crisis. Blame games often come with a history of events that led to such a situation or their observation of the crisis from its embryonic stage. They look forward to people from whose shoulders they could shoot their bullets. Crisis managers should ensure that they should not entertain such people in the crisis operation zone or even if they are existent, not to attach much significance to their entertainment.

7. DON’T EVER PLAY A VICTIM

Some crisis managers tend to play a victim on such occasions. They project themselves as a part of the system in which such things happen and they are as such victims to such situations. They tend to seek sympathy from others and want to build a profile of themselves as people who shoulder such responsibilities knowing fully well that such things would happen. Such utterances, projections by the crisis managers show them in poor light. It is important to assume responsibility on such occasions though logistics might prove later that accountability for such happenings might somewhere else. Crisis Management calls for display of courage, a sense of responsibility coupled with a bit of wisdom to handle things with adequate maturity.

8. DON’T HESITATE TO SEEK SUPPORT OR RESOURCES

The time of crisis is not the time for display of one’s authority, power or seniority in an organizational structure. It is a time for concerted efforts to undo a few things which should not have happened or to set in place a few things which have derailed from the system. It cannot be handled individually. The crisis manager should have the capacity to mobilise both human and other resources that would be required to ensure normalcy. There may be a number of people in an organization who display situational leadership to handle crisis, though they do not have a positional leadership. The crisis managers should let them emerge and display their talents and use their skills to tide over the crisis and restore normalcy.

9. DON’T USE THE CRISIS FOR INCREASING THE POPULARITY

Occasions of crises attract a wide publicity, both within the organization and outside including the social media. They are either keen to know what has happened or what kind of a story could be built which will be beneficial to them. Sometimes crisis managers do feel happy to engage in such publicity domains and feel a social recognition either on a positive or a negative note. These actions might build the profile of the people, but are not certainly professionally relevant. The focus has to be totally on engaging with the situation rather than using them for self-promotion. Display of unadulterated professionalism will help in tiding over the situation with ease.

10. DON’T HESITATE TO LEARN YOUR LESSONS

Every crisis brings along with it a set of new lessons – lessons those which relate to inadequate planning, inadequate supervision, inadequate communication, a sense of apathy, lack of control points, misplaced trust systems, delayed responses and the like. It is important for the individual and the team to keenly examine the cause and the process of crisis; they would open to many lessons which they had never learnt in their career or in their past learning profile. Crisis Managers need to analyse, record, discuss and draw inferences from the indicators that led to the crisis which should help them to put in place a re-engineered process which would minimise such eventualities.