Too bad Joan Dawe thinks otherwise.
Crisis response isn't rocket science.
That doesn't mean it's easy but half the battle is won if one merely looks around for possible assistance or advice. Imagining that your situation is unique, or worse, trying to excuse events after that fact with the "uniqueness" canard is to set your organization up for a fall now and in the future.
Four missteps leaders make when dealing with a crisis, courtesy of Fred Garcia, a well-known crisis response expert, who, it should be noted just conducted a workshop for the Public Relation's Society of America's healthcare specialty subgroup on leadership in a crisis:
1. Ignore the problem: management seems unaware and is surprised by a crisis that others
saw coming, or that they themselves were warned about but chose not to take seriously.
We saw such behavior in the early days of the New Orleans flooding; the Catholic Church
sex abuse scandal; the Ford Explorer/Firestone Tires recall; and when accounting firm
Arthur Andersen ignored numerous internal warnings that it was compromising auditor
independence in its dealings with Enron.2. Tell misleading half-truths: management tries to misdirect attention by speaking literally
true statements with the intention of misleading, which challenges adversaries or
whistleblowers to uncover the full story. On the first day the Monica Lewinsky story broke
in the Washington Post, President Bill Clinton told MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour host Jim
Lehrer a literally true but misleading statement: ‘‘There is no sexual relationship.’’ The
media and the President’s critics noticed the use of the present tense, and turned up the
pressure to get the president to address past behavior.3. Lie: management tells a deliberate untruth with the intention of deceiving. Four days after
telling Jim Lehrer that ‘‘there is no sexual relationship,’’ President Clinton hosted a White
House ceremony during which he told the media the lie that has become the defining
soundbite of his administration: ‘‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss
Lewinsky.’’ The lie challenged his critics and special prosecutor Kenneth Starr to seek
evidence to prove the relationship. When the evidence surfaced, President Clinton went
on television and admitted both the relationship and the lie.Martha Stewart was indicted, tried, convicted, and imprisoned not for violation of
securities laws, but for lying to federal authorities investigating whether securities laws
had even been violated.4. Assign blame to others: rather than taking meaningful steps to solve the problem,
management tries to redirect attention away from itself and to someone else. When the
Ford Explorer/Firestone tires crisis first became public, Firestone tried to shift blame to
Ford, saying that Ford instructed customers to inflate tires to the wrong pressure. Ford
blamed Firestone for making defective tires. Consumers were left to wonder what would
become of them.
-srbp-