How do you engage stakeholders in a crisis or emergency situation?

Engaging stakeholders in a crisis or emergency situation requires clear, timely, and empathetic communication. The first step is to identify who your key stakeholders and what are their interests.Quickly gather all relevant information about the crisis. Understand its scope, potential impact on stakeholders, and key issues that need to be addressed.By focusing on clear, empathetic, and consistent communication, you can engage stakeholders effectively during a crisis, helping to maintain trust and minimize confusion.

In a crisis the first step is to put the Fires out ASAP. I have worked with organisations where the instinct was to launch a 3-month procurement exercise for a bucket of water, but this did not produce a good outcome. The next stage is to repair the damage and get everything working properly again, with all the procedures in place. Then you can begin to formulate a plan for the future. Only when you have a plan can you take it out to consultation, listen to people, and try to get them on board. They cannot bring their contributons unless tere is something to discuss.

Most crisis and emergency situations are going to involve multiple internal and external stakeholders. Therefore, it is essential to include identifying key stakeholders from the start when devising an emergency response. Who are they? What part of crisis are they impacted? What role do they need to have in the response? Once you have identified key stakeholders, you can then create an emergency response team, response plan, timeline, and communication process. All stakeholders should have representation and communication. Leaving key stakeholders out of the response could negatively impact relationships by creating mistrust while inadvertently adding unnecessary time and costs by designing partial or unrealistic solutions.

In a crisis, it's easy to panic, to leap into action immediately and run around trying to put out the fires. Yet this can be counterproductive - the most important thing when leading through a crisis is to remain calm. So take a beat - even if it's just for 30 seconds. Breathe. This allows you to think clearly - and to identify exactly what you need to either resolve the crisis, or take the first steps to resolving it. Which in turn allows you not only to identify the most important stakeholders - either who can help fix the crisis, or who need to be informed - and get clear about exactly what you need from them. It feels counterintuitive to pause in the middle of a crisis, but trust me, it is essential.

Yes, but you commuication plan must be based on something real. You are not discussing plot lines for a TV show or a Marvel film.

It is essential to get clear on exactly what you need to convey to each stakeholder, and what response you would like from them. Are you passing on critical information, or do you need action? When you need to act quickly, and get responses quickly, you may need to change your normal routes of communication - a telephone call is often the best way to get responses quickly. When putting your team together, consider who will be the best people to work with each stakeholder - especially if you may need somebody at a senior level. In a crisis, it can be easy to think only of the impact to your organisation or project, so also consider how the crisis may be affecting the stakeholders, and how you can work with them to ameliorate any impacts.

Yes. Of course. You can achieve a lot if you give other people the credit. My preferred style is caring, white-haired Grandfather.

Stakeholder engagement is all about human interaction and connection - never more so than in a crisis situation. Emotions may be high, people may be angry, frustrated, or fearful - and often justifiably so. You may also be angry, frustrated, and fearful - never a good combination for a productive interaction. So take a beat to come out of your own emotions to be present for your stakeholders. Be honest, allow them to talk, show that you appreciate their situation, and that you care about fixing it. Hopefully you already have excellent relationships with your stakeholders, and demonstrating true empathy at this time will help you to co-create solutions that you might not have thought of yourself.

Showing commitment to helping your stakeholders to manage or avoid impacts to them or their organisation will be appreciated. Ask what you can do to help, work with them to identify solutions, or (if appropriate) offer resources to support them. Apologising is important - and be clear that you are apologising for the impact to them. And ask for their suggestions or feedback as to how a similar crisis could be avoided in the future. As people outside your team or organisation, they may have an objective and novel view.

It helps if you have real progress to report, can be honest about problems and and what you are doing about them, and have a credible prgramme fot the comng months. Vapourware never works.

In a crisis or emergency, engaging stakeholders is critical to ensure they contribute to solutions rather than unintentionally create additional problems. The key is proactive engagement—if you've prepared and exercised plans with them beforehand, you'll be in a much stronger position. During the crisis, effective delegation is essential to free up the leader’s capacity for high-level decision-making and managing key stakeholders. With this approach, you’ll significantly increase your chances of driving positive outcomes.

The above article is typical of the advice we get from earnest HR officers who have no experience in anything real. Douglas Adams parodied tham as the Golgafinchans, who invented the Wheel but wold not introduceit until te Marketing Department had agreed what colour it should be, and would not seFire until they could agree what the Fire-Users personalexperience should be. If this is written by a Chatbot it does not surprise me. It is shallow and repetitive, and adds nothing to benefit anyone. Orwell called it 'Duckspeak': speaking without thinking. But it could have been produced by any number of Customer Support Managers or Politicans I have worked with.

Having excellent, engaged relationships with your stakeholders in the good times will ensure that when you either need their help urgently, or need to convey bad news, you are far more likely to get a positive response, and to co-create a solution out of the crisis. The worse thing you can do is ignore a stakeholder and only go to them when you need something...