Effective Leadership During Crisis:

Crises can strike at any time and in many forms — a financial crisis, natural disaster, business disruption, or even political upheaval. No matter how talented or prepared your organization is, you need strong leadership during a crisis if you want to emerge safely on the other side.

Learn what skills you need during a crisis, how to develop a crisis management plan that adapts to circumstances, and how Whole Brain? Thinking can improve your organization's resiliency.

Understanding the Importance of Strong Leadership During Crisis

A business crisis is a sudden, unexpected event that threatens to disrupt an organization's operations. What rises to the level of a crisis? Anything that threatens an organization's reputation, finances, or very existence.

Crisis management is the process of dealing with a crisis — identifying the problem, developing a response, and executing that plan. Crisis management is often considered reactive.

Minimizes Negative Effects?

Time is of the essence when a crisis strikes. You don’t want to be unresponsive — or even appear that way. On the other hand, crisis leadership is about responding the right way, not just with meaningless activity.?

Great leaders assess the situation, create a response, secure the resources they need, communicate the plan, and get to work. While it’s too late to prevent the problem, they can still minimize the negative impact.?

Protects Your Employees

Your employees are trying to solve the crisis, but they’re also grappling with it. They’re likely in a fragile state emotionally with lower morale. In rare cases, you’re literally trying to protect employees from injury or worse.?

Crisis-ready leaders embrace their responsibility for the workforce. Their response plans prioritize employee safety and well-being. These leaders empower employees to help with crisis response by providing the necessary resources and clear communication. Your workforce performs better when they trust the organization, and that’s never more apparent than during a crisis.?

Avoids the Next Crisis

Crisis management is an important quality, especially in large organizations or companies whose work carries inherent risks. But the goal is to prevent fires (literally and figuratively), not just put them out.?

Leaders who invest in crisis leadership and preparation are actively scouting for the next crisis. This might include known risk areas, such as cybersecurity, or less-predictable events, such as an unusually strong natural disaster.

Displaying Empathy

Crises are stressful, and many people are frustrated, upset, or suffering from the effects of the crisis. Empathy is a powerful quality for leaders who want to connect with their stakeholders and help them see a path forward.

Empathy doesn’t mean avoiding tough decisions. In fact, it can lead to inclusive leadership and better decision-making. These crisis leaders are calm and composed in the face of adversity rather than reacting to fear or panic. Practicing empathy helps build trust, connection, and buy-in.

Create Response and Recovery Strategies

Your response and recovery strategies are likely the components that your workforce will experience most acutely during a crisis. Response strategies mitigate the impact of a crisis, while recovery strategies restore operations and return to normal as quickly as possible.

Both components are part of an overall organizational strategy, but they succeed when they are built with expert input from across the organization. These strategies should include:

Response strategies include:

• What, when, and how to inform your stakeholders, customers, and the public (if applicable).
• What your organization will do in the event of such a crisis.
• The tasks and responsibilities for each function and job role — for example, who are the decision makers?Making Better Decisions in a CrisisDuring times of crisis, leaders need to help everyone focus on what’s next. This is a daunting challenge, as you need to make good decisions quickly and without full certainty. While you need to leverage your problem-solving strengths, you also need to welcome other thinking preferences. Displaying leadership during a crisis requires you to stay calm, assess the facts, cultivate a range of perspectives, and act decisively.?