Mike Barger

Crisis management, as it is described in both academic and popular literature, provides a great deal of guidance on how leaders should think, behave, and lead during a crisis. But ultimately, business leaders simply cannot afford to think only about how they should deal with a raging crisis when it appears. What happens before a crisis is critical. To become effective high-stakes leaders, it is just as important that we understand how to prevent crises as it is to lead effectively during them. The subtitle of my new book High-Stakes Leadership in Turbulent Times is Why Stakeholders Are Your Greatest Assets in Good Times and Bad. I created this subtitle to emphasize the importance of stakeholder relationships, not only during and after a crisis, but even when things are running exceptionally well. Nowhere does the value of stakeholders become more evident than in the role they can and should play to help high-stakes leaders identify potential sources of future crisis. Here are some ways to think about engaging your stakeholders to help them help you find and address significant opportunities for improvement that, if ignored, could lead to a major organizational disruption. Internal Observations Which of your primary stakeholder groups is in the best position to conduct internal observations for indications of possible trouble? Your employees, of course. If you want your employees to serve in an observational capacity (i.e., if you want them to be on the lookout for areas of opportunity for improvement), then you need to make sure they understand what that means and what you expect them to do. Just by taking this step – you will be increasing your organization’s resilience. When you share this expectation with your direct reports, however, you will receive lots of questions, such as: What should I be looking for? How should I report what I find? What happens after I report something? Will my identity be shared, or will observations be anonymous? These are all great questions, and you’ll have to develop responses that fit your unique circumstances. Just know that if you want your employees to support the organization in this capacity, then you’ll need to be clear about your expectations and be ready to respond to questions in a way that inspires them to take on the responsibility. Second, you will need to tell your employees what to look for. At organizations that do this most effectively, employees are educated on the sorts of threats they are likely to see and how they are expected to deal with them. It is rare that an internally generated crisis doesn’t offer early warning signals — signals that employees are likely to see. Therefore, to improve your capacity for identifying potential organizational threats that may start small and grow rapidly, employees must be taught how to search for and respond to them. Third, the organization needs a process for passing the information from an observer to someone (or some team) who can address the issue(s). The process must include specifics for dealing with questions about reporting processes, communication channels, anonymity, consequences, reputational safety, and the like. These will all take time and effort to define and communicate; but done effectively and with a genuine commitment to employee engagement in the identification of organizational threats and opportunities for improvement, a culture can be created that wonderfully supports a capacity for resilience. External Observations How does an organization engage external stakeholders to serve as observers for potential threats to the enterprise? It does so exactly as you would intuitively expect – by taking the time to understand the interests of each stakeholder group and building relationships with them. Consider how your organization gets feedback from your customers about your products and services. How do you learn about what customers are buying, what they like best about your offerings, what they like least, and what they would change if they could? These are the types of questions being asked of customers today in just about every sector. Customer feedback has become a primary source for product development and innovation. Online reviews everywhere are driving the way customers interact with brands and are determining the future for those companies. But those reviews often come too late or don’t tell you enough. Asking your customers directly to tell you about their experiences can be game-changing, and establishing an ongoing feedback loop with customers can help you collect information on threats to your organization too. Customers in just about every business sector on the planet have demonstrated a willingness to share their thoughts and feedback in any number of forums, often with remarkable honesty and specificity. They will respond to surveys, post comments and reviews on websites, and many are happy to participate in focus groups or on discussion panels. As a high-stakes leader, your threat detection efforts might benefit considerably from leveraging these connections to get feedback not only on product features and future innovations, but also on customer concerns and minor incidents involving your products. Second only to your employees in their willingness to help your company succeed, customers can be an exceptional resource in your threat identification efforts. Can your other external stakeholders also support your external observation and threat detection efforts? They certainly can. As with your customers, strong relationships with everyone from regulators to the media to the customers of your competitors can create opportunities to both formally and informally solicit observations and receive feedback that can be useful to your organization. Consider what you could be doing today with your external stakeholders to more effectively engage them in conversations that will help you learn not only how to make your company better, but also to identify potential issues (sooner rather than later) that could grow into full-blown crises without your immediate attention.

When an organization finds itself in a crisis, each of its stakeholders will be concerned about the threat to their specific value proposition. Predictably, each will be looking for any information they can uncover to better understand the nature, extent, and potential impact of the threat. One of your many responsibilities as a high-stakes leader should be to position yourself and your team as the primary sources of this information. Why is it so important for an individual or a small team within an organization to serve as the primary source of “the facts” during a crisis? Because not only will stakeholders look everywhere to discover information, but there is evidence that many will demonstrate a belief in just about anything that they find. What evidence exists to support this claim? From our own experiences, we know this to be true. When was the last time that you conducted a Google search for an answer to a problem that you were trying to solve? When you searched, did you find it challenging to differentiate the good advice from the bad? Was it difficult to separate fact from fiction? If you struggled a bit in your attempts to find the “right” information, you are not alone. As we have all learned from our own experiences, sometimes the information on the internet is not particularly accurate, complete, or unbiased. During a crisis, when stakeholders are not getting the information they want, need, or expect, where will they go to get it? When they visit the internet (particularly when they head over to Facebook or Twitter) to learn about an ongoing crisis, what might they find? How accurate is the prevailing information likely to be? How would they know the difference between good information and bad? Common sense tells us that Google may not be the best place to find accurate information about a developing crisis, but the search engine has become so integral to our lives that it is reasonable to assume that it will be used, nonetheless. For high-stakes leaders, this can become a significant liability. In fact, we all saw this play out during the COVID-19 pandemic in many ways. A particularly interesting manifestation of this involved Corona Beer, a product of Grupo Modelo (a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch InBev), which is brewed in Mexico and exported widely to the United States. While reports have suggested that Corona sales were not negatively impacted by the beer’s name (which it shares with the “coronavirus,” the generic term often used to refer to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19), there is evidence to suggest that not everyone has been able to embrace the lack of relation. In an article published by USA Today on January 29, 2020, a headline read “The coronavirus has nothing to do with Corona beer. But, some people seem to think so.” The article cited the surge in Google searches for: “corona beer,” “corona beer virus,” and “beer virus,” suggesting that some people were presuming a correlation (or at least an entertaining irony) between the beverage and the coronavirus outbreak. While this somewhat comical headline may result in some head-scratching by most readers, there is evidence that the impact of social media’s embracing of the story has, in fact, produced a behavioral result. The following photographs, taken in several liquor stores across the United Kingdom, were shared on social media to document the impact of the Corona/COVID-19 connection. While there is certainly a possibility that these photos were staged and that my references are only perpetuating an urban legend, it is important for crisis leaders to recognize the behaviors that social media can instigate. During a crisis, stakeholders will search for (and often take as fact) any information they can find in a desperate and well-meaning attempt to better understand the extent of the threat to their lives and value propositions. What can high-stakes leaders do to diminish the likelihood of losing the attention of stakeholders to other sources of information? They can take the necessary steps to ensure stakeholders view members of the crisis management team — or other leaders at the organization — as the source of facts during a crisis. The best way to accomplish this is to establish and publish a recurring schedule for the distribution of updates. Crisis managers have found that setting an expectation for the provision of updates at an established time every day and through a specific mechanism (e.g., a daily 6:00 p.m. press release or a live press conference) is very well received by stakeholders. Perhaps you watched New York Governor Andrew Cuomo or Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear during the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic conducting their daily press conferences to update all interested stakeholders on the latest news. The commitment of these two leaders serves as an exceptional illustration of a best practice that created a means for stakeholders to receive consistent, reliable information. The point here is that, to be recognized as the source of facts during a crisis, it is necessary for high-stakes leaders to be very clear about what, when, where, and how stakeholders should expect to receive regular progress updates. Then, once these expectations have been set, crisis leaders must effectively deliver on these expectations during each briefing.

One of the most challenging aspects of crisis leadership is communication with stakeholders. During a crisis, all your stakeholders will be looking for as much information as they can get. When their value propositions have been threatened, it is only natural to expect them to be desperately seeking any and all intelligence that might shed light — and hope — on their distressed expectations. As crisis leaders, we know how important it is to share any information that becomes available with our stakeholders. We recognize that they are anxiously awaiting any news that we have to share. So, when there is some news to share, crisis leaders will typically find a way to share it. No rocket science there. But what do crisis leaders communicate to stakeholders when there is no news to share? I contend that communicating when there is “no news” is critical, and that cultural norms surrounding email communications have led leaders astray about communicating when we don’t have much to say. We’ve all become so bogged down by overflowing email inboxes that we’ve decided it’s rude or unnecessary to “over-communicate” with our stakeholders. Perhaps your company sends a monthly newsletter now, instead of a weekly one, or has moved most of its promotional offers to social media and retains the email channel only for “important” news. During a crisis, we are often not confident that we have something new to share, so we are tempted to hold back a communication because we aren’t certain that it is “important enough” to send. We don’t want to fill inboxes or mailboxes or media airwaves with messages that don’t have big announcements or news of a resolution or a call to action for our stakeholders. So we sometimes go silent when we ought to be communicating most boldly, candidly, and compassionately. The rules of engagement that you use when developing strategy for an email newsletter or normal stakeholder communications do not apply during a crisis. Remember, these are not normal circumstances. During a crisis, stakeholders are anxious, perhaps fearful, and they want information. You are a crisis leader, and, recognizing your stakeholder’s interest in what you have to say, you want to deliver reliable, meaningful information to them. So, what do you do when there is nothing new to share, when nothing much has changed from yesterday’s message? Do you hold off until tomorrow for an update so as not to send something that might be viewed as lacking any substantive news? No. You must keep your communications flowing. And to help you overcome the urge to wait for big news to share, here’s something to keep in mind: When you are leading a team through a crisis, no news is news! Here’s why. During a crisis, there are countless moving pieces. A great deal of activity is taking place and new information is becoming available all the time. As a member of the crisis management team, you’re seeing much of this information first-hand. You and the team are working through it, analyzing it, and determining how it contributes to your current understanding of the situation. In many — perhaps even most — cases, you determine that, “the new information hasn’t added much to your previous understanding.” So, you decide that the little you have learned is not worth sharing. You might think, “Why fill someone’s mailbox with something that doesn’t provide any new information?” Why? Because your stakeholders are acutely interested in what you have learned. They are anxious about the threat to their value proposition, and they want to know what progress has been made, if any, to resolve things. They have been watching all the activity and perhaps they have even seen bits and pieces of news through other distribution channels. They just know that there is news to share — even when there isn’t. When you don’t send an update in the midst of the heightened tension, you are thinking that you are sparing your stakeholders from just another useless email. Your stakeholders are not seeing it this way. They are certain that there is news to share — and when you fail to provide it, they decide that you’re keeping it from them. They assume the worst, and they assign nefarious intent. “There’s something they aren’t telling us,” they think (and tell their friends or colleagues). It’s just the way we are wired. Knowing this, we must get out in front of such assumptions and rumors. The point I’m trying to make is that crisis leaders should want to become the trusted source for information. To become this trusted source, you must establish that you and your team will communicate what you know, when you know it — even if what you know today isn’t anything more than you knew yesterday. During a crisis, your stakeholders are going to assume that there is always news to share. To earn and maintain their trust, you need to share what you know at regular intervals, ideally on a programmed schedule. Then, as scheduled, you should share what you know — whether you believe it to be newsworthy or not. Never forget that during a crisis, all news — even no news — is news.