Corporate Crisis Management Blog

The debate swings back and forth about whether Starbucks response to events in one of its Philadelphia stores in April is good, bad or indifferent crisis management.

However, it is inarguable that Starbucks did more than most would do - and the incident and its aftermath very effectively underline and illustrate the new rules of crisis management.

The facts of what happened on April 12 now seem established.

When was the last time you updated your crisis plan?

Go and take a look at it right now.

If the last revisions were dated more than two years ago, you are in trouble.

There is a high probability that your plan will not serve you well should you face a real crisis, in a world where digital media drives threats at lightning speed – and in which online and social media is the source of so many reputation and business crises.

You finally got around to building a new crisis preparedness plan.

One built for the digital age.

The plan is designed to enable a quick and effective response to emerging threats.

But how do you know it will work when the worst happens?

Waiting until your business and reputation are on the line in a dangerous situation is not the time to find out that your plan has weaknesses and omissions.

You get the call at 6pm on the Friday of a holiday weekend.

Your IT Manager has just discovered that the organization has suffered a major compromise of its data from an external party. It’s unclear how long it’s been going on or what information has been stolen.

Your job is to get the Crisis Management Team up and running and tackling the threat.

It’s been a wild and fascinating period recently in the world of crisis management. Let’s take a look at three highly visible crisis management case studies from the past year, looking in particular at what we can learn from them:

Long-time and highly respected crisis expert Gerard Braud has a golden rule for any crisis communications plans that he authors.

Every plan directs that a statement MUST be issued in one hour or less of a crisis going public.

Do you recall the frustration of trying to manage a crisis when you were being told by legal that the only acceptable public response was, ‘No comment’?

That might have been good legal strategy – but it was often a disaster as a way to protect the organization’s reputation and rebuild trust with stakeholders.

Now, in the age of digital and social media, the need to regain control of a crisis with your own story and messages has never been greater.

For those of us who live in Florida, the memories of September 2017 are very fresh.

Just days after we had watched on television the devastating impact on Texas of the named storm Harvey, we were glued to the television watching the ever-changing path of the category 5 Hurricane, Irma.

As Floridians in the strike zone evacuated to safer locations, major employers in the state activated crisis and emergency contingency plans.

Imagine how you would feel if you heard about a family secret from a third party on the internet, or in the newspaper?

That is exactly how employees feel every time they learn about a significant announcement or bad news from somewhere other than company leaders.

This powerful observation opens a fascinating chapter in RockDove’s new ebook, ‘The New Rules of Crisis Management’, focusing on the role of employees in a crisis.