A good crisis management team analyzes on-the-ground reports from the various lines of business and corporate support areas. Business units are executing their business continuity plans, which may mean they have already turned to work-around solutions, hoping that you will solve the large problems so that everyone can return to normal operations. What are the types of decisions, then, that a crisis management team is responsible for?
• Determining whether employees should stay at work, report to work or work from home.
• Evacuating employees if necessary from foreign locations.
• Determining whether emergency assistance may be offered to employees.
• Authorizing unusual expenses—an example of such expenses may be extra security personnel to monitor a facility that has been damaged.
• Authorizing internal and external communications, with a strong element of shaping the story that will be told by the team.
• Considering and then acting on legal advice that may cover a wide range of topics, from liability to reputational risk exposure.
• Providing updates to regulators and to boards of directors, so that there are no surprises.
In summary, a good crisis management team is empowered to make the optimum set of decisions on behalf of an organization. Over time and with experience, the team can operate from a playbook that bears a strong resemblance to a streamlined set of checklists. Such a playbook allows the team to handle lower level events with dispatch and to meet higher impact events with a level of knowledge and competence not otherwise possible when juggling too many new fast balls. Crisis management is not simply the management of natural disasters, though we have certainly had our share of them in the past several years. It is much more than a compilation of procedures. It is decision making at its highest level.
(This article is excerpted from a longer one I published in Continuity Insights in February of 2012.)