Tweet

Crisis Management - The Essentials

Guest post by: Justin McKeown

Article Overview: Protecting your reputation - your most valuable business asset - during a crisis is a major concern. But how do you go about it?

Crisis Management - The Essentials

Never before has reputation been so important. In today's competitive market, reputation can be a key differentiating factor. Reputation evolves over time - it's based on your vision and values, the quality of your products and services, and your corporate personality and behaviour.

It's driven by the opinions and experiences of the complex web of individuals that make up your stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers, partners, investors, journalists, pressure groups, regulators and competitors.

Essentially it's all about communication, trust and long-term relationships. A good reputation can inspire stakeholder loyalty, attract new consumers, strengthen your supply chain, keep the regulators from your door, protect you during a crisis, and ultimately drive shareholder value by defending your bottom line.

Reputation is one of your most valuable assets but it's difficult to acquire and manage, yet all too easy to damage or destroy. And once it's dented, it can take years, if ever, to recover.

According to research carried out by Lloyds, risk managers in UK and US food and drink companies saw accidental and deliberate contamination, followed by health and safety issues, as the biggest threats to their organisations' reputations.

Food and drink are emotive topics. Consumers want brands that they recognise, whose quality and consistency they trust. A crisis is anything that threatens that trust relationship by presenting a gap between stakeholder perceptions and expectations, brand values, and reality.

Your crisis could be caused by internal failings or by an external person, organisation or event. It could be driven by a product recall, poor financial results, employee relations problems, or because you failed to properly understand your stakeholders and what your brand means to them.

Protecting your reputation - your most valuable business asset - during a crisis is a major concern. But how do you go about it?

The golden rule is to communicate. Effective communications are based on honesty and transparency - and this applies just as much, if not more so, during a crisis when relationships and trust are pushed to their limits.

People understand that mistakes happen and things go wrong: provided you demonstrate you can be trusted to tell the truth, to show leadership, and to act in the public interest.

This is where your long-term investment in your reputation pays off. The stronger your reputation, the more leverage you have to protect the brand in a crisis.

So tell your stakeholders the facts as soon as you can. It may be tempting to cover up or delay, but the truth will always out and when it does the consequences for your reputation will be significant.

Talk about what happened, what you're doing about it and how you will prevent it happening again. Be seen to take stakeholder concerns seriously. Act decisively and quickly to reassure stakeholders that you are in control. Be proactive and keep communicating - if you're not talking about the crisis, someone else is.

Make sure your messages are consistent, internally and externally. Ensure your actions match your words and your behaviour doesn't conflict with your values. You don't want to enhance that gap between perception, expectation and reality.

A crisis needn't damage your reputation. When properly managed, it can provide an effective opportunity for communicating and demonstrating your values and integrity on a very public stage.

But to achieve this sort of result you need to prepare long in advance. As we know, investing in your reputation pays dividends during a crisis. This means investing in effective and professional public relations.

PR professionals are experts in relationship management and two-way communications. They help organisations understand stakeholders' perceptions and expectations, and they can identify, inform and manage emerging issues and crises.

Putting PR firmly at the heart of your strategic decision making processes is much more effective (and less painful) than waiting till a crisis has developed before bringing in your communicators to firefight. Too many companies only really value public relations after a crisis.

So if you have been through a crisis, you'll know the true value of PR. If you haven't - don't learn the hard way.

Related Articles
  Do You Know Where Your Disaster Recovery Plan Is
  Managing Crises Before They Happen
  “Crisis Management Planning – What’s Happening Where We Work?”
  In a time of crisis, PR is your greatest asset
  What Are the Factors That Lead to an Economic Crisis?
  Crisis Communications Planning or What To Do Before During Or After It Hits The Fan
  Golden Rules for Crisis Management
  Is the imagination genie out of the bottle at your place?
  Don't Allow the Economic Crisis to Infect Your Sales
  Rebuilding Your Finances After an Economic Crisis
  The Fundamentals of Crisis Communications
  Your Customers' Needs Change in Tough Economic Times
  Inventory Management - Automated Systems
  Crisis Management
  Economic Crisis Affects Our Coffee Production Industry
  Reputation Preservation in a Crisis
  Crisis - What Crisis?
  Major Crisis don't just happen!
  Leverage as the Cause of the Global Financial Crisis
  Crisis Leadership

Article Tags: Crisis, Crisis Communications, Crisis Management, Public Relations, Reputation



Related Forum Posts
No B.S. Time Management - A great book I read on Time Management is No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs by Dan Kennedy.
Which kind of industries are you interested in? - Ecological or E-business or Investment or Finance or Management or Non-Profit or Retailer or others.
HRPreneur - Hi everyone, I am new to the forum and I recently started my own Human Capital (HR) consulting firm called HRPreneur Inc. HRP focuses on making human capital a strategic differentiator for SME's. Below is a summary about HRP; Who We Are: HRP is a Human Capital consulting firm with 30 years of experience that becomes an extension of your company by providing a full array of services to help you create a highly engaged workforce focused on achieving strategic results in order to build a long lasting great company! Mission: HRP provides small and medium sized businesses a Strategic HR Business Partner to increase employee engagement, resulting in cost savings, increased productivity and results at an affordable rate! Vision: To inspire and warrant SME's reach their full competency! Cost Effectiveness: We provide over 30 years of experience at a fraction of the cost at a strategic executive HR business level You will save between 50% to 60% in costs per year on salary, bonus, benefits, training, office space alone We will provide you additional cost efficiencies through our services Services: • Strategic Human Resources Planning • Organizational Redesign • Change Management • Organizational Culture Development • Employee Engagement Programs • Leadership Assessment and Development • Compensation Design • Talent Acquisition • Assimilation and On-Boarding • Performance Management • Talent Management & Succession Planning • Human Resources Due Diligence • Human Resources Audit • Full Service HR Outsourcing
Books for Women Entrepreneurs - There's a thread for good books in the Resources folder, but it doesn't target books for businesswomen particularly, so I figured I'd start such a thread here. It doesn't matter how successful you are in your business - it's always possible to learn something new. In subsequent posts I give Table of Contents and brief descriptions for various titles - most of them devoted to the businesswoman - and sometimes a review. If anyone else has read a review, or has read the book and found it useful, please comment! 1. The Old Girl's Network 2. Mother's Work 3. The 7 Greatest Truths About Successful Women 4. Pitch Like A Girl 5. Workplace Warrior 6. Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the Modern Consumer 7. Contingency Planning & Disaster Recovery 8. She Wins, You Win 9. Napoleon On Project Management 10. Why Good Girls Dont' Get Ahead, But Gutsy Girls Do 11. Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Restart your Career even If you Haven't Had a Job in Years 12. The One Minute Millionaire 13. Talking From 9 to 5 14. Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambitions 15. 101 Best Home Based Businesses for Women: Everything You Need to Know About Getting Started on the Road To Success 16. Work With Passion: How to Do What You Love for a Living. Revised and Expanded 17. Fail-Proof Your Business: Beat the Odds and be Successful 18. Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End 19. Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide 20. Millionaire Women Next Door: The Many Journeys of Successful American Businesswomen 21. Start Small, Finish Big: Fifteen Key Lessons to Start - and Run - Your Own Successful Business 22. Rewired, Rehired or Retired: A Global Guide for the Experienced Worker 23. The Martha Rules: 10 essentials for achieving success as you start, build or manage a business 24. The Essentials of Entrepreneurship: What it takes to create Successful Enterprises 25. Net Ready: Strategies for Success in the E-conomy 26. The Promotable Woman 27. Leave The Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro shows you how to do more in less time and feel great about it 28. The Work At Home Balancing Act: The professional resource guide for managing yourself, your work, and your family at home 29. Secrets of Six-Figure Women
Re: what position to request? - What do you think of: Executive Manager? Director of Product Management? I am not interested in working as a freelancer. As I mentioned, the purpose of what I am doing is to get involved into a startup that may become successful in the future. This is a situation when a group of people get together to launch something promising and invest into this their time and energy and even may be money.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Secrets of Successful Business Partnering

BUILDING A HIGH PERFORMING TEAM

The new marketing question. Will they follow?

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.