A speaker identifies nine behavioral patterns that make crises worse: silence, stalling, denial, victim confusion, aggressive posturing, arrogance, blame-shifting, media avoidance, and whining. Each one damages reputation and blocks effective response. Leaders should recognize and avoid these patterns in favor of transparent, collaborative crisis management.
Chapters
Everything about responding to crisis is a process. Even failure is a process. And in doing this for many years, I've identified essentially a pattern of failure that you immediately recognize and want to avoid going forward. There are nine ingredients to this. I'll walk through them quickly because they're very interesting, and you will remember the first one is. The first ingredient of failure is silence. I've already told you a number of times, silence is a toxic strategy. Avoid it. It ruins your reputation and maybe your employment, who knows? The second is stalling this business of just not doing things, just waiting to get something done. Remember we talked about being hesitant, being timid? This is a bad thing, people notice. Third is denial. Denial is simply saying, even though it's leaking, foaming, thinking, burning, and you're responsible for it. You know, it's like, where's the fire? Where's the smoke? What's the problem? Okay? Fourth is, I call this victim confusion. We hear this a lot. The company who's just blown something up or just done something terrible to a bunch of people or animals in the environment says, well, you know, it's not as bad as you think. And we're a good company. We've always been a good company. You know, we sponsored 100 baseball teams or something. It somehow the company says, we're victims, too. Companies and perpetrators cannot be victims. Only victims can be victims. The moment you talk as though you're a victim, we look at you and know you're a perpetrator. Fifth is my favorite testosterosis, okay? And for those of you who run things out there who are female, you have this too. It's a pattern of getting angry, wanting to hit back, wanting to strike out, rather than focusing on getting things done and frankly, apologizing, so to speak. Sixth is arrogance, and let me define arrogance for you. Arrogance is deciding essentially what other people will do, say, or how they'll behave without consulting them, okay? And it never works. It makes people angry. And, you know, rule number one in the response process is, you know, do not create additional critics and enemies in the process. Arrogance creates enemies, and critics don't do it. 7. Search for the guilty. You know, when we can't solve the problem of who caused it or what it's about or how it happened, begin looking around for people to blame. We also call this blame shifting. It's a time waster. We're all aware of it when you do it, and it's a whole separate set of news stories and social media stories which you want to avoid by this time. If you haven't really done some good communicating. Number eight is fear of the media because all of a sudden this gap has occurred between essentially what you're supposed to be doing, much of which is communication and which you're going to have to do now. And there is great fear and trepidation because this is what happens when you wait too long. I guess my second favorite is the last one. Number nine. It's called whining. Sticking your finger in your navel and walking around with your head down. Sort of just whining about stuff. Okay, Whining is not strategic. It doesn't help with anything. People lose confidence in you when you're whining. Management by whining around is a bad thing. Skip it. But it's one of those things that's very memorable when you do it. Okay, this is the list you want to put on your mirror in the morning. Look at it and avoid every one of these items every day.
