If You Can’t Lead Through Crisis, You Can’t Lead at All

Throughout my career as a communications professional, I have reminded my clients, colleagues, and audiences that “You can’t communicate your way out of what you behaved your way into.” And I should know. I’ve been the spokesperson for many people who have behaved badly.

I’ve been the woman trembling and nauseated while speaking with Crain’s Chicago Business about my employer’s latest scandal. I’ve run through the hallways toward the president’s office, to declare “The ABC News helicopters are overhead. We need to make a statement.” I’ve been invited by attorneys to sit with corporate leaders and elected officials accused of sexual misconduct, theft, fraud, and more … and it’s been my job to make the “bad press” go away, and to help the suddenly infamous regain their reputations (or at least drift quietly into obscurity). Crisis communications makes me sick — literally. I’m very good at it and I hate it with my every molecule.

Indeed, I can’t help someone who behaved their way into crisis or chaos to talk their way out of difficult times, but I can and do help them craft messages that are authentic, vulnerable, surprising, and timely. And so can you.

Don’t Waste the Crisis

The COVID pandemic recently taught us that even those of us who lead admirably and with heart can find ourselves in a crisis. Surely, if you lead long enough and in an industry that matters, crisis always comes knocking. One of the industries I am most known for serving is higher education, and in 2023, it’s evolving — beautifully and painfully — often mired in crisis and change.

• Dozens of colleges and universities have recently announced closures
• Controversies abound (e.g., teaching assistants on strike, campus crime on the rise)
• Enrollment declines are accelerating, with no end in sight, and
• Vocal students and faculty are bringing age-old problems (and possibilities) into the light.

Now is a scary time to lead in higher education. It’s an exciting time as well.

During the 2007-2009 recession, John Popoli, then president of Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, told his employees: “Don’t waste the crisis.” It was the single-most mindset-shifting piece of advice I’ve ever received in my career. I hope I have done him proud with how I’ve handled the crises I’ve experienced since — at work and in my life.

How have you fared?

• If your organization learned to operate more leanly during the Great Recession but you went back to your old ways of wasteful spending, you “wasted the crisis.”
• If you achieved new levels of productivity and workplace satisfaction during the remote work of the pandemic in 2020 — and then you forced everyone back into the office without addressing work/life harmony and burnout risk — you wasted the crisis.
• If you felt forced to oust a company leader who bungled a public comment in horrific fashion, and you didn’t subsequently invest in media and communications training for your executives, you wasted the crisis.

Crisis is terrifying and, for some of us, invigorating. I encourage you to let every crisis change you for the better. Learn to embrace what the CEO of Foundry College, Dr. Akiba J. Covitz, calls “beautiful chaos.” Make lists of what you’ve learned during your most recent crisis, what the crisis revealed about your people and your organization, and what you can and will do differently (starting right now!) so your next crisis hurts a little bit less.

5 Ways to Grow Your Leadership Team into Crisis Experts

So, how do you keep your cool when the going gets tough, and how do you prepare and support your leadership team through the unthinkable?

1. Don’t tolerate panic, grievance, or blame when the pressure gets high. Teach your people to take a deep breath, and calmly begin with, “So, here’s the situation …” and “We’re all in this together.”
2. Show up, authentically. Be brave enough to say “I don’t know,” “I was wrong,” and “I’m sorry.”
3. Jump into collaboration and community and avoid the turf wars. During a business disruption, crisis, or scandal, it’s easy to fight for control or disavow responsibility. Let go of the job titles and operational silos and come together. Right now.
4. Train your people — up, down, and across the organization — to confidently communicate during crisis. All executives should receive periodic crisis-communications and media-relations training. And all front-line workers (especially the receptionist and the customer-service representatives) should be given every tool and power possible to help calm the chaos.
5. Empower your team to identify and embrace the silver linings, even during the worst of the storm. Meetings during a crisis should include phrases like: “Here’s the surprising insight …,” “Here’s the short-term solution and the long-term possibility …,” “Here’s where our people can shine …,” and “Here’s the opportunity for us … if we don’t waste the crisis.”

Your next crisis is coming. Maybe not tomorrow and maybe not even this year. But it’s coming. And the option to be prepared — to get through it together and learn valuable lessons along the way — is yours to take.

Written by Kate Colbert.
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