25 Practical Tips For Managing a Crisis in the Workplace

Here is What You Need To Do When the Sky Is Falling

If you have not yet experienced it in your career, you will at some point. Managing a crisis at work is difficult for even the most skilled of leaders. Every time I think of such situations, I imagine that scene in the movie Apollo 13, when NASA controllers place all the available materials on a table to try to find a way to fix the injured spacecraft. They’re sweating, under pressure and people are depending on them to succeed.

You don’t have to be in control of a space capsule to find yourself in the midst of a crisis at the office. Rather, chaos can be triggered when you learn your software has been hacked and a quick fix needs to be developed. Perhaps you learned a product had a defect after you shipped thousands of units and you now need to figure out what to do. Or maybe a world event has had a major impact on your firm, and you need to shore up the company to maintain stability.

In all such instances, crisis management typically follows the same four steps.  First, there is the initial containment and understanding of the issue. Second, once the problem scope and scale is understood, work generally shifts towards investigating the cause of the problem. The third step uses the previous two activities as a means to outlining and testing theories to resolve the matter. Finally, the fourth step is to implement changes or controls for the long-term.

Four steps may sounds easy, however, when you are in crisis mode there are time pressures, financial challenges, customer impacts and more than enough stress to go around.  There will even be circumstances when you are not sure what to do.  I have experienced these very unpleasant situations many more times than I wish to remember in my career, to the point where I have mapped out the common steps toward resolution.  So while there will be a sudden blizzard of panic and urgency, just know that there is a solution; you just need to find it.  Here are 25 actionable tips to make sure the resolution comes as cleanly and efficiently as possible:

1.  Establish a Core Team

When managing a crisis situation in the workplace, a great deal of cross-team interaction is necessary. Your specific circumstances may require involvement from process specialists, quality specialists, customer service representatives and supply chain personnel. The first step in resolving crisis is to create a core team of leaders who will ‘own’ their function’s actions. Place these names on an organizational chart so roles and hierarchy are clearly understood.  The core individuals will serve as the leads for each respective sub team and will be responsible for all activities within their jurisdiction throughout the process.

2.  Identify a Support Team

Identify additional individuals who support each functional leader. For example, if your crisis involved software, the Programming Leader should have an adequately sized team of supporting software specialists helping that Lead complete actions and run tasks to ground, rather than having the Lead handle all the issues by him or herself.  Without a support team, the Lead will struggle to focus on coordination and communication because he or she will also be responsible to complete various tasks.  From a personal standpoint, you must separate reporting and coordination from doing and analyzing.  Place the names of the supporting team members on the organizational chart and align them to a given functional leader.  Understanding who is doing what is essential.

3.  Create Task Isolation

Classic management theory tells us that when large change is being introduced into an organization, that the team doing the day-to-day work should be decoupled and independent of the team implementing the change. The same approach must be used when working through a crisis: the team that is managing and supporting the crisis needs to be removed from the day-to-day to ensure they can clearly focus on resolving the issue. Equally, the team that remains assigned to the day-to-day needs to remain focused on those activities. Added resources from elsewhere in the organization are typically needed to allow the respective teams to remain productive.

Create a Physical Space to Work

The last thing you want to do is leave the team fighting for space to work and collaborate.  Create a separate space for the team to work, that is dedicated to the crisis response.  This can be in the form of a single conference room, a dedicate location in the factory, or simply a dedicate set of cubicle bays.  The ability to place charts, graphs and data on the wall, as well as to spread out documents and information on a table cannot be understated.

4.  Lists Are Your Friend

When you’re engulfed in chaos, numerous discussions take place and a variety of suggestions and ideas constantly emerge. Make lists of these thoughts to serve as a record for revisiting later. Place them on a white board in the room for all to see, or just on a piece of paper in your notebook. Bring in a scribe to help if necessary. Simple lists will help you keep track of activities when you find yourself jumping from topic to topic throughout the day.

5.  Standardize External Communication

Communication to key stakeholders – internal executives, customers and supporting personnel – is paramount during a crisis. Everyone will want to know what progress is being made, and a great deal of time is often consumed simply by keeping others up-to-date.  Establish your standard protocol for communication to these stakeholders that will be followed throughout the process. Especially in crisis mode, all communication should follow the What? So What? Now What? format.  By setting a clear communication strategy early on, you can ensure all parties know what to expect and when they can expect it.

6.  Identify and Maintain Priorities

For a crisis resolution team to work well, it is important that priorities are established, and are clearly understood by everyone involved.  Avoid reducing efficiency by having team members work on unrelated tasks. Further, the established priorities of what’s important and what should be deferred to a later date must remain consistent.  Everyone wants the situation to go away as quickly as possible, but you’re only delaying the end if you continuously change the focus.  If changes in priorities are necessary, clearly communicate such changes to the team instead of relying on the communication to trickle out.

7.  Set Your Cadence

Because of the multitude of meetings and activities that need to happen when working to resolve a workplace crisis, set a consistent schedule and expectations of time when the core team will meet on a daily basis. An early morning standup meeting everyday can help establish alignment for things to be completed on that day.

You may want to consider meeting again in late afternoon to verify progress and to uncover any issues that may prevent closure of actions. Regardless of what schedule you establish, make sure the schedule is clear and consistent, and outline your expectations of each participant. Particularly if weekend work is required, establish the plan in midweek so that people can have time to rearrange personal plans as needed.

8.  Use a Disciplined Problem Solving Method

Even with communication and schedule protocol in place, you will need to conduct the investigation systematically. You can accomplish this by employing a structured problem solving technique. Many formalized problem solving tools exist; one such example is known as the 8 Discipline (“8D”) method. Doing so will create some much-needed structure around the problem, and provide a controlled path towards resolution.

Other problem solving framework options include the Shainen technique and the 5-Why analysis approach. If you are not familiar with these methods, call an expert. The money you spend on an expert facilitator will save you cash and aggravation in the long run. Regardless of which problem solving method is best for you, it is vital that you agree on a method and stick to it. This will ensure all team members are aligned to the steps and process being followed.

9.  Prepare to Spend

Any organization that finds itself in the middle of a large-scale problem will very likely have its back up against a wall. Time will be of the essence. In almost every case, costs associated with the investigation – expediting fees, shipping fees, travel costs, equipment costs, liability fees, etc. – will quickly add up. Most organizations have standard protocol for expense approval (usually someone in the Supply Chain or Finance departments).

Once the crisis management team is formulated, be sure to identify the individuals who must approve and track cost expenditure, as well as issue any purchase orders or sign off on related expenses as necessary. If these roles or individuals are not clear at the onset, it can lead to delays in progress.

10.  Methodically Drive Action and Progress

No matter how complex the situation or how difficult the circumstances may be, all major problems are resolved by making incremental progress. When managing a crisis, emphasize to the team that completion of short-term actions is necessary to resolve the bigger issue. Time spent looking for a quick fix and ‘silver bullet’ as they say is likely to be time that is wasted. Repeatedly emphasize the need for controlled and methodical progress, and avoid losing time pursuing quick fixes and responding with knee jerk reactions.

11.  Create Simple Diagrams and Visuals

A great way to organize plans in a chaotic environment is to make the flow of activities visual. Box diagrams and flow charts serve as a great way to outlined the major activities in a simplified form so that it can clearly be communicated to the outsiders, and more importantly, to help align the team members to various activities being worked.

A visual diagram does not replace a full up schedule, but certainly takes the complexity out of a large Gantt chart, boiling down the tasks to a small list of key efforts.  Visualizing the effort at a high level helps show the sequence in which various tasks will be completed and how they relate to one another.

12.  Focus on the Right Solution, Not the Fast One

When you are facing a crisis situation, it is natural to look for the smoking gun. We all want to make the problem just go away. Unfortunately, this sort of miracle does not happen often, so it’s is important to remain focused on the right resolution and avoid jumping to conclusions. Taking short cuts typically results in more trouble. Band-Aid solutions and ‘fix-it’ plans should only be used to address short-term needs, and not be relied upon as the end-all resolution.