LEADERSHIP ASSIGNMENT

Instructions:

Describe a crisis situation in which you observed someone providing effective leadership. Briefly describe the situation, the leader, and how leadership solved or improved the crisis situation. The essay should be 4 pages in length, typed double spaced.

USE MINI-LECTURE AND OTHER SOURCES IF YOU WOULD LIKE!!

MINI-LECTURE BELOW:

MLS 5351, Week 8 Mini-Lecture: Preparing to be a Crisis Leader and Preventing Crisis Missteps

Dr. Witherspoon

I’ve been reviewing some books focused specifically on crisis leadership and am sharing two dimensions of crisis leadership not found in your text.

Preparing to Be a Crisis Leader

In 2018, Tim Johnson published a book on Crisis Leadership: How to lead in times of crisis, threat and uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Mr. Johnson has spent many years as CEO of a crisis and issues management company. He has advised senior leaders of international oil companies, global pharmaceutical manufacturers, banks, tour operators and others who experience major industrial accidents, cyber breaches, terrorist attacks and natural disasters. He is now a partner in Deloitte North West Europe which acquired his company. Mr. Johnson’s text offers an interesting review of dimensions of crisis management, and one of his topics is on how leaders can prepare to lead in crises…because most of us find ourselves in a crisis situation at one time or another. To prepare to be a crisis leader, he writes, individuals should:

-Examine their behaviors in situations similar to crisis circumstances…what were their actions in these situations?

-Actively engage in their organization’s crisis preparedness activities. Helping create relevant procedures is good preparation, as is participating in crisis simulation exercises. Crises don’t give you long-term warnings, so preparing ahead of time is beneficial.

--Reach out to all stakeholders of the organization, whether followers, potential collaborators inside the organization, or outside audiences. All of these constituencies may be part of a crisis response, so consider ways that each constituency will be important to a crisis leadership plan in your preparations.

--Observe other leaders carefully when they respond to crises. Studying excellent leaders is a common way of enhancing one’s leadership. Such is certainly the case when preparing to be a crisis leader. (pp. 225-227)

Counter-Productive Crisis Leadership Behaviors

Helio Fred Garcia is the president of Logos Consulting Group, and he teaches crisis management and crisis communication at New York University, and ethics at Columbia University. In 2017, he published The Agony of Decision: Mental Readiness and Leadership in a Crisis. It received the 2018 award for Best Crisis Management text by BookAuthority. ( New York: Logos Institute for Crisis Management and Executive Leadership Press, 2017). Among the observations he presents, Mr. Garcia lists several counterproductive behaviors that cause leaders and their organizations increased problems as they try to navigate the murky waters of a crisis. They betray, he writes, “a lack of mental readiness, a failure to exhibit emotional discipline, deep knowledge, or intellectual rigor.” (p. 164) Moreover, not all crisis leaders are good communicators. If that is the case, they may be prone to some of the following mistakes.

According to Garcia, the counterproductive behaviors that leaders may exhibit in crises include the following:

· Ignore the problem—Denial is a fairly common organizational response to a crisis, perhaps because there is a hope the crisis will go away in time, at some point. That rarely happens, as we’ve come to understand in the COVID pandemic. Ignoring the problem may worsen the situation over time, and certainly won’t solve it in the short term.

· Deny the severity of the problem.—In this situation, the problem is acknowledged but it is not immediately addressed. To a great extent British Petroleum faced this situation after the Deep Horizon Oil explosion. The leak after the explosion was known, but BP emphasized it was handling the situation. Unfortunately, as several possible solutions were tried, the public was able to watch the gushing leak, and huge oil slick, for days and weeks and months.

· Compartmentalize the problem. –In 1989, the Exxon Valdez tanker started leaking oil in Prince William Sound, Alaska. The company didn’t acknowledge the problem immediately, and when it finally did, it was labeled a “transportation subsidiary” problem. It was a company-wide problem, however, and became a long-term credibility issue for the company.

· Tell misleading half truths.—To avoid short-term embarrassments, individuals and organizations can release responses that are not lies, but neither are they entirely true. This “strategy” may be used to “buy time,” but rarely does it improve the situation. Oftentimes, this response avoids responsibility for a problem or incident.

· Lie---In organizational crises, a lie is often a panicked first response. As President Nixon discovered, it is sometimes better to admit a failure/mistake early, rather than increase interest over time through a cover-up. As one of his staff senior staff remarked years after Nixon resigned, if the break-in of the Watergate had been treated like the 3rd-rate burglary it was, Richard Nixon would have completed his second term in office.

· Tell only part of the story; let the story dribble out.—Releasing the least amount of information possible at the beginning of a crisis also is counterproductive. As Mr. Garcia, writes, it is better to release all information in one news cycle, rather than letting it “drip, drip, drip.” In the Deepwater Horizon crisis, the company withheld information from the families of those who were already known dead, as a result of the explosion. The ongoing oil leak became as big a story, perhaps more problematic for the company, because it tried to minimize the magnitude of the spill in public comments to the press. However, the leak was ultimately seen by underwater cameras and the spill was evident on satellite imagery , and watched by interested audiences in real time. The “spill” would eventually ruin fishing/shrimping waters for people in several states, and negatively affect the tourist business in Gulf states for multiple years.

· Assign blame.—Crises may tempt individuals to blame others as short-term responses to those crises. In the early days of the U. S. coronavirus pandemic, the lack of ventilators was blamed on the federal government, state governments, local governments/hospitals, the current U. S. president and the previous U. S. president. The lack of equipment caused crises within hospitals and “the blame game” was used in responses to this issue as well as the lack of personal protective equipment in general. Obviously, another use of “blame” has been the naming of “China” as the responsible party for the beginning and spread of the virus. No matter what one’s political affiliations, China has been seen as at least partially blameworthy for the spread of the virus, because it appears to have been slow to warn the rest of the world about the quick spread of the virus inside China itself.

· Panic and paralysis—Cities on the U. S. Gulf coast generally have set procedures as they ready for hurricanes…because they’ve been through such preparations before. People and their homes may have survived several hurricanes in this area, with people sometimes sheltering inside their homes. When cities prepared to “shelter in place” due to the COVID pandemic, many Americans stocked up on supplies needed when weathering hurricanes. Individuals automatically stocked up on products such as toilet paper and paper towels. As a result of the panic response, there were shortages on paper products…caused by the panic behavior, not the crisis itself.

· Shoot the messenger.—Some of the broadcast national networks and cable networks have been blamed for overpublicizing the COVID pandemic by those concerned that public reaction might create stock market panic and other negative reactions to a downsizing of the economy (businesses closing/layoffs/furloughs, etc}. President Trump and other Administration officials have expressed concern that certain networks were over-reacting to the outbreak of the disease, and were causing financial panics on Wall Street. Other than refuse to appear on that network’s programs, or try to damage individual or corporate reputations, politicians find it hard to punish media outlets as bearers of bad news in a democracy. In organizational crises, “shooting the messenger” may mean demoting or firing a staff member or group who are continuous bearers of bad news about work-related topics, e.g. continuous failure of new product attempts, unsuccessful advertising campaigns, mistakes/catastrophes leading to client/customer illness or death etc.

(pp. 166-214)

References

Garcia, H. F. (2017). The agony of decision: Mental readiness and leadership in a crisis.

New York: Logos Institute for Crisis Management and Executive Leadership.

Johnson, T. (2018). Crisis leadership: How to lead in times of crisis, threat and uncertainty.

London: Bloomsbury.