Module 7 Introduction. What We’ve Learned So Far About the Need for Crisis Leadership

Welcome to our exploration of crisis leadership. So far in this course, we’ve discussed how the business environment of today has placed a premium on a high-stake leader’s ability to lead a team through a crisis. Particularly because these crises aren’t the rare, unlikely events of yesteryear. They’ve become almost a normal aspect of doing business. Crises aren’t normal, of course, but they are clearly no longer a question of if. Rather, our question is when. When these exceptionally disruptive events do occur, we can clearly see why crisis leadership demands a focus on stakeholders. It is these stake holders, after all, that the organization exists to serve and support.

When a crisis threatens the value proposition of these stakeholders, crisis leaders must respond in ways that address both the threat and the perceptions of a wide assortment of concerned, perhaps emotional parties. Following our examination of stakeholders and their interests, we explored the topic of organizational resilience and the things we could do is high-stakes leaders to help our teams and enterprises better anticipate potential crises, cope more effectively with them, and learn from them once they’ve been resolved. During this exploration, we also made a connection between resilience and our relationships with stakeholders, who we described as some of our most valuable high-stakes leadership assets.

We shifted gears a bit in module 4 and examined a model that could help us better understand and predict stakeholder reactions to a crisis. We then applied what we learned in that module to a discussion of crisis typologies. These typologies to which you can now add your own, were presented as useful mechanisms for crisis preparation. If we can identify a few different types of crisis that we might have to face as an organization, you may argued, then we ought to be able to complete some planning such that we would be much better prepared for each scenario, should we ever have to face it.

Our stakeholder reaction model comes into play, again, as we conduct our crisis planning by helping us craft communication templates that we can have at the ready to tailor and launch when necessary during a crisis. The last module you completed explored the nature of the crisis environment itself and how challenging it can be to navigate. Leaders of any variety will face very few situations more stressful, complex, frustrating, and vitally important than during a crisis. The very nature of the crisis environment is working against us, before we even start to receive the earliest indication that a crisis situation has ignited, and is about to become the bane of our existence for the foreseeable future.

With all of this foundational work behind us, what is a crisis leader actually expected to do? What are they expected to know? How are they supposed to be in the eyes of their constituent stakeholders? These are all great questions. Questions that we will answer in this module. Yes, there was a great deal of literature out there on the topic of crisis leadership. Some of it is very good. Much of it, however, makes it hard to know why or when or how to apply the author’s recommendations. In this module, I’ll try to provide you with some foundational recommendations that can help you become a more effective crisis leader.

I hope that you’ll find each of these as ready for you to put into practice today. Welcome to our penultimate module, crisis leadership. Let’s dive in.