Learning art of crisis control
The ‘instant media’ world we live in today makes crisis management skills vital.
Crisis management has always been an important facet of business. In this age of social media, however, crisis situations have become more difficult to deal with than ever before. News spreads quicker. Rumours surface more easily. Managing these situations requires greater finesse and expertise.
One of the key crisis management issues can be when to speak up and when to remain silent.
“Increasing media scrutiny, global news coverage and the growing popularity of social media mean that corporate reputations can be damaged quickly,” says Winky Moon, who manages and advises on public regulatory affairs and corporate social responsibility issues.
“The majority of the multinationals and well-known listed companies in Hong Kong have crisis management teams, which usually consist of the management team together with communications and legal professionals to handle any unexpected situations. To Chinese corporations, however, crisis management is a new concept,” she says.
Moon says companies need frameworks for dealing with potentially sticky situations. “For consumer brands, a social-media-crisis manual should be developed to cope with an impending crisis. Social-media-monitoring tools, and an understanding of when to speak out and when to stay silent, is also very important to contain a social media crisis,” she says.
As crises can take many forms, crisis management can be difficult to define. Creating precise guidelines on how to manage crises can be a challenge. But organisations that don’t have crisis management strategies in place are at risk.
The Richard Ivey School of Business, which teaches exclusively through case studies, has more than 340 cases related to crisis management on file. Dr Janet De Silva, dean of Ivey Asia, says: “Crisis management is how an organisation and its leaders deal with a major event that threatens to harm the organisation, its stakeholders or the general public. It is an integral capability requirement for all leaders – be they in the private or public sector.”