Dominic Cockram, managing director of Steelhenge Consulting, a Regester Larkin Group company, discusses crisis management and leadership

What are some of the highlights of the conference ?

The Crisis Management Conference (CMC) is now in its third year, and this year the conference will explore the key facets of crisis leadership. Whether a problem originates from an operational incident, performance failure, compliance or policy issue, every crisis requires both internal and external leadership excellence to ensure success in response and recovery. The conference offers delegates a unique opportunity to hear from a fantastic line-up of crisis management specialists including Hugh Dunleavy, a former director at Malaysia Airlines, and other expert speakers from Deutsche Bank, CERN, BAE Systems and the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. They will share how their organisation and leadership teams prepare for, and respond to, crises. CMC serves as a platform for all those involved or interested in crisis management to come together, hear some great insights into how others are operating and network with peers.

What challenges are placed on leaders in times of crisis?

There’s so much expected of leaders during crises; the first challenge being that they have to be in multiple places. Ideally, they want to be the public face of the organisation and therefore they need to be in front of the media, they need to be speaking to their shareholders and investors, they must be seen to be leading by their staff internally and they want to be with the crisis team managing the response. Managing the media can be a full time job in the early stages but the leader also has a key role in providing strategic direction and critical decision making, ensuring priorities and values are maintained across the business – people and customers, assets, reputation and many more things have to all be prioritised clearly and responsibly to demonstrate that the business is in control.

To what extent should the internal audience be kept apprised of ongoing crises?

During a crisis, your employees represent one of your most important stakeholder groups and yet are, to some extent, often forgotten. They can be your greatest advocates but in the absence of information the trust your employees hold in your organisation can dwindle and there is a threat that morale can diminish. Communicating internally is vital and staff must feel that they are being engaged and informed – but it can also be challenging because they also all have access to social media. You need to think about exactly how much can or should be divulged if it is a sensitive issue. This is also a moment when it is great to have strong internal policies in place about staff use of social media!

Are there any benefits that come out of crises?

It sounds odd, doesn’t it, but I think a business can definitely come out of a crisis stronger than it was beforehand. What you do see is that when a business deals well with a crisis, their senior management will come out much more respected by the staff, the markets, the regulators, investors and the public, as someone who did a really good job dealing with a very difficult situation. The public really do understand that things go wrong, and assuming that it’s not a case of gross negligence, that everyone is doing their absolute best to deal with it. If this appears to be going well then credit will be paid to the business, its senior leaders and response mechanisms. A businesses reputational capital is very much enhanced in those organisations where leadership is seen to have done a good job under the extremely challenging circumstances of a crisis - and share prices bounce back much faster after any initial uncertainty.

Why is crisis management an important thing to understand and plan?

When a crisis hits you, it is chaotic, complex, fast moving, riven with uncertainty and misinformation and a very uncomfortable time. Because the time to respond is short, you must have planned and prepared before the crisis hits so that you can be fast and effective when it does happen. Statistics show that it is more and more likely to happen in our fast moving world. So burying your head in the sand really is no longer an option. Crisis and communication plans, procedures, roles and responsibilities all need to be thought through ahead of time. Who has authority for what, who is the spokesperson, have they been trained and so on. We will be publishing the results of our annual crisis management survey at the conference and some of the results in there are quite startling in terms of how often businesses are standing crisis teams up and yet how unprepared many of them are in terms of having done some training or, even better, an exercise to see how it feels for real.

Organisations are building their reputational capital all the time, right now in everything that they do and how that is perceived externally; in how they behave, their values if you like, how they treat their staff, how they treat their customers and suppliers, and it’s that reputational capital when something goes wrong that you start to use up. Not enough businesses understand that, the bigger your credit balance, the more resilient you’re going to be when something goes wrong. A good reputation serves you very well in a crisis. If you’re perceived to be a good brand that does good things, people will treat you very differently compared to one of the brands that people dislike or are very uncomfortable with.

Responding to a crisis is a huge challenge and as the adage goes “fail to plan, plan to fail”.

Dominic Cockram is managing director of Steelhenge Consulting which is a Regester Larkin Group company. He chairs the Crisis Management Conference. For more information about the Crisis Management Conference, click here.