WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
5 Tips for Providing Effective Leadership During a Crisis
by Sarah Lai Stirland
teams must anticipate their risks, and be prepared to confront and manage problems if they arise. That’s the core message Dr. Greg Pat-
N
ton delivered late February at the Univer- sity of Southern California’s Senior Living Executive Course in Los Angeles, which was co-sponsored by Argentum. Patton is a renowned leadership and communications professor at the USC’s Marshall School of Business. Here are five top takeaways from his lectures.
1. Plan and anticipate. “When it comes to a crisis, there simply should not be any surprises to key leader- ship members of an organization,” he says. “By analyzing the organization, industry, customers, suppliers, services, political envi- ronment and region, leaders should be able to identify, determine the likelihood of, work to prevent, and prepare a clear response strategy in advance of any crisis event.” To prepare, Patton asks executives taking
his leadership course to think of 20 different crises that could hit their businesses. Then he asks them to choose the top three to five most likely scenarios. He asks how the ex- ecutives would respond, what actions they would take, and what they would say. He encourages top executives to do this train- ing exercise with their own staff members. The goal is to ensure that your team can
take charge of a situation in an instant. “You want to give them guidance, and give them direction so they know what to do, and have the confidence to be able to respond more effectively,” he says.
obody wants to think about their organization experiencing a cri- sis, but business leaders and their
2. When a crisis does occur, stick to the facts, and acknowledge what went wrong. “Bad things will happen. When you get in trouble is when you try to deny and cover it up,” Patton says. If, for example, a resident with Alzheim-
er’s wanders and experiences a fatal fall, an appropriate response would be an expres- sion of mortification, and making a state- ment along the lines of: “Our responsibility is to take care of every one of our residents. We’re horrified that this could occur, and we’re going to make sure that this cannot, and will not happen again,” Patton explains. But company executives often try to
downplay events and minimize their own roles in a crisis. This tactic usually backfires, extending the crisis and the media coverage.
3. Take corrective action. Crises often indicate wider underlying prob- lems, Patton notes. For example, Johnson & Johnson had to redesign the way it packaged pharmaceuticals after someone was able to undetectably tamper with their bottles of Tylenol to poison and kill consumers in 1982. The company immediately issued a recall and worked with the Food and Drug Administration to create tamper-proof bot- tles; Congress subsequently enacted a law requiring such packaging. In other cases, an appropriate response to an accident might be compensation and procedural changes.
4. Frame the context by using your own words. In another training session, Patton brings in people with backgrounds in journalism and they role play with executives. The execu- tives pretend to be leaders of Snow Brand
Dr. Greg Patton, professor at the USC Marshall School of Business.
Milk Products. In 2000, more than 14,000 people in Japan got food poisoning as a re- sult of contaminated milk sold by the com- pany. The executives in the training respond to questions such as “How many people did you poison again?” with a statement of facts, like “As of this morning, we know that there are 14,425 who became sick, and we believe another 125 are still in the hospital,” instead of “We poisoned 14,425 people.”
5. Help the media, but don’t engage in speculation. When television news crews arrive and must file stories on deadline, try to earn trust from reporters by providing them with useful and factual background information about your company or community. “Educate them, but don’t say anything that might be wrong, because it will lead them to question every- thing else you tell them,” Patton says.
20 SENIOR LIVING EXECUTIVE / ISSUE 2 2017
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