Leading through a Crisis vs ‘Damage Control’

Among an organization’s most important and valuable assets is its reputation. This applies equally to companies, departments and even project teams.Business continuity and disaster recovery planning is not just about mitigating loss and improving up-time, availability and maintaining customer service through an outage.  It’s not just about getting ‘back to normal’. It’s also not just about ‘learning from the experience’ to avoid the disaster or better-managing a similar event in the future.

No.  The real value of planning ahead is in knowing how you are going to use the next unavoidable disaster or crisis to your advantage.

Beyond reaction and response… beyond triage or ‘putting out the fire’… beyond minimizing the impact to the organization’s reputation, leaders need to know how they will use a crisis to improve their reputation and enhance their standing in the eyes of the consumer, the user community or their B2B customers.  If planned for properly, any crisis can be an opportunity for your team, department or company to grow your audience or your market and increase their level of confidence in you.

From the perspective of internal IT departments, it’s a similar situation.  From both upper management and the user community there is an unrealistic expectation of perfection… zero defects, zero downtime, zero risk… that forces IT architects and management to focus on avoiding those situations that might trigger interruptions.  But there should be at least as much thought and effort put into how one will lead through a crisis, because it will happen eventually, regardless of the latest data protection or high-availability solution.

When faced with your next crisis, will you be a leader in the eyes of your customers or will you be apologizing, begging forgiveness and simply doing damage control?

UPDATE 6/15/2010: Here is a great article, How To Use Twitter to Avoid a Online Reputation Disaster, that discusses how to proactively use Twitter to catch smoldering issues before they become crises… and make your org look good in the process.