In this episode, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, along with Senior Consultant Jen Otremba, discuss the makeup of a corporate crisis management team and how important selecting the right talent and skills can be to the overall success of your program.

Topics covered include forming a corporate crisis management team, emotional intelligence, procuring the right skill sets for the team, and the need for a unified approach involving all different types of disruptions that your organization could face.

 

Episode Transcript:

Bryan Strawser:

[inaudible 00:00:22] the first podcast, which you had not, I don’t think, you weren’t a part of the first one. But I talked about this idea of having a crisis framework. The background there was that everybody always would call. Clients would always call and say, “I need to have crisis plans. I need to have plans because of active shooter, for a power outage,” and for whatever. I would always steer them to, plans are fine but that’s not really what you need. If you’ve never thought through this, you need a framework. How do you make decisions? How do you communicate the results of those decisions? How do you get the stakeholders …

 

Jennifer Otremba:

Right.

 

Bryan Strawser:

… at the table?

 

Jennifer Otremba:

Who’s responsible for the final say in something?

 

Bryan Strawser:

Who’s gonna make the decision? How do you escalate a decision? So, we wanna talk a little more about that idea today because we were having some discussions with some clients recently and partners, around, who should be at the table? I mean, who needs to be there?

 

Jennifer Otremba:

And if they’re there, what is their role?

 

Bryan Strawser:

What’s their role?

 

Jennifer Otremba:

What’s expected of them.

 

Bryan Strawser:

I think, one of the really difficult things to think about as you’re building a crisis management process in a company, in a non-profit or a private sector organization is, you’re gonna have this crisis management team and in a crisis, however you decide to define it, somebody’s gonna be in charge, so to speak, of managing that process. But they’re not necessarily in charge of the crisis. Right? Or are they?

 

Jennifer Otremba:

Well they could be. I guess it would depend on how it was set up. In our previous experiences I’ve seen it done a few ways but you could have Incident Manager for instance, that would be responsible for bringing all the appropriate parties together. They would need to know enough about the incident. To know who to call and who to talk to and who to bring to the table. Then once they’re to the table, it’s that group to sort of make the decisions as to what happens next.

 

Bryan Strawser:

In our world, what we typically bring our clients to is, look at everything that could be a major disruption to your company at that enterprise level. It should filter into one crisis management process, right? We think about financial crises, reputational crises, executive misconduct or serious HR issue. Then we have all the things that we typically think of as a big crises. Data breach information, security event.

 

Jennifer Otremba:

A hurricane.

 

Bryan Strawser:

National disasters.

 

Jennifer Otremba: