Crisis Management Training and Strategy for Businesses|Crisis Management Teams| Corporate Security |Incident Management Teams | Crisis Response Training |Crisis Management Advice |Incident Management Teams |Business Safety |Managing risk |Objective Travel Safety

November 04, 2023

Crisis Management Training

Importance of a Crisis Management Strategy for Businesses

We have recently completed a series of sessions for an international NGO with six principle offices around the world. These sessions focused on training their regional Incident Management Teams (IMTs) and also the Global Crisis Management Team (CMT) based in New York.

The sessions involved training on the principles of crisis management and structures of teams followed by a scenario-based exercise. The latter varied between the Asia and Latin American IMTs handling a crisis evolving a climatic disaster (with a person being kidnapped to add to the mix!) to the US and EU teams handling employees getting caught up in a terrorist incident. The training was possible as the organisation had already taken strident steps to prepare for such events.

What does an organisation need to effectively manage a crisis?

For an organisation to effectively manage a crisis, they need to have procedures and structure in place so that they have the rapid ability to react. To have practiced in advance is also important, so should an event happen, it’s not the IMT’s or CMT’s first outing! A success outcome, which might be seen as minimising the risk to employees and reputation, will be dependent on whether they have a plan and this doesn't need to be complicated.

simple steps for crisis management planning:

Senior management acknowledge the need for a crisis management function.
Select a team that will react to the event. The team should be drawn from a range of business activities and at Objective Travel Safety, we help to identify the relevant people.
The team needs to be led by a Coordinator who has sufficient ‘clout’ and importantly is a good delegator and listener.
Each position in the selected team requires a deputy, as a crisis may last for days and a team of expertise, both internal and external will be required. It can be useful have people with different language skills and geographical knowledge if possible.
Identify a room from which the crisis can be managed. Whilst some on-line functionality will occur, face to face meetings will inevitably speed up decision making and ensure a measured and considered response.
Some anticipation of likely risks is useful but don’t try to predict how events will precisely unfold. If you do so, you will react in the manner you have predicted and not as events are unfolding.
Practice the team.

Crisis Management and Incident Management Testimonial/Review

"Charlie is a great crisis management trainer. He was very easy to work with on planning the training sessions and super accommodating. He was able to get my teams to take into consideration factors in a crisis they wouldn’t normally think of.

My favorite part of the training was how Charlie worked to get everyone on the team involved. He also did his research when thinking of scenarios that could plausibly happen to my organisation. I highly recommend Charlie and the team at Objective Travel Safety.

Inspiration on how to handle a crisis

If looking for inspiration on how to handle a crisis, look no further than NASA’s handling of Apollo 13. Imagine handling a crisis unfolding 200,00 miles away in space using 1970s technology. I thoroughly recommend listening to the podcast made by BBC World Service and on BBC Sounds “Thirteen minutes to the Moon, Season 2”.

As James Lovell, Commander of Apollo 13 put it “you have to look at it as a tale of two groups, one group in a comfortable control room fortified by hot coffee and cigarettes that had to make quick and correct decisions. The other group in a cold, damp crippled space craft, 200,000 miles from earth who had to make sure what they said was number one, going to work and number two, are we going to put it in correctly and control the spacecraft to do the job”. From a crisis management point of view, the leadership by the flight controllers in Houston was simply extraordinary.

Contact us for more information on how we can help with your Crisis Management Training, setting up a crisis management review, help putting a crisis management team together and producing and implementing crisis management scenarios to ensure awareness of the strategy.

Email: office@objectiveteam.com

Tel: 01788 899 029

Charlie McGrath