Decide What Your Company Represents: A Crucial Preemptive Approach
When a crisis strikes, decisive leaders emerge not by scrambling for an opinion but by drawing from long-established beliefs. Those who have taken the time to clarify their core values can make credible choices when circumstances intensify, accurately reflecting their company's stance.
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Key Insights
- Assess and reaffirm your organization’s values before facing a crisis by immersing your leadership team in realistic scenarios questioning their genuine beliefs, rather than rehearsing expected responses.
- Understand that silence communicates a message too; before opting for inaction, evaluate if the issue impacts your employees, reflects upon publicly stated values, or unintentionally allows others to shape your narrative.
The media requests began streaming in before we had formulated answers.
Staff were eager to understand our position. Journalists demanded an official quote. Advocacy groups called for explicit clarity. Every passing hour without a response felt like yet another opportunity for a damaging headline.
This was 2017, a turbulent year marked by the fallout from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. As public scrutiny grew surrounding the administration’s response, the pressure was felt beyond the political sphere. Corporations whose executives were attached to the president's business advisory councils found themselves in the eye of the storm.
At that time, I was in charge of communications for a CEO serving on one of those councils. What transpired was a shockwave; our company was thrust into a national discussion we had never prepared for.
Within the company, every communication draft seemed to provoke one tough question while generating several others. If we issued a statement, what would that mean for our relationship with an administration that was a critical business ally? Conversely, if we maintained silence, how would our employees interpret that decision? Each iteration of our message aimed to address one more layer of scrutiny, mitigate another risk, and anticipate every potential backlash. As we revised, the language polished itself increasingly, yet the certainty seemed to diminish.
This experience illuminated a fundamental insight that has since shaped my approach to leadership. The toughest challenge in a crisis isn’t finding the right words to say; it lies in recognizing whether you’ve previously established a coherent belief system.
The organizations that acted decisively weren’t necessarily better positioned than we were. They had proactively grappled with these questions before public attention turned on them. Their principles had been articulated into actionable decisions. When the pressure is on, the spotlight serves not to create values, but to reveal them.
Establishing Principles Before Crisis Hits
A common misconception in leadership is that trust is earned when everyone agrees with you. Stakeholders often disagree on various issues, from strategy to hiring choices or product launches, yet many leaders maintain their credibility because they've clearly articulated their values.
Organizations faced with crises typically falter when they attempt to define their beliefs while the world demands answers.
Silence Speaks Volumes, Too
Some leaders mistakenly believe that remaining silent minimizes their risk. At times, that may hold true. However, when an issue directly impacts your employees, customers, or overall business, silence often communicates a message of its own. If your stance isn’t clear, people will fill that void with their interpretations or allow others to shape the narrative for you.
Before deciding to stay silent, ask yourself the following three questions:
- Does this issue affect our people?
- Does it touch any of the publicly stated values?
- Are we comfortable with someone else defining our position?
If there’s hesitation in your answers to any of these questions, silence warrants as much consideration as any public pronouncement.
The Importance of Consistency Over Consensus
I've observed organizations manage similar controversies yet end up with vastly different results. The determining factor isn’t always the positions they take; more often, it’s how consistently they uphold those positions over time.
Stakeholders are quick to notice discrepancies. If leaders express one set of values internally and another externally, or if commitment to those values wavers in tough moments, trust erodes.
An effective exercise is to evaluate past decisions rather than forecast future ones. Gather the latest five or ten significant choices made by your organization and review them as if you were seeing them anew. Do they narrate a coherent tale reflective of your organization's purpose?
Your stakeholders have likely formed their judgments. This reflection allows leadership to compare their conclusions against the prevalent views.
Clarifying Decision-Making Processes
One key learning is that while leaders expend a lot of energy discussing their decisions, they often overlook explaining the rationale behind them.
When stakeholders grasp the frameworks guiding your decisions during routine situations, they’re likely to trust your judgment when things become extraordinary. While they may not always agree with your conclusions, they can appreciate that those decisions stem from deliberate considerations rather than convenience.
Avoid waiting for a crisis to articulate your organization's decision-making processes. Cultivate this practice within your everyday leadership approach. When employees grasp the thought processes behind promotions, strategic pivots, tough trade-offs, or even disappointing outcomes, they absorb vital lessons about your leadership style.
Trust develops one decision at a time. Each challenging dialogue, every promotion, every public declaration, and each instance where your values are put to the test contributes to the collective understanding of your leadership identity.
Almost every leader hopes that they won’t be judged by a singular tough moment. Yet, from my experience, those moments don’t just define us; they reveal our underlying character. Long before the headlines break, before the pressing calls begin and the weight of scrutiny sets in, we’ve already been determining what type of leaders we aspire to be. The crisis merely unveils that essence for everyone else.
