Crisis Management

for Managers Who Strive to be the Best, Even Under Enormous Stress and Pressure

What do typical organizational crises look like?

Learn to be comfortable in a crisis!

Let’s say there’s a rumor circulating about your agency or your team. It’s a rumor about an extremely serious issue. You feel that ignoring it will cause problems, but so will addressing it!  You get totally contradictory advice from your experts and advisors! You don’t have the information—and for a long time won’t have the information—you either need to confirm or deny the rumor.  You need a compass, a North Star, a strategy . . .

Crisis Management Strategies are to Management . . .what Flight Emergency Procedures are to Aviation

Pilots who aspire to be the very best—both civilian and military—aspire to being able to concentrate on controlling the aircraft even when everything is going wrong, even in the midst of a crisis. They aspire to a level of flying skills that result in an almost super-human level-headedness exemplified by the likes of Chuck Yeager.

The best of professional pilots continuously hone their skills to an ever-increasing level of professionalism that allows for clear, cool thinking precisely when it is needed the most; when everything else is going very wrong. 

That’s when the rest of us more ordinary human beings get rattled, lose our cool, forget our training, and can’t think straight.  After all, it’s perfectly normal to get scared and confused by the impossibility of an unraveling situation, to have one’s thinking clouded by emotions or frustration, anger, fear, terror. 

That’s why skilled pilots constantly study, train, and practice emergency procedures: engine failures, fires, control malfunctions, explosions, etc. 

When the airliner on which you are flying develops a serious mid-air emergency, you hope that the pilots up in the cockpit aren’t just ordinary humans; you hope they’re not only good pilots—but very good pilots!  In an emergency, you hope that they have “the right stuff.”

What does this have to do with managers?

Managers need to practice for an emergency just as pilots do

Although managers are faced with having to handle crises far more often than pilots are, managers are almost never trained in how to manage crises!  This is a real oversight by most management schools and professionals. 

Providing leadership to your organization in a crisis is no different than pilots knowing how to keep control of that DC-10 even though the they just lost the hydraulic pressure.

If you aspire to be an excellent manager—one who will perform well, even brilliantly, under the pressure and chaos of a crisis—you would put yourself through the training so that you too would be virtually comfortable with a crisis when one does occur. 

Get the right stuff!

Allow yourself to benefit from the kind of training pilots benefit from throughout their careers: Crisis-Management training!  Give yourself this major advantage!

How to go from being an average to phenomenal manager

To develop into a phenomenal leader in a crisis you must learn what all great pilots already know…

Let’s first look at what pilots do differently:

• Pilots—at least the best pilots—train all their lives in how to handle emergencies: fires, engine flame-outs, wing-icing, control-system failures, instrument malfunctions, hijackings, etc.
• They subject themselves to simulated emergencies that are so extreme and far out that it would be way too dangerous to practice those crisis situations in an airplane. They, therefore, do it in computer-driven aircraft simulators, called Link-Trainers.
• In these Link-Trainers, pilots are subjected to simulated fires, engine flame-outs, control-system failures, etc. They are so realistic, it’s startling!
• Moreover, pilots consistently put themselves through these meat-grinder emergency-simulations; not just during their initial pilot-training, but throughout their careers!
• It’s this kind of career long willingness to study, train, and practice emergencies that rarely occur in real life, but that make the difference between average pilots and phenomenal pilots.
• Oddly enough, very few mangers do anything like this!
• Even though managers experience crises in their jobs far more often than pilots do.
• Even though these management crises are every bit as difficult and challenging to handle well as flight emergencies are.
       
• Not surprisingly, a disturbingly high percentage of crisis management case studies turn into “Basket-Case” case-studies.
• This is where poor judgment leads to management’s equivalents of airplane crashes: devastated organizations, ruined careers, demoralized teams, utterly failed missions…

                                     

The idea of Link-Trainers for honing the skills of pilots is a brilliant idea. It has developed a corps of outstanding pilots. It has elevated the level of professionalism of pilots to a level that simply could not be achieved otherwise. And most of all, it has saved many lives.                             

It’s an idea that deserves to be copied for the training of managers.  In fact, it’s downright stupid not to do so. Link-Trainers for pilots are machines that are expensive to build and operate. Link-Trainer equivalents for managers are easier to create and cheaper to operate.

What does a Link-Trainer for Crisis Management look like?

Our Crisis Management seminar is a Link-Trainer for managers who aspire to be the best they can be

This training is not about basic management.  We assume you have already mastered that. 

Rather, Crisis Management training is for those managers who want to be valuable leaders, especially when things get crazy. 

After going through our training if and when a crisis strikes, you will become a case study in “Leadership and Vision in the Midst of a Crisis” rather than becoming another Basket-Case case study of “Leadership-Failure Under Pressure.”

Just because you’re a manager and not a test pilot doesn’t mean you can’t develop “the right stuff” and be the organizational leadership equivalent of a Chuck Yeager.  All you need is the proper training!