Crisis Leadership overview

Yesterday, we learned about crisis leadership and how an effective manager communicates and acts in these types of situations. The presentation was excellent in my opinion, and really showed us real life examples on mangers who have effectively and ineffectively acted in times of crisis. The first part of the presentation went over the steps on how managers should act in times of need. A manager who acts well in stressful situations will remain calm, announce plans on how they plan to fix the situation, and than act accordingly. On contrast, a manger cannot panic and cause the population to freak out with them because the situation will only become worse.

One of the situations the group showed us was how a mayor (I believe, cant quite remember his name) acted when the planes hit the twin towers. When asked in a news conference he remained calm and told the people that they were working on a plan to save as many people as possible. Also, another thing that really struck me was that he never mentioned the number of deaths from the attack because that would cause the United States to go into a frenzy. In my opinion, he was a perfect model of a higher end individual acting in the most appropriate way during an ultimate time of crisis.

On the other hand there was controversy on how the president, George W. Bush, acted when he heard the news of the attacks in New York. Mr. Bush was at an elementary school reading a book to a classroom of children when he heard of the attack. Instead of acting, he waited seven minutes until the book was finished before he acted on the situation. Many people were infuriated that he didn't respond immediately and address the nation in a time in need. Mr. Bush argues that he waited the seven minutes because he didn't want to scare the young kids. This was a major controversial issue and many people have differing opinions about it. In my opinion, I think that Mr. Bush should have quietly announced that he had to leave early to deal with an issue. He didn't have to mention that it was about the twin towers but could have instead said that he had a major issue to deal with.

The last thing we did was practicing scenarios by breaking up into groups of board members and people addressing the board. There were four scenarios ranging from internal scenarios in the organization to personal problems that individuals could face while working. I thought this exercise was a great way to portray this topic because we only had five minutes to come up with a plan to address the board. While this may seem short it does portray how quickly individuals have to respond in times of crisis.