The Crisis Will Find You. Meet It with Your Dukes Up.
When CEOs think about crisis communications, they often picture the moment everything goes wrong: the product recall, the executive scandal, the bad earnings report. And if picturing a catastrophe is as far as things get, leadership might as well shut down the company, because they’re primed for collapse when the going gets tough.
The organizations that handle crises best have already done the work. They’ve built relationships across departments, empowered employees to communicate confidently, developed trust with stakeholders, and created processes that help people execute under pressure.
And best of all, they’ve trusted their communications team to play a key strategic role in all of it.
That’s the central lesson from a recent episode of Cracking the Comms Code, featuring members of one of America’s leading crisis communications programs in the country.
- Dr. Yan Jin, Professor of Public Relations at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication;
- Jason Anthoine, Senior Vice President and Managing Director at Arketi Inside;
- Jennifer Bowcock, Senior Vice President of Communications & Creative at RealPage, Inc.; and
- Chloe Clavert Hicks, Senior Social Media Content Strategist and graduate student at the University of Georgia.
The discussion centered on UGA’s Crisis Communications Think Tank, where students, professors, and corporate leaders solve real-world communications challenges. What emerged was the blueprint for an organization built to beat a crisis before it starts.
Not Every Fire Requires the Fire Department
One of the first lessons discussed was what should become standard practice in every communications department: define the term crisis before you think about particular crises.
A flood of angry comments on social media may feel overwhelming, but if the organization continues operating normally, serves its customers, and maintains stakeholder confidence, it may simply be having a bad day. A true crisis is more than the spasms of the social media outrage cycle.
Organizations can focus on only so much, and true crises deserve the lion’s share of their attention. Leaders who mobilize crisis teams every time criticism appears eventually train employees to overreact, exhaust resources, and lose perspective when genuine emergencies arise.
Panelists argued for a “continuous readiness” mindset. Crisis management isn’t an emergency procedure tucked away in a binder until disaster strikes. It requires communications, legal, finance, operations, and executive leadership to continually identify risks, challenge assumptions, and prepare for situations before they become headlines.
The Team Hears the News First
When it comes to warding off a crisis, organizations are too ready to overlook their most important audience: their own employees.
Workers answer questions from customers. Friends ask them what happened. Family members send them news articles. Even if they never speak to the media, employees become unofficial spokespersons the moment uncertainty begins.
That’s why internal communications can’t be treated as an afterthought. A polished press release accomplishes little if employees receive conflicting information—or worse, learn about company news from social media before hearing it from leadership.
To cut the wire on a company-collapsing game of “whisper down the lane,” leadership should bring multiple perspectives into the room early in the war-gaming process. Communications professionals, lawyers, finance leaders, product teams, and social media managers all view the same situation differently. Those differences in perspective safeguard against blind spots.
One such overlooked perspective brings in social media teams. These guys and gals aren’t simply publishing content; they’re gathering real-time intelligence. Every comment, direct message, and customer complaint offers valuable information about how audiences understand — or misunderstand — an organization’s response.
Companies that treat social media teams as strategic advisers instead of content distributors gain an enormous advantage during fast-moving situations.
Trust Isn’t Built During a Crisis
Long before the crisis hits, every company has an account with the “trust bank.” Every honest conversation with employees, every transparent customer interaction, every fulfilled promise, and every thoughtful decision becomes another deposit in the trust bank. When the time comes to make a withdrawal — and it will — leadership should make sure the account is well padded.
Executives often feel compelled to respond immediately when disaster hits. But sometimes strategic silence is the better choice. Rushing incomplete or inaccurate information can inflict more damage than taking time to understand the situation.
That’s not an excuse to cower under the mahogany desk. On the contrary, knowing when not to speak requires preparation every bit as much as knowing what to say.
The same principle applies to artificial intelligence. AI can quickly summarize thousands of comments, identify emerging trends, and help communications teams work faster. But today’s tools still struggle to interpret sarcasm, humor, and emotional nuance. Leadership absolutely must keep a “human in the loop,” because AI can’t handle the job on its own. Instead, combine AI’s speed with human judgment.
None of these systems can fix a disaster at the moment it’s unfolding. Every one of them needs to be in place, earning credibility for the company, well ahead of time.
The Best Crisis Plan Starts Long Before the Headlines
Crises are part of running an organization. The CEO may not show up at a Coldplay concert, but it’s up to you as the comms person to make sure you’re ready when the plague of locusts shows up out of nowhere. If it’s not one thing, it’s another, so companies need to make preparation and flexibility a part of their daily routine.
This means fostering a broader culture of readiness. It starts with acknowledging the trust bank’s existence and taking deep breaths to distinguish between a true five-alarm fire and a flash mob of loudmouths on X. From there, the rough-and-ready company makes regular trust deposits with customers, stakeholders, and employees; keeps everyone on payroll up to date; and consolidates the whole team, human and robot, into an elite crisis-crushing unit.
The strongest crisis response isn’t a perfectly crafted press statement written two minutes to midnight. It’s an organization that spent years preparing so that, when the pressure sets in, everyone already knows what to do.
