Crisis Management: Focus on the “What Should We Do Now?”

The most important thing to do in a crisis is to focus on the now. Ask yourself, where were are now, what do we need to do?

A good captain is one who can command his ship out of a crisis. A bad commander will spend his efforts pushing blame as he does nothing to stop his ship from going down.

I've had two crisis's in the past month and I've found that this seems to work.

Don’t dwell on mistakes. Mistakes are what got us into the situation. Assigning blame isn’t going to ctrl-z the crisis.

Next, prioritize the tasks. For the most part, the #1 task is usually easy to determine. Make the #1 priority known to everyone. If there are secondary priorities make those also known to everyone.

People will continue to assert blame others or justify their actions. Remind them to focus on their task at hand.

Next, assign duties. If people are stressing about the magnitude of the crisis, it’s often calming to focus on small tasks. Assign small task to people. Tell them, you’re only job now is to do this. After someone is stressing about something big and you’ve replace that stress with something small, their stress level will greatly plummet.


Give people deadlines. Generally though, in a crisis, the deadline is “5 minutes ago”.

As the leader, do not assign yourself any tasks. Your job is to stress about the big picture. If you take on a task, it might disrupt your perspective.

Most of all, remain calm. Act as if this happens all the time. People take cues from their leaders, if their leader remains calm, so will they.

When the crisis has been averted, congratulate people for doing a good job.

Then find a solution so it doesn’t happen again.