Are
your china operations prepared for a crisis?
Authors
note: "Having spent more than half my life working in the Greater
China region, I can attest to the critical importance of teamwork
in a crisis. While teamwork is the essential element in crisis management
anywhere, it is especially important in China's well-known "issue
rich" environment. This article was originally written for a global
audience and is completely applicable to China, already a major global
player. I have made editing changes in this version to address some
of the more "China-specific" factors which impact the development
of a High Performance Crisis Team in China and added some "China anecdotes"
to illustrate key points.
In light of recent corporate scandals
and the diversity of operating structures of many organisations in
China, Lehmanbrown has invited David Chard to present a very important,
yet often ignored, business issue for all companies with operations
in China - "Crisis Management".
Risk, whether it be financial, legal,
operational, brand management or public relations, must be a controllable
element in any business organisation. Once these risks are identified,
a team and appropriate strategy must be put in place to limit any
damage caused by crises or events such as September 11, information
shredding or even a disgruntled ex-employee out for revenge.
High performance teamwork
is essential to successfully addressing the challenges of a crisis
and being able to emerge with the least overall damage to a company's
reputation and other assets. In fact, most of the traditional crisis
literature stresses the importance of identifying and training teams
and conducting crisis scenario drills. However,
the available crisis literature gives little attention and almost
no specific guidance as to how these teams-in-training should operate,
how they can best be evaluated, and how they can most effectively
extract vital learning from the scenarios they have experienced.
In
other words, lip service is offered that "the essence of success in
a crisis is teamwork," but it is simply assumed that once a crisis
team is appointed it will be able to operate effectively. As anyone
who works in a modern organization would agree, this assumption is
a huge leap of faith; the typical team, even under the best of circumstances,
is hugely dysfunctional (just read today's Dilbert comic).
"Is
it reasonable to expect that under the added stress and trauma associated
with a red-hot crisis, the crisis team suddenly will be able to
operate as a seamless high-performance team? On the contrary, the
normal breakdowns that block team performance are always exacerbated
by the stress of a grueling crisis situation. Add in the extra challenges
of language, cultural, regional and regulatory differences found
in China and you have a formula for a disaster in the making. Failing
to properly prepare your team in China is folly of the highest order."
David Chard, CCG Worldwide
The following are some
problems common to crisis teams everywhere, and some principles that
can be extracted from them to help build a High Performance Crisis
Team.
1. Poor Organization
While a crisis team usually has
a designated leader, this leader seldom has any working experience
with the team: despite belonging to the same organization, they simply
never interact as a team¡until the crisis hits. So,
even though the goals or mission of the crisis team are clearly spelled
out, the specifics of how these members would operate and interact
with each other are seldom explicitly detailed and communicated in
organizations. This "fuzziness" about roles and responsibilities
results in many breakdowns and recriminations due to the lack of alignment
among the team members at the outset of a crisis.
China:
I once trained a team in China comprised of 14 individuals who were
stationed at six different locations in China. They had been "assigned"
to the crisis team but had no clear idea as their individual responsibilities
in a crisis. At the opening of the first day of training, it was immediately
apparent that they had never even met each other before and knew each
other mostly in terms of their email addresses! Their names appeared
on the list as "crisis team" yet there was no explicit understanding
as to how they would operate in a crisis across a vastly diverse geographic
region. How effectively do you think they would have been in the face
of a real crisis?
In the initial stage of team development,
people tend to simply assume that their expectations, values and mental
models are shared by the others, and the result is often chaos and
additional, unnecessary stress on the group. As a result, in many
actual crises observed by the author, much critical time is wasted
on reframing the groups' shared understandings-very much at the expense
of the crisis they're trying to manage.
Good organization, and the checking
of assumptions, are qualities of a good team and must be explicit
steps in getting a crisis team ready to operate. This is especially
valuable at the stage of crisis preparation when the team has the
luxury of working out a clear operational plan before a crisis has
struck.
Bottom Line:
Getting everyone on
the same page regarding operating norms, roles and responsibilities
is not an activity the team should have to spend precious time on
during an actual crisis.
2. Lack of a Shared
History
Oftentimes there is very little
alignment among team members of the same organization about "what
is so" regarding their company. The normal process of attrition and
turnover ensures that the "institutional memory" of any organization
is routinely diluted, unless specific steps are taken to prevent this
from happening.
This can have serious impact on the
performance of a crisis team operating under the scrutiny of a broad
group of stakeholders and must be unequivocally addressed as a part
of the crisis preparedness process. On almost
every occasion when implementing a crisis simulation, there occurs
a recognizable type of dysfunction related to this "memory gap":
The members disagree about their own history as a company; about their
mission, vision, and values; and about specific policies that are
being impacted by the risk scenario. A serious information gap emerges,
and this becomes an added and unnecessary stress factor. What if the
lack of alignment results in giving out inaccurate statements that
will come back to haunt the company later? (And why is it that the
public (and the media) often have a better memory about a company's
historical track record than the company itself?)
China:
Organizations in China tend to have a higher turnover rate, for a
variety of reasons. It is especially important then to be aware of
the attending gaps in "shared history" and to take steps to ensure
that all the players stay "on the same page" regarding the company's
track record.
In addressing this "memory gap" all
developing crisis teams should be taken through a specific Shared
History exercise to review their shared understandings, uncover gaps,
and create a new sense of connectedness and alignment among team members.
In the author's experience, it is usually during
this exercise that "skeletons" will emerge from the collective memory
that had been overlooked previously and that need to be factored into
the organization's risk profile.
During one such exercise in Beijing,
several team members recalled some embarrassing "skeletal" incidents
from only two years before about which the other members were completely
unaware; without this exercise the group as a whole could easily have
been blindsided if these issues were to emerge in the public spotlight.
3. Unskilled Information-Sharing
In the heat of a crisis, time and time again it is the inability to
rapidly and skillfully share vital information across organizational
function groups that most seriously threatens a crisis team's effectiveness.
This usually emerges amidst cries of, "Why didn't you say so earlier?"
or, "When did you know this?" or worst of all, "What do you mean you
assumed this wasn't important?" As any crisis coach will tell you,
it isn't that people are actively withholding
information; rather, they just lack an agreed-upon process and shared
expectations regarding what skillful information-sharing looks like.
The unshared information does not always
consist of the facts about what happened in a particular situation,
but rather what it meant from the perspective of one individual. Often,
crisis team members are silent when they should be sharing their hunches
and insights as a part of the collective insight needed to reach good
decisions. Crisis teams can learn to use an Action Learning
methodology called "Stop/Reflect/Write/Report," which ensures that
all types of information-including facts, observations, assumptions,
hunches, insights, ideas, comments, suggestions, fears, and analyses-can
be rapidly shared among team members at any stage of the crisis scenario.
This simple exercise has saved many a crisis team from imminent disaster.
Ordinary "discussion"
is simply not effective as a process to ensure that vital information
is shared rapidly by teams under stress. It is a huge time-waster,
often characterized by one or two "alpha" individuals who tend to
dominate the group's thinking process.
Opportunities are lost, key insights end up missing, information is
withheld, and people are shut down. While this is always the case
in "normal" organizational situations, the impact of this type of
dysfunction is multiplied in a crisis and could mean the difference
between a swift recovery or the destruction of the company's reputation.
Bottom Line:
All crisis teams must be steeped in an effective,
agreed-upon methodology for rapid information-sharing in real time.
It should not be assumed that a crisis team knows how to communicate
with each other in the heat of a crisis. Yet, typically, most crisis
preparedness efforts focus on "hardware" issues and naively assume
that the crisis team knows how to communicate.
4.
The Wrong Question Is Being Asked
Every crisis response should begin with asking the right questions.
Most teams lacking this orientation can spend considerable time working
on one so-called "obvious" question or area of concern simply because
it was the first one to come up. Imagine the collective shock that
comes with the realization that there is actually a long laundry list
of questions that also need to be addressed-some of which make the
original question or problem pale in comparison. The right type of
effort has been applied to the wrong area.
One
of the first issues for the crisis team to address is determining
what questions are implied by the crisis situation.
Once this list is available for consideration, the team can rapidly
agree on priorities and develop a sense of confidence that they are
indeed making the best use of their valuable time.
China:
Some organizations in China still tend to be organized according to
strict hierarchical assumptions: whoever has the biggest title dominates
the discussion and makes the decisions. Under this "dominator" model
it is easy for the team to become "grooved" by the questions the leader
happens to be asking at the time. Crisis teams need a collaborative
leadership model whereby the leader has been trained to harness the
power of the "group mind" based on a series of pertinent questions¡and
then make a decision based on the collective insights of the group.
To make this work, the group must learn to be ever-vigilant about
the nature of questions they are asking.
Bottom
Line: Crisis teams must learn
how to observe themselves while still in action, to constantly be
aware of what questions they are asking and to insert new questions
into the process on a regular basis. It is vital to have one member
of the team assigned as an observer, to log the content and quality
of conversations and this be in a position to "notice" when the team
is getting caught in a side-track when they would do better to focus
on more pertinent evolving issues.
5.
Champions Need Coaches
While it has long been recognized that all teams need good leadership
to be effective, the notion of having a coach on the sidelines acutely
observing and tracking the behaviors and processes being used by the
leader and team is a fairly recent breakthrough in organizational
thinking. The job of the coach is to skillfully
observe the organizational habits and processes that add up to the
dysfunctional teams so typical in modern organizations. He or she
should be focused on the real-time behaviors of teams and individuals
as they emerge during training and testing. The coach is
empowered by the team to intervene with a live, just-in-time learning
opportunity that addresses the learning needs of the team at that
particular moment. Once the lesson has been learned, the coach steps
back again to observe, ready to intervene only as needed. The coach
is highly skilled in spotting "the teachable moment" when a particular
lesson is most needed and receptivity will be highest.
China:
During one notable training experience in Guangzhou, the crisis team
had spontaneously divided itself into three distinct groups. Each
group became deeply engrossed in solving a different set of issues.
Unfortunately, the three sub-teams were
not communicating with each other and none of them were actually focused
on the most important issue: a TV news team was on the way to their
location and expected to get a live statement representing the company's
response to the crisis! As coach, I got them to notice
what they had been doing, reconfigure as a team and get themselves
ready to address the media within 20 minutes. (I intervened just after
one team's self-appointed leader had "stormed" the white board demanding
everyone to "shut up and pay attention.") Needless to say, the intervention
of a coach was invaluable to the success of this team. Red-faces abounded
when the group became aware of how unskillfully they had been operating!
This was a classic "teachable moment."
Champions have coaches
because they know they cannot simultaneously swing the racket and
observe themselves swinging the racket. And
if ever there were a need for a champion team, it's in the pressure
cooker of a crisis. Team leaders who have worked with a
coach can attest to the fact that having a skilled learning coach
as a member of a crisis team can make the difference between simply
fixing flat tires and breaking through to the highest possible levels
of performance demanded by a crisis.
About
the Author
David Chard is president of Seattle-based
Crisis Consultants Group Worldwide, a global network of crisis preparedness
trainers and rapid response crisis experts. With over 20 years' experience
in international public relations and crisis communications, Chard
focuses on helping multinational organizations develop high-performance
crisis teams before a crisis hits. He is also a certified Learning
Coach using the methodology of Action Reflection Learning (ARL) developed
by Leadership in International Management.
He can be reached at david.chard@crisisteams.com.
Visit the CCG website at: www.crisisteams.com.
David
Chard , Beijing.
This article originally appeared
in the July / August 2001 Issue of "Contingency and Planning Magazine."
By special arrangement, the author has updated the article for this
issue of "Peeling The Onion".
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Special
Seminar Opportunity - "Crisis Preparedness for Managers in China"
LehmanBrown
China is pleased to announce that by special arrangement with
Crisis Consultants Group Worldwide, David Chard will be coming
to Beijing in November 2002 to carry out two action-packed
seminars entitled "Crisis Preparedness for Managers in China."
Based
on his 25 years of professional crisis management experience
in the Greater China arena, these seminars represent a "must
have" learning opportunity for senior management concerned with
developing an effective crisis preparedness and response capability.
For
registration information visit: www.lehmanbrown.com/CrisisSeminar.htm
or for phone registration call: Rachel Wan, Tel: (86 10)
8532 1720 today.
Space
is available for a maximum of 35 participants at each 1.5 day
seminar so be sure to book early. Crisis Preparedness for Managers
in China is proudly sponsored by LehmanBrown China in association
with Crisis Consultants Group Worldwide.
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