Crisis Management is a new area in management sciences. Hands-on crisis management practices include predicting potential crisis which may occur and preparing plan in case of a crisis. Normally, companies have ready available resources and time in case a crisis occurs. Crisis Management often involves emphasis on customer relations to recover from any damage and making sure to stakeholders of the company that recovery process is underway and it will be successful.
Crisis is an unpredictable event and can happen without any pre-symptoms, it can happen anytime, anywhere. Company needs to deal with unwanted crisis through effective means of crisis management.
Following are the common indicators to most of the crisis-
- Threat to the company
- Surprise
- Short decision time
When crisis occurs, companies need to make changes, and when effort for change vanishes, it’s called a total failure. Contrary to Risk Management, which involves identifying threats and finding the best methods to avoid them? Crisis management involves dealing with threats after they have occurred. Crisis management requires skills to find, estimate, understand and handle a worse situation after it has occured and till the recovery procedure completes.
|
In the words of Venette: “crisis is a process of transformation where the old system can no longer be maintained.”
|
|
Sometimes, Crisis Management also referred as Incident Management. The techniques that companies follow to deal with unwanted happenings are called Crisis Management Plan.
Crisis has various types, different types of crisis leaves different impacts on function of companies. To deal with a certain type of crisis, it is necessary knowing types of crisis as different crisis types needs different skill sets to handle.
"Coombs" identified 9 types of crisis as mentioned below-
1. Natural disasters
2. Malevolence
3. Technical breakdowns
4. Human breakdowns
5. Challenges
6. Mega damage
7. Organizational misdeeds
8. Workplace violence
9. Rumors
Lerbinger identified 7 types of crisis as mentioned below-
1. Natural disaster
2. Technological crises
3. Confrontation
4. Malevolence
5. Crises of skewed management value
6. Crises of deception
7. Crises of management misconduct
The job of crisis manger involves with project management, media and communications, crisis operations, start-up ventures including new media and cable television, financial control and strategic planning. A crisis manager should be a champion of open communication and trans-cultural diversity to build positive working relationships. He / She should possess a solid understanding of international and corporate business cultures. It involves Prevention as well as preparation exercises to identify both likely and unlikely crisis such as expecting fire tragedy at any moment and taking precautionary steps and so on. It includes both crisis planning and response including well planned response team, with spokes person(s), and manuals which outline guidelines during a crisis.