🍀Have an organisation-wide shared understanding of risk
☘️ Define what constitutes a ‘Critical’ incident and a ‘Major’ incident, what differentiates them, what they mean in terms of resourcing, response, priorities and life cycles
☘️ Build teamwork and trust beforehand.
☘️ Crises don’t always build trust but they will always test it
☘️ Practice under pressure to build staff confidence, understanding, psychological readiness for what may come, and to stress test and adjust your plans accordingly before its too late!
☘️ Confusion and (sometimes) chaos are normal in crisis but readiness minimises it’s impact and duration
☘️ A structured decision making model is critical in a crisis to help you minimise Fight, flight and freeze, unconscious bias, a narrow focus, to help identify both risks and opportunities, to understand priorities, and to formulate your best options.
It also acts as an audit of decision making and can (and should) be reviewed to learn and embed good practices and remove bad practices
☘️ Trust your training and trust your team
☘️ Constantly welfare check your people
☘️ Share what you can, when you can, and if you can, with your team
☘️ Your crisis may not be your clients. Keep them informed to maintain confidence
☘️ You can’t control everything
☘️ Your own fears are not weaknesses, they are normal
☘️ Consult at all levels, because leadership abilities don’t have to come with a title, rank, length of service, or industry experience, nor do all the good ideas.
☘️ Be brave, stay humble and use your team, because the leader’s focus can narrow in crisis
☘️ What worked before won’t necessarily work again, stay flexible, stay open minded
☘️ Remember BAU (business as usual)
☘️ Make it clear to everyone when you are in different phases of crisis transition eg response, resilience and recovery. It sets the correct mindset shift and focus
☘️ Your attitude affects your behaviour and that of those around you
☘️ What you say and how you say it, how you enter a room, they all matter
☘️ And finally…be kind to yourself. its tough!
