Level Up Your Crisis Management Skills

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Every leader wants to believe that their company is prepared to handle a crisis, but when one occurs, it often reveals the weaknesses at the heart of an organization.  But not every.   This leads to an obvious question: Why do some organizations freeze in the face of a crisis while others spring into action and skillfully minimize the damage?  

The authors posed this question to leaders who have faced high-stakes disruption firsthand. Our interviews included individuals who have served in high-ranking political, military, and government roles, as well as senior executives at major global companies.   Based on their insights, the authros identified seven capabilities that any organization must develop to withstand a crisis. Because most organizations have these capabilities, if only in a partial or uneven form, they also define what each capability looks like in terms of its level of maturity.

The Seven Core Capabilities of Crisis Management

1. Contingency. Preparing for what might happen and defining roles upfront so that people know what to do when the crisis hits is critical to surviving a crisis.
2. Clarity. Transparent and clear communication is essential in a crisis. This does not mean spinning disaster into a polished press release; it means communicating early and honestly. 
3. Coordination. Effective leaders connect silos before a crisis. They build trust and a rhythm of collaboration so that when things go wrong, everyone can act as one and as needed. 
4. Compassion. Showing genuine empathy for all who may be affected by the crisis, both inside and outside the organization, builds credibility and confidence and, critically, buys time to deal with the situation. 
5. Confrontation. Leaders must face the hard truths early. 
6. Control. Good leaders maintain order in a crisis. That doesn’t mean centralizing every decision; it means defining decision rights in advance, clarifying who decides what, and empowering those closest to a situation to act when needed. 
7. Continuity. The best crisis managers don’t just move on once a crisis has faded. They run postmortems, capturing lessons that can help them build resilience and make the organization better prepared for the next crisis.

Each of the seven core crisis management capabilities can be seen as developing over the following five stages of maturity.  Level I Reactive (Ad Hoc Response).  Level II Aware (Basic Planning).  Level III Defined (Structured Execution).  Level IV  Integrated (Aligned and Embedded).  And Level V Strategic (Continuous Resilience).

It’s important not to view this simple framework as a checklist. All of the capabilities must be in place to some degree because they reinforce one another and together make a system more resilient. Contingency without clarity breeds confusion; compassion without confrontation leads to inaction; control without coordination creates bottlenecks. Each element constrains or amplifies the others. Organizations that survive crises have these seven capabilities in place, supported by strong organizational routines and culture.

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