Most executives aren’t ready for a crisis. Here’s what the prepared ones do differently.
Twenty years. Dozens of crises. One pattern that never changes.
“Only a few top executives come prepared,” says Barbara Mahe, Communications Director at Consultancy32, who has spent two decades navigating high-stakes situations for corporates and startups across sectors. “Being prepared and well-supported is key to minimizing damage and maintaining trust.”
That observation is drawn from Barbara’s real experience across financial scandals, reputational emergencies, and high-stakes situations in Europe, North America and Asia.
The illusion of readiness
Most leaders believe they’re prepared. They have a legal team and perhaps a vague sense that they’d “handle it” when the moment came. But for companies with high-stakes, managing a crisis requires outstanding communications skills. And crisis communication is about having a framework that holds under pressure, and that eventually will leverage a complex situation to make your visibility and reputation even stronger.
What we at Consultancy32 observe repeatedly is that organisations confuse incident response with crisis communications. Getting those elements wrong can do more than just complicate a crisis.
The cost of being unprepared
The damage from a mishandled crisis can be financial, relational and reputational. Stakeholders (investors, employees, regulators, the press) are watching how a leader behaves under pressure. They’re evaluating the character of the institution.
Trust, once lost in a crisis, takes years to rebuild. A case in point: the Oxfam Haiti scandal (which by the way illustrates how nonprofits can lose trust as fast as commercial organisations). But similar scenarios are many:
- executives who minimised too early and lost credibility
- organisations that went silent and appeared guilty
- leaders who spoke too soon without the right preparation and turned a contained incident into a front-page narrative.
The common thread in almost every case isn’t the nature of the crisis itself, but rather the absence of preparation and the right support structure around the leader at the critical moment.
What prepared looks like
The executives who navigate crises well share a set of common practices.
- They’ve mapped their corporate and business vulnerabilities before an incident occurs.
- They’ve established clear communication protocols, in particular for press relations and social media management.
- They’ve rehearsed difficult scenarios to build the kind of cognitive readiness that allows for clear thinking when the pressure is highest.
The best-prepared leaders have a trusted, experienced communications team around them. People who understand the ecosystem they are navigating in, the strategic architecture of crisis management and the human dimension of public trust.
That combination of preparation and expert support, as Barbara Mahe points out, is a deciding factor.
This combination should be a priority to any organisation, private, public or nonprofit, where institutional trust is often the core asset. It may even be the most important investment a leader can make.
Before the storm
It’s quite obvious but it needs repeating: the window for real preparation is always before the crisis, and not during it. Once a situation is in motion, the options narrow fast. What looked like a manageable response from the outside becomes a race especially in view of social media amplification.
The executives who come through crises with their reputations and organisations intact aren’t lucky. They’re ready. And they didn’t get ready alone.
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Consultancy32 works with business leaders, CEOs, and foundation directors to build the crisis communications readiness that most organisations lack. From vulnerability audits and scenario planning to real-time crisis support, our team brings 20+ years of frontline experience to every engagement.
Don’t wait for the bad headline: https://consultancy32.com/our-academy/
For more on crisis communication, see 4 Lessons from Facebook Communications Crisis
