How do you react in a crisis?
They come up all the time in the real estate and construction businesses. No need to tell you that no crisis is easily resolved.
It’s a mess, and it messes up everything around it.
The big crises are beyond most of us. “Big” means a company problem, one that transcends the agent or the foreman.
I attended a seminar this summer on the subject and the speaker was blunt:
• When the media calls, refer everything to one person, and that that person to say nothing.
• Fire someone. Anyone, no matter whether that person was at fault. It will deflect the problem.
• Don’t let the CEO say anything. If he shows that he can’t handle it, the public and the employees will lose faith.
But what about the little guys. We don’t have many big crises — well, they’re big to us, but on a global scale they certainly don’t measure up to what, say, Bill Watson or Linda Sherrer consider a “crisis.”
I ran across a column by a guy named Don Wetmore, an educator who makes a second paycheck by conducting seminars and has some points that would apply to us.
To him., a crisis is “when a deadline has snuck up behind you and robbed you of all choice.” Poor time management, he says.
“I would suggest that if you find yourself in crisis management a lot, it probably has less to do with your day-to-day responsibilities and more to do with a lack of anticipation,” he says. “Most of the things that put you into crisis management are things that are capable of being anticipated.”
We have to get over the thought that it’s our fault, of course. It may not be entirely our fault, but too often we waste time by trying to blame everyone except ourselves. “It’s our own damn fault,” went that Jimmy Buffet song.
Wetmore says, “A problem well defined is 95 percent solved. If you have an accurate accounting of your time crunching crises, you’ve gone a long way to reducing them in the future.”
He suggests an exercise to help reduce crisis management.
“For the next two weeks, run a crisis management log. Nothing fancy about it at all. Simply take a pad of paper and entitle it ‘Crisis Management Log,’ and for the next two weeks when you encounter a crisis, log it in,” he says. “Put down the date and time it occurs and a little detail, so that two weeks later when you go back to review, you will remember the particulars. After two weeks of accumulating this data, go back and review every crisis you encountered and ask yourself, ‘Which of these could have been avoided?’”
Most people, he adds, discover that about 20 percent of the crises they suffered through were unavoidable. Stuff happens. We cannot eliminate all crises, but most people discover that about 80 percent of the crises they suffered through could have been avoided with better anticipation and planning.
Hope this helps.
WAIT! What happened to the loan agreement! is it back in the office? Who was supposed to bring it? Aaarrrgghhhhhh ...
- Fred Seely is the editor of Realty/Builder
Connection and editorial director of Bailey
Publishing & Communications In. He can be reached at [email protected].