If you’re the leader of a company of any size, the moment disaster strikes, you instantly find yourself facing intense, unforeseen, and sometimes life-altering decisions. Your community may have been severely impacted — and you may even be dealing with class action lawsuits. With the eyes of the public bearing down on you, the action you take now will often determine how you will be perceived in the long term.
Ideally you have a plan in place that provides systematic guidance for the steps you’re taking. You want to be careful about acting impulsively under duress, and having a process laid out on paper can drastically aid your approach to the circumstances at hand.
This is the time when Bishop and Fields can help you maintain a sense of level-headed self-possession as you put your plan into action. We can help you understand how to proceed.
In an increasingly complex and interconnected world of hyperspeed product development, complicated production logistics, and instantaneous communication (or miscommunication) problems can strike at any time. Governments are quick to step in and penalize any small situation that runs afoul of the law, and customers are all-too ready to sue or disparage you based on anything they might perceive as mixed ethics.
If you’re dealing with a particularly severe public relations issue, the online vitriol can be embarrassing, swift and relentless. The public scrutiny, the cesspool of social media — these are the times when your competitors are waiting to strike. They can’t wait to nab your best employees or swoop in on your customers. It’s also the time when cybercriminals rear their heads to exploit vulnerabilities in your communications network.
When a crisis befalls your business, Bishop and Fields can help you in the early stages of the disaster. We’ve helped companies deal with wide-ranging business disasters. This is where we know how to help you step up or step back and potentially turn the situation in your favor. You can use a trusted outside eye to gauge how a particular PR difficulty may enlarge or travel or mutate.
Bishop and Fields can help you maintain control of your organization, appease stakeholders, tend to immediate primary threats, and set out to correct the main cause of the crisis. This is where we bring our experience and can get you real tangible results in your hour of need. You can take the right steps to maintain your authority and work toward positive headlines tomorrow rather than staying mired in the negative tone of today.
While many leading executives and corporate leaders are trained in how to communicate during a crisis — and this is one critical component of crisis management — this training doesn’t necessarily equip them with the full spectrum of skills needed in major unprecedented situations.
Because Bishop and Fields deals with these situations on an ongoing basis, we can help you navigate turbulent times with the tools and approaches we’ve seen deployed time and again to lift companies out of their most dire predicaments.
Risk assessments are only efficacious if they’re entirely thorough. You’ll want to look at risk in the context of how similar situations have been handled in other industries as well as your own. We want to help you understand the risks and threats of the present situation, and look at the ways you can transform your weaknesses to build the most successful version of yourself.
We will help you realize the short-term actions you can take to keep yourself financially afloat. Imagine keeping the confidence of your investors and stakeholders, rather than watching them bail.
Critically, we will help you to fortify your team by communicating with and training your managers at different levels so they are supported and prepared to undergo the challenges of the moment. They will know how to respond and oversee dilemmas with their own sphere. This helps to stabilize the organization as a whole and gives your team a sense of ownership and pride in their own resourcefulness and leadership capabilities.
You will see that by enacting your crisis prevention plan and coupling it with appropriate crisis response techniques, you will be to weather the storm of your present struggles and get back to the realities of business life where, not only will this rough period become a distant memory, it will have served to make your company a stronger and more self-assured entity than ever before — one that will continue to grow and prosper will into the future.
