A message arrived: ‘A crisis? We’re an annuity development company. What kind of crisis would we have?’
I hear this a lot. The assumption that crisis is something that happens to airlines, hospitals, and oil companies — to ‘high-risk’ businesses. Not to quiet, buttoned-up financial services firms. Not to companies where nothing very interesting happens.
Let me share 10 crises I have personally been involved with that are completely agnostic to your industry:
- a senior executive gets arrested;
- a longtime employee files a harassment lawsuit and goes public;
- a disgruntled client posts a viral takedown on social media;
- your CFO gets investigated for fraud even though they’re innocent;
- a data breach exposes customer financial information;
- an employee dies on company property;
- your CEO’s old social media posts resurface;
- a regulator launches a surprise investigation;
- a key partner gets caught in a scandal and your name is attached;
- a family member does something incredibly stupid on camera and it goes viral.
None of these require you to be a high-risk business. They require you to be a business — with employees, customers, partners, and a reputation you’ve spent years building.
Great leaders aren’t born in good times. They’re great because of how they’ve handled the awful moments. A crisis doesn’t require you to be reckless or to operate in a dangerous industry. It requires you to have people in your organization who are human, and it requires you to have built something worth protecting.
The companies that survive these moments aren’t the ones who thought it couldn’t happen to them. They’re the ones who knew it could — eventually — and decided to be ready.