Author: chatterton

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.

I’ve watched executives deliver technically accurate statements that somehow made everything worse. Not because they lied — because they reached for the same tired phrases everyone uses when they’re scared and stalling.

Three phrases do the most damage, and they’re everywhere.

The first: ‘We take this very seriously.‘ Every company says this. Every single one. It has become the corporate equivalent of ‘thoughts and prayers’ — words that fill space without conveying meaning. Your customers don’t want reassurance that you’re taking it seriously. They want evidence that you’re actually doing something. Show the work, not the sentiment.

The second: ‘At this time, we have no evidence that…‘ The moment you say ‘at this time,’ people hear the hedge. They know you’re building yourself an escape route for when more information surfaces. They’re right to be suspicious — this phrase exists to protect the company legally while technically telling the truth. The problem is that ‘technically true’ and ‘genuinely trustworthy’ are very different things.

The third: ‘We apologize if anyone was offended.‘ That little word ‘if’ carries enormous weight, and none of it is good. You’re not actually apologizing — you’re questioning whether the other person’s reaction was even valid. It makes the recipient feel worse.

What works instead is simpler than most leaders think. Acknowledge that the other person’s questions are the same ones you’re asking yourself. Tell them specifically what happened and what you’re doing about it. Tell them when they’ll hear from you again.

That’s empathy, specific action, and ownership without conditions.

The phrases that build trust in a crisis are almost always the ones that lawyers want to soften and executives want to avoid. They feel risky because they’re direct. But direct is what people remember, and it’s what they believe.