Any crisis situation can significantly affect an organization, demanding immediate strategic actions from a company’s leaders. Indeed, management should make quick decisions about the adequate allocation of resources (McNulty & Marcus, 2020). The role of leadership in such situations is primarily to focus on the possible scenarios of this specific situation to take appropriate measures to prevent undesirable outcomes (McNulty & Marcus, 2020). In fact, leaders should avoid being trapped on one issue; instead, they should take a holistic view of the problem (McNulty & Marcus, 2020). It is essential to understand that even though the response is needed, a leader is not capable of controlling all potential consequences. Hence, one should consider effective communication and the delegation of the decision-making for different aspects of the crisis.
One such example of a crisis situation is the cyberattack on the private data of two companies, Excellus and Lifetime Healthcare. This incident happened on August 5, 2015, and was instantly recognized by the firms’ experts (Orr & Singer, 2015). The leaders immediately notified the FBI and the affected customers about this crisis; however, it is still unknown whether data was stolen (Orr & Singer, 2015). Still, leadership decided to offer compensation to the affected parties by providing two years of free credit monitoring (Orr & Singer, 2015). In this case, communication was managed exceptionally well because both intelligence agencies, people who could be harmed, and the media were notified. Additionally, affected individuals had a chance to call these organizations and report if their stolen data was misused. Still, crisis communication could be improved by creating a special page on these companies’ websites to provide the most recent information in real-time.
References
McNulty, E. J., & Marcus, L. (2020). Are you leading through the crisis … or managing the response? Harvard Business Review. Web.
Orr, S., & Singer, P. (2015). Excellus records hacked; 10.5 million records affected. Democrat & Chronicle. Web.