At 8:45 AM on September 11, 2001, John Murphy, the CEO of Oppenheimer Funds, was out for a run in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park. He was thinking about the company’s reorganization plan, which he had announced the day before, when suddenly he saw an explosion near the top of the north tower of the World Trade Center. He stopped to watch black smoke pour from the place of impact—an awful lot of smoke, it seemed, for what was probably a small plane that had lost its way. He thought of his own employees in the neighboring south tower and made a mental note not to renew Oppenheimer’s lease in that building. “First the bombing in 1993 and now a plane accident,” he thought. “What’s next?” He continued jogging, now in the direction of the office.
Crisis Communication: Lessons from 9/11
The sheer enormity of last year’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon gave new meaning to the term “crisis management.” Suddenly, companies near Ground Zero, as well as those more than a thousand miles away, needed a plan. Because the disasters disrupted established channels not only between businesses and customers but between businesses and employees, internal crisis-communications strategies that could be quickly implemented became a key responsibility of top management. Without these strategies, employees’ trauma and confusion might have immobilized their firms and set their customers adrift.
In this article, executives from a range of industries talk about how their companies, including Morgan Stanley, Oppenheimer Funds, American Airlines, Verizon, the New York Times,Dell, and Starbucks, went about restoring operations and morale. From his interviews with these individuals, author and management professor Paul Argenti was able to distill a number of lessons, each of which, he says, may “serve as guideposts for any company facing a crisis that undermines its employees’ composure, confidence, or concentration.”
His advice to senior executives includes: Maintain high levels of visibility, so that employees are certain of top management’s command of the situation and concern; establish contingency communication channels and work sites; strive to keep employees focused on the business itself, because a sense of usefulness enhances morale and good morale enhances usefulness; and ensure that employees have absorbed the firm’s values, which will guide them as they cope with the unpredictable.
The most forward-thinking leaders realize that managing a crisis-communications program requires the same dedication and resources they give to other dimensions of their business. More important, they realize that their employees always come first.
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