Crisis Management

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

This is a departure from my usual customer service and customer experience (CX) articles. While it does tie in to service and CX, it is really about leadership. In customer service and CX, resolving a complaint or crisis means resolving the issue to the customer’s satisfaction, ideally in a way that makes the customer say, “I’ll be back.” Sometimes, customers’ requests and expectations can cause frustration, but let’s put it into perspective.

Let’s say that your customer isn’t an individual or a company that calls you with a request, question or problem. Instead, that customer is a branch of the military, such as the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines or Coast Guard. Or perhaps, that customer is an entire country.

I recently had the privilege of visiting Scott Air Force Base and attending a lecture by Chief Master Sergeant Brian P. Kruzelnick, the command senior leader for the U.S. Transportation Command and principal advisor to the combatant commander and senior staff on matters concerning joint force integration, readiness, growth and utilization of the military workforce.

Chief Kruzelnick, or BK as he likes to be called, shared leadership lessons with an audience of 20 successful business owners. At the beginning of his presentation, he referred to all the people he served as customers. That caught my attention. In a way, the military is like a monopoly. If you want to “call in the troops,” you don’t shop around to determine which “brand” you want to work with, and you don’t get competitive pricing. You just get what you get.

But BK and his team take incredible pride in the work they do. They function like a group of senior leaders at a large, successful company. So, I asked, “BK, can I interview you for Amazing Business Radio and a Forbes article?” Fortunately for us all, he said, “Yes,” and the result is a number of lessons that all leaders can adopt for customer service, especially when it comes to crisis management.

BK started as if he were narrating a story: “It was 17 days in August. …” He was referring to the evacuation in Afghanistan in 2021. “We evacuated 123,334 men, women and children using 800 military aircraft. They went across nine countries and eight time zones. Unfortunately, 13 lives were lost, each one an American hero. We also had 20 babies born on those aircraft as we were evacuating them out.”

Consider the math. How many people could each plane transport? The larger C-17 planes are mainly used for cargo. They have the ability to move people, and with seats installed, usually about 120 passengers. But at one point, they put 823 people on a single aircraft. The engineers and experts knew they could do it. They actually had the passengers sat in the cargo hold and had a strap across their lap for safety. In a time of crisis, they successfully executed the largest evacuation the U.S. ever attempted.

But there was more. At the same time, there was a 7.2-magnitude earthquake in Haiti. There were wildfires in California that burned 1 million acres. A Category 4 hurricane blew through Louisiana. And if that wasn’t enough, there were safety inspections of the military’s larger aircraft that had to be completed across the entire fleet for a possible safety issue. BK proudly said, “And we got it all accomplished in 17 days in August. Wow!”

I joked about how many flight attendants it takes for 823 passengers. BK replied, “We don’t have flight attendants on C-17’s, but we have military personnel who are there to take care of business.” He shared a story about a young boy who was in the cargo hold and was laying on the floor next to his mother. He was cold and scared. One of the crew members took off his military jacket and wrapped it around the young boy, and then walked away to continue his job. Another crew member saw this and caught the moment with a photo.

BK said, “I think that defined the whole movement of what we did. Aside from everything else you hear about, that thing boiled down to humanity. Our ability to care for someone who needed to be cared for. That one picture epitomized that 17-day operation.”

In this incredible military operation, boundaries were pushed. Protocols were modified to suit the situation. The question was, how do you push or break a system that has never been stretched so far, and possibly change precedents for the future?

There is much to learn about managing a crisis from this incredible story. Let’s wrap up with BK’s six crisis management and leadership lessons:

1. Clarity in Times of Crisis: In times of crisis, there must be a clear objective that people can rally around. The goal is clarity. Everyone must understand what the commanding officer—or in the world of businesses, a leader or manager—wants and expects.

2. Extensive Training: People have to be trained to a level that makes them successful. On-the-job training is not possible in crisis situations. BK refers to this as Adventure Training. Nobody should be put into a position of questioning if something is going to work. On the contrary, there must be a level of comfort when you’re feeling the pressure of a crisis, and that comes from a foundation of strong training.

3. Prepare for the Worst: BK says, “I don’t think big companies think about their worst day. Most are building themselves to be at the best, optimal, all the time. But how many times do we think about our worst moments and how we can act and react to ensure we can still execute, perform and succeed? In the military, we run exercises all the time to make sure we can respond regardless of the situation. … There’s enough foundational training that we can operate and execute when called upon.”

4. Empowerment on Steroids: You must feel trusted enough to make decisions without fear of repercussions. BK said, “People must have the faith and trust of the organization resting on their shoulders that if they pushed the limits, which they knew they could do and still be safe, that no one would come down and try to hammer them negatively for what they did because there was trust in their expertise.”

5. Faith, Hope and Love: Let’s break these down one at a time:

• Faith — As a leader, you must have faith in your organization, the processes, the people executing and yourself.
• Hope — You must have hope. BK says, “Hope is critically important, because if you have hope, everybody that follows you will have hope because they’re looking to you as the leader.” I challenged that with the old saying, “Hope is not a strategy.” His quick response was, “Hopelessness is not a strategy either, so I would take hope.”
• Love — Have passion for what you do and compassion for the people you do it with.

6. Bring Harmony to Chaos: As we came to the end of the interview, I asked for one final piece of crisis leadership advice. BK quickly responded, “Bring harmony to chaos. Don’t bring a can of gasoline to the fire!”

Image Credits: Pixabay

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.