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Excerpted from PRNews' Crises Management Guidebook: Dealing With Victim Management Crises
James E. Lukaszewski

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In America today, part of the process of becoming a manager is training in de-emotionalization and being anti-victim. Simply put, if it can’t be easily measured, if it is difficult to quantify or if it can’t be metricized, it is probably not important. On top of this, managers are trained to discount, disregard and disrespect virtually every kind of emotional expression. Peers, shareholders and the business community expect managers to “tough it out,” and “avoid looking like sissies,” at least at first when bad things happen. It is OK to “give in” after victims have been insulted, demeaned and slapped around a bit. The result is that management’s response to crisis often comes across for what it surely is: callous, arrogant, cold and heartless. Managers are not compensated on their level of humanity.
Sometimes they are punished for empathy. Remember the chairman and co-founder of JetBlue, who was sidelined after he quickly and quite successfully managed recovery from a tremendously embarrassing winter storm service mess-up?
Going one step further, business people are taught a decision-making ritual, one in which even the most urgent decisions are made through a process of conflict, confrontation and aggressive intellectual and verbal combat. Looked at through the lens of victimization, this approach is time-consuming and distracts from the humane immediacy victim response requires. Too much delay and the perceptions of arrogance, callousness and culpability take over, especially if management hesitates or is initially hostile, negative or dismissive toward victims. Failure to manage the victim dimension immediately and compassionately is what really makes an adverse situation a crisis, particularly for leaders.
In crises, one crucial strategic responsibility of company leadership is to have in place a Victim Response Unit and Special Victim Action Team, reflecting participation by communications, the legal department and human resources, to immediately help management avoid both the collateral damage and devastating consequences of mismanaging the victim dimension and to keep management focused on the significant benefits to reputation, public trust and legal liability reduction that will be achieved by prompt, empathetic and apologetic managing of victims.

Crises and Disasters Create Many Kinds of Victims

Almost every post-mortem on crisis communication failure and management decision-making deficiencies identifies the failure to promptly address victims as the emotionally negative energizing force that causes trust to break down. Bad news of any consequence is about victims and victimization, or the potential for both. When the emotionality of victimization meets the rational amoral decision making of modern management, the permanent casualties will almost always be in management and reputation.

Who Can’t Be a Victim?

Let’s do some demystification. Corporations and large organizations, like government agencies, are almost never, from a public perspective, considered victims. Lawyers, corporate advisers and senior executives don’t qualify either. Yes, Tylenol was a victim of a product-tampering criminal in 1982 and 1986. Yes, the airlines whose planes were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center in 2001 were victims. The syringe tampering incidents in 1993 made Pepsi, an iconic American brand, a victim. The government building bombed in Oklahoma City in 1995 was also a victim. Yes, there are circumstances, although very few in number, where one could genuinely consider a large organization and its leadership to be victims.
Generally speaking, however, it is more likely that large organizations will be immediately viewed as perpetrators, or at least as having some culpability in the creation of victims. In these situations it is equally true, but perhaps not as intuitively apparent, that some employees are victims in every scenario. If the response of the organization is to stumble, mumble, fumble and bumble, any opportunity to be perceived as a victim is lost.
Management advisers, especially attorneys, need to recognize the crucial and important realities of the victim dimension, and be prepared to coach management for victim response readiness and for the important humane behaviors required as crises unfold.

James E. Lukaszewski, chairman and president of The Lukaszewski Group Inc., is a national practice leader in crisis management and author of the just published Why Should the Boss Listen to You? The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor.

This is an excerpt from PRNews Crisis Management Guidebook. To Order

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