If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son.Perhaps the best exponent of this approach was Harold
Macmillan who said at London Airport of a political crisis in his
Cabinet: ‘I thought the best thing to do was to settle up these
little local difficulties, and then turn to the wider vision of the
Commonwealth.’
Statesmen, of course, have to give the impression of playing it
cool. Henry Kissinger, who spent his whole diplomatic career in
crisis management, said once: ‘There cannot be a crisis next
week. My schedule is already full.’ But managers should play it
cool too.
One of the arts of dealing with a crisis is to maintain the confi-
dence of everyone around that youaremanaging it. Insouciance
like Macmillan’s is one way of doing this. Another way is delib-
erately to give the impression that you are taking it easy –
relaxing almost – when in actual fact you are working at top
speed. Good crisis managers, in situations where all hell is let
loose, and people and pieces of paper are being thrown about in
all directions, and three telephones are ringing at once, will, from
time to time, lean back in their chair, sip a cup of coffee, and idly
gossip about last night’s football game. They then resume work
with redoubled energy. Robert Townsend (1970) described this
approach well in Up the Organizationwhen he wrote: ‘There is a
time for engagement and a time for withdrawal. A time to
contemplate it, and a time just to laugh at it.’
And in The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe, in describing how Chuck
Yeager (the man who broke the sound barrier for the first time
with two broken ribs) influenced the crisis management style of
airline pilots, wrote this about their approach:
Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon
gets to know the voice of the airline pilot... coming over the
intercom... with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particu-
lar down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody
itself (nevertheless! – it’s reassuring)... the voice that tells you, as the
airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a
thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belt because ‘it
might get a little choppy’.How to Manage a Crisis 159