The first material of this series of new professions. We examine crisis managers' work, duties, and relevance in large companies.
Inside, we have hidden a quiz with case studies that will help you improve your crisis management skills. Towards the end - regardless of your answers - we will recommend free courses to help you quickly develop your managerial skills.
At least once in our lives, we have experienced an economic crisis and its effects. Some have lost a significant part of their income; as a result, others have lost their jobs, and some have lost an entire business that they had worked on over many years. To avoid considerable damage, the profession of a crisis manager has emerged, and their main objective is to save a company at all costs.
A crisis manager is normally invited into a company because of their expertise. However, they can also be a permanent staff member, particularly if the company operates in an unstable area or has been through challenging times over a prolonged period. A crisis manager helps an entrepreneur avoid bankruptcy by identifying problems quickly and changing the business strategy. The job of a crisis manager can be divided into two stages:
Stage 1. They gather and process a wide range of information about the company. At the same time, you must remember that someone else's enterprise can be like the human soul and be dark. Therefore, the crisis manager must work with internal specialists who may not be interested, find inaccuracies in other people's documents and work in an extremely tense environment with strict deadlines and restrictions.
Stage 2. They analyse the state of the company and development measures to eliminate the shortcomings of their current strategy. As a general rule, the crisis manager can meet the team's resistance again because "eliminating shortcomings" could even include closing entire departments or reducing salaries.
The entire work of a crisis manager could take three months to a year. Afterwards, the manager moves to another company upon request and repeats the cycle.
To find out the causes of a crisis within a particular company, a crisis manager needs to know what is causing it. For example, in addition to an external market crisis, the need for crisis management may be caused by the following:
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Exceeding the budget allocated for solving certain tasks.
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A lack of effective management within a department or team.
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Mistakes in the organisation of business practices and lack of optimisation.
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Inaccuracies or a lack of information available to the company and the inability to work with it and to analyse it.
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Imbalances in the selected business model.
To summarise, the following basic tasks of a crisis manager are as follows:
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Guarantee the continuity of work procedures to increase transparency and quality communication between departments.
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Identify weak business links, areas, channels, assets, or practices, eliminate them, and retain and maximise the effective ones.
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Enhance the financial model, improve the business's profitability, and increase financial turnover and product sales speed.
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Make the business structure more "efficient" to facilitate internal management practices.
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Identify where resources are slipping away, save them and raise costs.
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Strengthen the existing leaders in the company and eliminate the so-called "marauder specialists" who undermine the efficiency of the business from within.
How crisis managers save companies: Judy Smith's Story
Judy Smith is one of the most famous crisis managers in the world. She has authored her own books about crisis management and is a frequent guest on professional talk shows. She solved a high-profile business collapse during the Sony crisis when their servers were hacked. In addition, she saved dozens of American companies from the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. Judy Smith's experience is rich and inspiring. Her story is the basis of the TV show "Scandal" with Kerry Washington.
Initially, Judy Smith did not aspire to work in crisis management. However, she was once an ordinary and successful manager. Then, received requests from business acquaintances and partners to help them solve challenging issues. At first, Judy Smith agreed to this out of friendship, but then she began to officially take "commissions". Eventually, following decades as a crisis consultant, Smith founded her consulting firm, which currently includes an entire team of crisis managers specialising in different areas and niches, from digital technology to medical.
Test how suitable you are for the profession and how ready you are to upgrade your vital skills. To achieve this, imagine yourself as the hero of three situations. Our website will randomly choose various situations for you, and you must find the right way out of the crisis.
