Share the Lessons Learned
“It’s over,” said Terry, tired but relieved.
“It’s almost over,” said Matt, “we need to share what happened with our employees.”
Terry pushed back, “Do we really? This has been hard on everyone. Why don’t we move on? In a month no one will care or remember. Let’s just put this behind us.”
“No,” said Matt, adamantly this time, “I know it’s been hard, but we handled this the right way, and our teams need to know that. When we sent out the holding statement they trusted us to follow through on what we said we would do. They deserve to know what we did, why we did it, and what we learned. A month from now they might forget the details, but they will remember their company does what it says it’s going to do.”
After you have done what it takes to understand the true depth and breadth of the problem, completed the hard work of opening your mind to receive the cold, hard truth, and taken substantive action, it’s now time to finish the job.
Part of finishing the job well is communicating effectively. There is a typical evolution in communications as a crisis is being resolved:
- Early in a crisis, it is often true that the only things that could be said with confidence were said in the brief and factual holding statement.
- Then, as substantive action was being taken, there may have been “threshold moments” that warranted similarly accurate, but necessarily brief updates.
- However, once the crisis has been resolved, there is often an important opportunity to communicate broadly and in more detail what was done, why it was needed, how it worked, and what was learned.
Communicating the resolution of a crisis and the lessons learned can go a long way to rebuilding trust. It isn’t suffering that demoralizes us. We are demoralized by meaningless suffering. If the previous steps have been done well, the pain that everyone went through will not be meaningless. You’ll have a hard, but ultimately encouraging story to tell, one that makes you and your organization more resilient for the future.
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