It is not that hard to manage and lead your team through a crisis if you prepare properly.

Someone asked me this week how I handled different crises while I was at Walt Disney World.

The one really big learning I had in the last few years is that you cannot create a book of instructions on how to deal with a crisis.  I have learned that you put a bunch of smart experts in a room and in the field, and you let them use their expertise, common sense, and judgment . . . they will figure out as a team the right solution every single time.  No book can hold the answer to issues that are happening on a moment’s notice. Even if the answer were in a book, I am sure that the book would be so thick you could not quickly find the answer.

During Hurricane Charley back in 2004, someone asked me:  how do you run the Emergency Operations Command Center?  I told him that what you do is listen to the experts-and for the most part-you listen to them and do what they tell you.  When you are not sure, you get the whole group around the table and quickly bounce the issue off of them.  The answers come quickly, and all different points of view are surfaced that no one individual could ever come up with.  When you have all of the different points of view in front of you, making a good decision is a lot easier. The other thing that made it easier to deal with the different crises which I experienced  from 9/11 to several hurricanes was that we had  conducted many simulations through the years. The saying, “Practice makes perfect,” really is true.

Practice and then pick competent people, trust their judgment and common sense, and then you will get a score of between 9.5 and 10.0, which is usually high enough to win a gold medal . . . and you never win a gold medal by looking up the answers in a book.  You win because you have experience . . . because you have trained, and trained, and trained . . . because you have the common sense and judgment to know what is right and what is wrong . . . and because There Is No Book when you are in the middle of the race!   . . . Lee