NYU’s econ maven Nouriel Roubini hasn’t yet glimpsed any sign that the system financial crisis is abating. In the WSJ Tuesday, the “professor who called the housing and credit collapse” and his co-writer paint a horrifying picture of bank losses yet to come, and call for an interesting solution for the government to apply.
- 1. Recognize that their employees can help manage the significant customer impacts arising from bad news. Prepare them and their managers and call upon them to reach out to customers all of the time.
- 2. Take your medicine: The news media is going to focus on the worst aspects of the crisis and its impact on your firm — don’t be surprised by this and don’t try to talk them out of it. The best you can hope for is that your most urgent message (sometimes two or three) can be included in the story. Don’t ignore “bad press” with either customers or employees — you need to have ongoing dialogue with your stakeholders anyway, so talk about the story and where you felt it went wrong. (but don’t throw rocks at the media, it’ll never work…) The stories are a pretext for conversations.
- 3. Consistently remind your stakeholders of your commitment to them — and your plans for working through the issues. You gain much more from talking about these things than not.
Tags: crisis, discuss, engage, Talk, transparency