CRISIS MANAGEMENT
The Art of Crisis Management
While we do not propose a formal definition of the word crisis in this manual, we treat any event that can, within a short period of time, harm your institution’s constituents, its facilities, its finances or its reputation as a crisis.
Crisis management is the art of making decisions to head off or mitigate the effects
of such an event, often while the event itself is unfolding.  This often means making decisions about your institution’s future while you are under stress and while you lack key pieces of information.
Consistent with the overall philosophy of this manual, the key to being able to manage a crisis is doing as much planning as practical before a crisis starts in order to best position you and your institution to respond to and mitigate such a situation.
The Crisis Management Continuum:
Introduction
What is usually called “crisis management” should be best understood as part of a broad continuum of activities as follows:
• Planning relates to getting your institution in the best position to Planning.
react to, and recover from, an emergency.
• Incident responses are the processes that you have put Incident Response.
into place to ensure that your institution reacts properly and orderly to an incident as it occurs.  Examples of incident response include:
a.
Evacuation after a called-in bomb threat
b.
Denial of entry to suspicious persons
c.
Calling for medical help when a child is injured in your school •  Crisis Management is the management and Crisis Management.
coordination of your institution’s responses to an incident that threatens to harm, or has harmed, your institution’s people, structures, ability to operate, valuables
and/or reputation.  It takes into account your planning and automatic incident
response, but must also dynamically deal with situations as they unfold, often in
unpredictable ways.
Business Continuity.
•  Business continuity relates to those steps necessary to restore your institution to normal functioning.
As will be discussed in detail below, a great deal of crisis management occurs before a crisis begins: it is about planning and preparing.
The Crisis Management Continuum:
Planning
Introduction
As mentioned above, planning relates to getting your institution in the best position
to react to, and recover from, a crisis.  Planning for a crisis is discussed in some detail throughout this manual.  For example, the chapter on explosive threats helps you consider what is necessary to plan to respond to an explosive threat-related crisis at your institution. The chapter on armed intruders seeks to do the same.
However, there are two elements of planning that are unique to managing a crisis:• and
Creating escalation rules for your employees
•
Creating a crisis team.
In short, the goal is to have employees who know when to report problems and a team of senior employees who are ready to react to them.  Each will be discussed in turn.
Creating Escalation Rules for Your Employees:
Preventing, Detecting and Controlling a Crisis
Creating escalation rules for your employees is an essential element in crisis prevention, detection, and control.  This means that you train your employees to bring matters
to the attention of more senior personnel for their analysis and handling as soon as possible, preferably before they become critical.  It means not only setting clear rules for when an employee must notify senior staff of a problem (for example, whenever a caller or letter writer mentions suing your institution), but also empowering staff to feel comfortable reporting concerns to senior staff (for example, ensuring that junior staff do
not feel at risk of ridicule or a negative job review if they in good faith report what they inaccurately believe is a problem).
Without such rules, a developing crisis may go unnoticed by senior management until it develops, appears in the press, and/or turns into a calamity.
•
Choosing to Act — or Not
Creating escalation rules is important because when and how a manager becomes aware of a crisis can often determine how an institution responds — and how successful it can be in its response.  Consider these two scenarios:
1.
A synagogue employee receives a phone call that, while not overtly
threatening, is a rambling speech that contains some very anti-Semitic
remarks.  The employee doesn’t inform the director of the call.
(Institutional discussion of situation ends)
2.
A synagogue employee receives a phone call that, while not overtly
threatening, is a rambling speech that contains some very anti-Semitic
remarks.  After the call, the employee makes a note of all the information
relating to the call, informs his/her supervisor (the synagogue director),
who in turn calls the police to file a report.  Afterwards, after consulting
with the synagogue President, he/she decides that the situation warrants
extra security during the upcoming high holidays and briefs security
personnel accordingly.
Clearly, the two institutional responses are very different.  In the first case, because
the clerk did nothing at all, management was simply cut out of the decision making process.  Had the employee escalated because, say, the synagogue’s management had instructed its employees to draw to management’s attention such an unusual occurrence, the management of the synagogue would have been able to react or consciously choose not to react.  Simply, without an escalation rule, an institution’s management may lose a critical opportunity to react.
•
When to Escalate?
The key question is what should cause such an escalation?  How should an institution handle the task of teaching its staff and volunteers to know when to escalate?
There is no science in creating such a plan and the institution’s leadership should think
about the kinds of incidents they would want to know about immediately.  These may include, but are not limited to:
1.
Security threats (e.g., bomb threats)
2.
Allegations that may expose the institution to legal liability or embarrassment
3.
Allegations that an employee or lay volunteer is acting in a manner that
is inconsistent with the institution’s best interests, such as misuse of an
institution’s resources
4.
Any inconsistency between expected and actual bank balances
Requests for information that is inappropriate (i.e., a request by an unknown
5.
person for an employee’s home address)
6.
Requests for information relating to the institution’s security or infrastructure
(i.e., a request for information about where employees park or when the
office is unoccupied)
Requests for donor information
7.
8.
Attempts to improperly access computer systems and/or “hack” an
institution’s Web site
9.
All other contacts that concern the employee
10.
All unusual events, including repeated hang-up phone calls, calls that contain
sharp disagreement with an institution’s policy or practice, and visitors who
concern the employee
react to doThe institution’s leadership should create a reporting mechanism (e.g., a log) to maintain a log of these and other incidents.
Of course, many of the above may be consistent with lawful and innocent behavior and a good deal of judgment and discretion is required.  Finally, this is not a complete list, and such a list must be drawn up with your particular institution’s situation in mind.
Management must work to create a culture where employees can communicate these incidents to management’s attention without fearing overreaction or any negative consequences to the reporting employee (including feeling as if they are not being treated seriously).
Creating a Crisis Team
A second key element of getting your institution in the best position to react to, and recover from, an emergency relates to the creation of a crisis team that is ready to quickly come together to help manage an institution’s way through a crisis.
The senior manager of an institution should establish a mechanism for pulling together a crisis team.  She should:
1.
Identify the key players who will be on a crisis management team, based on
their specialties, willingness to serve, and personalities
a.
Example (large institution): Senior manager, Board Chair, Rabbi,
Facilities Chair, Principal, General Counsel, Information technology
leadership, etc.
Example (small institution): Rabbi, Board Chair, two or three active
b.
and involved board members, maintenance person
2.
Identify the person (or people) authorized to bring the team together during a
crisis (the “crisis team manager”)
a.
You may wish to designate this task to someone other than the most
senior manager, as locating and bringing the crisis team together may
detract from the senior manager’s efforts to deal with the crisis as it
unfolds
b.
You may wish to designate this task to someone other than Rabbi: he
or she may be obligated to attend to religious duties
The crisis team manager should be able to be reached 24/7.  Similarly, the
3.
crisis manager should be able to reach the members of his or her crisis team
24/7.  Of course, this raises issues relating to Shabbat and holidays with work
restrictions.
The function and role of the crisis team is discussed in greater detail below.  But,
in short, the crisis team will be responsible for restoring “command, control and communications” during a crisis while gathering as much information as possible,
so that the directives of the senior manager can be well informed and effectively implemented.
In an effort to build cohesion and to work out any problems, the crisis team should practice crisis management.  One way to practice this is by working through scenarios during a so-called table-top exercise, in which team members work their way through a fictitious crisis. See page 34 of the manual.
The Crisis Management Continuum:
Incident Response
Incident response is the automatic process that an institution puts into place to ensure that employees and systems react properly to an incident as it occurs.  The more standard procedures you can put into place, and on which you train your staff, the less likely you are to encounter confusion and chaos when a crisis occurs.
Such automatic processes involve careful planning, and much of the manual has been devoted to this topic.
The key point is the awareness that, during a crisis, you must recognize that the most senior manager will likely not be the one who is triggering these responses.  For example, a junior staff person may find herself confronting the situation of an armed intruder or an unidentified package — and being forced to make a decision while
more senior management is elsewhere.  While it would be preferable if the employee could consult a senior manager about what to do during an emerging crisis, in reality, this employee may have to act immediately for the safety of the entire organization
and its constituents.  Your planning must be cognizant of this fact and should seek to appropriately empower such staff personnel with the knowledge of when and how to act. For examples, is your staff able to deal with the following:
1.
Explosive Threats (see pages 49 – 60)
2.
Armed intruders in schools (see pages 73 - 81)
3.
Computer crime targeting your institution (see pages 36 - 48)
4.
Evacuation procedures (see pages 56 - 58)

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