In this installment of EHSDA Shorts, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Darling, Retired United States Marine Corps, and public speaker on crisis leadership and decision making, explains how EHS professionals should respond to a crisis in the workplace.
This clip was taken from a webinar titled “Leading in Times of Uncertainty: 24 Hours Inside the President’s Bunker on 9/11/2001“. The full session is available for FREE on-demand here.
This webinar was sponsored by Industrial Scientific.
Transcript (edited for clarity):
Question: How should EHS professionals respond to a crisis in the workplace?
Darling: Everybody knows a crisis is not an emergency or disaster, but it’s a time of intense confusion. Something is wrong, not right. Somebody may have quit, some, we had supply chain problems, we got a hostile workforce, we may have a protest outside, but now is the time for us to take action before it elevates itself into an emergency where you got to call 911.
And if it becomes regional-wide, it automatically turns into a disaster. Crisis leadership is about you, it’s being proactive, it’s coming here today to listen to me, to go back with these notes, and say, “Where are our plans?” and “When’s the last time we did training?” and “How would I call you if I didn’t have my cell phone on me or access to my Outlook or Slack?”
This is now to be proactive and on the responsive side, you’ve got to be public, you’ve got to be out there, you’ve got to be visible, you’ve got to be where people can see you, you can’t be in the corner office, you’ve got to get down in the dirt, you’ve got to roll up your sleeves, you’ve got to be ready to give direction, and help out. If I was with you today and you could say, ‘Hey, I’ve got Bob visiting me, don’t send me home, send me down to the local 7-Eleven or bodega to bring back water. Everyone’s got to chip in, all hands on deck, that’s what crisis leadership is all about, there’s a framework out there. If you can remember this acronym, great, it’s called Start Doing More to Live and the S is for situational awareness or sense making. What’s happening? Why are we out of sorts? What is different now that wasn’t different before? Is this something I need to take action on now or have we got to get more input from people based on time available? But this is called raising situational awareness, then you’re going to move into decision making and coordination, which is how we make decisions, how we observe, how we develop a course of action, and then we get our leadership to pick one and we all start executing; meaning making the ability to communicate. Terminating and accounting or terminating and learning is all about getting back to normal, not an easy thing to do.
Situational awareness: sensing, watch the clock make the call, don’t become paralyzed looking for more information. If you feel it in your gut that this is a place, it needs a command decision, do the five-finger point and make the call, you’ll live with yourself. If you lose a life or something catastrophic happens because you were afraid to make the call, you’ll never forgive yourself. Vice President Cheney in the bunker was willing to make the call to shoot down Flight 93 to take lives out of the sky to save more Americans on the ground. Have the courage in a crisis to make the call.