Crisis Leadership: 3 Decisions You Must Make in the First 5 Minutes

Confusion spreads faster than flames — and the decisions you make in the first five minutes of a crisis determine whether you stabilize the situation or make it worse. Brad Hauck breaks down the exact three-decision framework he uses on the fireground and in business: read the scene, stop the spread, then create clarity before people start writing their own story. Most leaders skip step one and pay for it all the way through.

Transcript

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Welcome to Leadership in the Line of Fire with your host, Brad Hauck. Join Brad as he dives into the heat of leadership challenges where the flames of business uncertainty meet the hard earned lessons of firefighting. Embrace change, master agility, and become the trusted leader guiding your team through the smoke. Get ready to ignite your leadership journey. When a crisis hits. Most people think leadership is about acting fast. But in the first five minutes, the real challenge is seeing clearly while everyone else is reacting emotionally. Your team is watching, the pressure is rising and the decision you make in those opening moments can either stabilize the situation or it can actually make it much, much worse. On the far ground, we learn quickly that confusion spreads faster than flames. And the same is true in business and leadership. In this episode, I'm breaking down the three critical decisions leaders must make in the first five minutes of a crisis and why calm, clarity and direction matter more than panic and noise. Welcome to the pod. So today, obviously we're looking at the three decisions that you need to make within the first five minutes of a crisis. And there's so many things going on. When you first arrive at a scene that's in crisis, it doesn't matter whether it's a fire ground or a business boardroom, the fact of the matter is there's all sorts of inputs coming in. There's panicked people, there's stressed people everywhere, and you've actually got a problem that has to be dealt with as well. So aside from all the people, there is actually the crisis. And this is one of the most fun things about being a leader, quite frankly. When you're good at this, when you're good at working with people to get the right answer to deal with the crisis, you'll find that you enjoy leadership a lot more. So what's the first decision that we need to make? The first decision is to read the scene before you act. You need to work out what's actually on fire. So where's the real threat? You need to get information in. And that means sometimes telling people to be quiet and to go around the room one by one and get all your input, or however it is you're assessing the situation. If you're there by yourself, obviously you're going to be getting the input from what you hear, read, smell, et cetera. So on a fire, get there, look around, look at where the fire is, look at the exposures, look at the assets that are threatened, what's the weather doing, all those sorts of things that are happening in business, you're looking for those answers. What's the problem, oh, this client site has crashed or this business is threatening to leave us because we didn't do this thing. Why then? We're getting into the information that we need. So we need to look at orientating ourselves within the situation and understanding what's going on before we react. Most really good leaders can rapidly filter noise from signal. In other words, they can basically screen out all the stuff that's irrelevant. And there's going to be a lot of irrelevant stuff, especially when people are panicked because they're all going to tell you something different. And it's all their personal point of view of what's happening. It's not necessarily the truth. And it also depends on their level of experience. I know myself, I'll turn up to a fire, I'll look at it, I'll be like, oh well, it's only 30 centimeters high. So what? Other people turn up and go, it's a massive fire. It's entirely down to my level experience. I see fires where they're coming out of the trees that are 30 meters tall and there's another 30 meters of flame coming out of the top. To me, a 30 centimeter high fire or one foot fire is nothing to really worry about. Yeah, okay. There's lots of things to be considered. But when I look at it at first and I assess it, I see it that way because of my experience. Now a brand new firefighter might see it entirely different. And I know that in business, sometimes I see a problem and I panic because what I will do is I'll extrapolate how someone else might be seeing what happened and that's a huge mistake. What I actually need to do is work out what the client is actually facing at their end. What is the real issue here? Is it that it's actually not a massive problem, it's just something we need to deal with? Is it something that they're thinking ahead and going, you know what, we need to think about this in the next 12 months, or is it something that we just need to go straight in and solve it right away and put everything else aside until this problem's dealt with? And again, it's about getting information. You can't act without good information. Now, in a previous episode, I've talked about these sorts of decisions before and I've said that your research shows that if you have 70% of the information, you can make a pretty good judgment call. So we're getting everything we need. So what are some of the questions we could ask? Well, first of all, what's Changed, that's really important. We've got like the status quo, what's going on, but what's actually changed to cause everybody to panic? It may be something really simple or it may be something very complex. You won't know until you work out what it is. Second question is, what is escalating? In other words, it was fine here, but why has it got bigger? What is it that's got bigger? For example, on a fire ground, we might have a fire and everything's fine. And then everybody starts to panic because the wind gets up, so the fire gets higher in the trees, it moves faster through the grass, all those sorts of things. So what has causing and what is escalating? So what's changed and what's escalating? The fire is escalating because this thing has changed. And what's the worst case direction that this issue could move in? So I know that I look at things like what are my assets and threatened assets and things like that. In business, we're often looking at what is going to cause problems for the client and how can we make sure that is not a problem going forward. And I know, I see plenty of businesses that see issues but don't fix them. They just don't care about their clients. And that sometimes can happen with big corporations or it can happen with small business. One thing I can assure you is that the client isn't always right. There's no doubt about that. But if you're seeing a problem, it's worth investigating and reading what the issue is. Because while it's not a problem now, you don't know whether the market's changed. So there might be a fundamental change happening around you who you haven't picked up on, but one of your clients has. And so going to them and finding out all the details is really important because you may see it flow onto other clients and that's when the problems really start. So if you nip it in the bud early and then apply it across your whole business, you can make a major difference. Obviously, on the fireground, reading the scene is essential before we move to the next step. So decision number one, read the scene before you act. Work out what's actually burning. Decision number two is to stabilize the spread. Your first job is not to solve all the problems. Your first job is to stop it escalating any further. Okay, so you need to get things like containment lines in place. You need to work out what it is. That's the number one priority to prevent the situation getting worse. Often when we're overwhelmed with all these inputs from everyone, it's worthwhile taking a step back and looking at what is the problem that I'm trying to stabilize here. And it could mean walking around the other side of the vehicle. It could mean walking out of the boardroom for five minutes to get a drink of water or have a cigarette, whatever it is that you do to escape and having time to process that. What I often find is people's brains get full. They get a lot of input really fast, and then the input doesn't stop because they're standing in the middle of it and everybody wants to tell you something, make sure that you really understand that what they've got to say is so, so important. And it is. But your brain can only take so much input at one time. So step away. Put someone in between you to buffer them, to take notes or whatever it happens to be. Step away, take a breath and work out what it is that you actually believe is the number one priority. And that's not always easy. So on the fire ground might have things like protect life is always number one. Then it's property and environment and those all order life always comes higher. So it's very easy to break down your decisions if you have a bit of a hierarchy. But it's not always that simple. It might be protect life or it might be you need to anchor the flank or stop the spread of the fire through the grass. Whatever it is, you need to stabilize that problem so that it doesn't escalate any further. Now, in business, there's all sorts of things that need to be done. Okay, it might be stopping your reputational bleed. It might be to protect your cash flow, might be to stabilize communication and improve it so that people are getting the communication level that they require from you to make them feel safe and not panicked to not have this problem. Or as I said before, sometimes that communication, stabilizing communication gets you better feedback to allow you to make better decisions about what you need to do to solve the problem ongoing. And sometimes it's about containing operational damage. That means dealing with your people who are causing problems. And while that's very annoying, it happens all the time. You get someone who comes to work in a bad mood and they say the wrong thing and they upset people. Now, whether that's internal or external is irrelevant. Sometimes you're in damage control mode because that's the thing you need to solve first. You need to stabilize the attitude, the approach, the way people are interacting before anything else can happen. There's so many Steps to stabilizing. But understanding what it is that needs to be stabilized first is the most important. And that will come with experience. Like everything, the more experience you get, the better you are of building a picture of what it is that you need to look at. I know that junior firefighters see about an inch wide when they look at a fire, they see flames, whereas an experienced officer will see the whole fire and they'll pull out a map and look at it on a large scale or however they're looking for their information. So you need to break it down first of all, get all those inputs and then work out what that first step is that you need to solve so that the problem doesn't spread. And the decision number three. Number three is to create clarity. In the absence of communication, people create their own story. So once you've decided what you need to do, you need to make sure that everybody understands what needs to be done, what the number one priority is. And that's where we talk about setting our mission or our goals. We need to do that on a daily basis when we're dealing with problems and issues and new implementations and things like that. Work out who needs clarity right now the most and make sure that they get it. Studies on crisis teams repeatedly show uncertainty spreads faster than the actual problem, meaning that the more uncomfortable people are, the more stress they make people around them. So the more safe people feel, the more certain they understand what's going on and how to solve the problem, the easier it is for them to slip back into normal mode and get on with the job of solving the problem. So your people are going to be looking for clarity, direction, and emotional regulation. Sometimes you're going to have to slow them down. Stop. Take a breath. Just breathe for a minute. Okay, here's the problem as I understand it. Here's where our biggest issue is, and this is what we're going to do to solve that right now. And then you get time, of course, to make the next decision while that problem is being solved. And so a leader becomes the emotional thermostat of the situation. People look to the leader if the leader is out of control, if the leader is not leading, then everybody else will panic too. So it's so important. And look, there'll be times when you're out of control. There's no doubt about it. Everybody goes through those times where it's like overwhelm. And especially if you have ADHD and things like that, you're going to get overwhelmed really quickly. So stepping back and breathing and taking a quiet moment to think is really worth it. You don't know how you're going to react until you're put in that situation. And that's one of the reasons why I really like training people, putting them in simulations and getting them to think about a made up problem. It's even better. I like playing the game myself, creating situations and then how would we solve it? It's really important because it allows people to make mistakes while under pressure without it being mission critical. Research shows teams perform better when leaders communicate early, communicate clearly, communicate calmly, and assign ownership of the problem quickly. The sooner you get things moving calmly, clearly and early, the better things are going to be for everybody in your team. If it means writing it down quickly, it doesn't have to be any more than one sentence. Write it down on the board so that everybody can see it, read it and understand it. And when new people come into the situation, or you send your leaders back to their teams, make sure that they've written it down and they read it out to their team so everybody understands what it is that you're going to do. Otherwise people just make up their own stories and that's just not healthy because things expand and they get added to. And we've all played Chinese Whispers. I know that term's probably not quite acceptable anymore, but that's what the name of the game was, where we pass a message on from one person to another and by the time it gets to the end of the chain, it sounds nothing like the original message. That is a huge problem in any organization and is not something you can fix unless everybody reads off the same piece of paper. So sending that information out to everybody, making sure it's put on a whiteboard, everyone walks past whatever it happens to be, make sure everybody's on the same page. We are going to do this to solve this problem by this time. I always think that's really important to get down so, so that there's no misunderstanding on what we're trying to achieve. Now. That may change as you move through the process, but you must have some central point of truth. So when pressure rises and everything feels uncertain, people look to you as the leader for clarity, direction and calm. In those first few moments. Your response sets the tone for everything that follows. Remember, great leaders don't just react fast. They think clearly under pressure and they bring order to the chaos. If today's episode hit home, take 60 seconds to share it with a friend you trust. These conversations matter. And if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. We've got more real world leadership tips coming your way. Please like, share and obviously subscribe. Until next time. Stay sharp, stay safe and keep leading from the front. And remember, run towards the flames. Thank you for tuning in to Leadership in the Line of Fire. If today's episode sparked some insights, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Don't forget to hit like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Your support fuels this journey. Join us next time as we continue to explore leadership lessons from the fire line. Until then, keep leading with courage and agility.