How to adapt your crisis response for COVID-19 and beyond
Though this crisis might feel different, traditional crisis communications best practices, like the TACOS method, are how communicators can best serve their communities.
The definition of a crisis is a time of intense difficulty or trouble. Needless to say COVID-19 has plunged our families, colleagues and communities into an unprecedented situation in which confusion and uncertainty have elicited stress and anxiety.
Our priorities must be to family, community, and country and each of us as leaders, whether we are conscious of it or not, are key contributors to holding together the social fabric that will pull us through. If we accept the challenge, then the crisis will pass. If we don’t, it will linger.
Family comes first and it is this crisis that needs to be addressed deliberately and expeditiously by family leaders. I am not a family therapist (my communications expertise resides in the corporate world), but the guidance I have received from experts has been to be as transparent as possible and reassure your loved ones without creating expectations or promises that are impossible to keep.
In short, manage expectations.
While every business leader is confronted with varied challenges, obligations and audiences, the foundations of corporate crisis communications is consistent with the best practices of parents, politicians and the clergy: Transparent, Authoritative, Consistent, Over-communicative, Social (TACOS).
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