Crisis Management Team and Plan

In chapter 5 it focuses on the importance of having a Crisis Management Team (CMT). It stresses that you must put a team together before a crisis takes place so that they are able to make some plans for potential crises. The team should be composed of at least eight people in different areas of the organization. For Tiffany & Co. it would be composed of the CEO, Michael Kowalski, a member of the Human Resource team, Victoria Berger (President of Global HR), the finance director Patrick McGuiness, as well as the head of security. Without a doubt they will need more than one Public Relations consultant, a legal counsel, and some organizations may have professional crisis consultants. The CMT at Tiffany & Co. would probably be much larger than many organizations because I feel that as a result of them being a worldwide retailer they should have many different people on the team so that all threats are planned for accurately.

The goals of the team are to identify any threats the organization may be facing, for instance for Tiffany & Co. a threat could be any current competitors or threat of new competitors. They then must develop a crisis management plan based on whichever threats they feel are relevant at this time or could become major issues in the coming months. They then must train the team and the organization itself in the case that a crisis does take place and how they will manage it if it does happen. After a crisis occurs the team is still not done working they must evaluate the crisis and see what they can learn from it as well as what they may need to change for the next time when dealing with a crisis.

I have already listed a few potential crises that may occur for Tiffany & Co., those would be some examples of threats they could use as potential problems. They could then order these in importance and begin to make some plans on how to handle these issues if they become major crises. A major point in the crisis management plan is to train the team and employees how to handle a crisis if it were to occur. It is recommended that the CMT runs a few mock disasters in order to train its employees. For instance Tiffany & Co. has stores all over the world and although it would be a huge process but at least one member from the team should somehow visit each store so they can accurately prepare everyone for a crisis.