First, if you hear the sound of gunfire in another room,
don't run toward it, urge Carol and Duane Frederickson,
co-presidents of Frederickson Consulting Inc., a workplace-violence
consulting firm in Minneapolis. It may seem harsh or cowardly to
suggest fleeing, but the damage has probably been done, and now you
need to think about saving your own life. If you're unlucky
enough to meet up with the gunman, be agreeable. "Don't
try to rationalize with him," suggests Carol. "Remember,
if [he] is waving around a gun, he's probably
irrational."
If you're trying to avoid being seen, "stay as low as
you can, and if you can, get under your desk and pull the chair
in," says Duane. "Lives have been saved that
way."
Prevention is the
Best Medicine:
- Create a violence policy. If your employee manual has a policy
outlining your definition of violence, long before a problem has
gone out of control you can utter the words "You're
fired"-without fear of a lawsuit-if an employee is committing
what your manual states is a violent act, say Carol and Duane.
- Confront the volatile employee now, not later. Would you let a
stick of dynamite burn?
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Think of Gary Thompson as a
lifeguard, pulling entrepreneurs from the whirlpool wave that is
known as the media machine. Thompson is executive vice president of
the San Francisco branch of Waltham, Massachusetts-based Schwartz
Communications. Though he specializes in helping small businesses,
he also assisted Jack-in-the-Box after its infamous food-poisoning
problems in the mid-1990s, watched colleagues try valiantly to
restore Exxon's image after its Alaskan oil spill, and was in
charge of maintaining corporate composure after a high-tech
client's CEO was kidnapped several years ago.
Any worst-case scenario could bring bad publicity, which is why
Thompson urges you to ignore your lawyer, who will advise you to
say nothing, and follow his formula:
1. Acknowledge the problem. Saying there
"might" be a problem will only make you sound
wishy-washy.
2. Sympathize with those who are affected. And be
specific. You feel bad for your employees, your shareholders, your
customers or all of the above.
3. State what the company is doing. But "until you
have something solid to report, it's not necessary to disclose
to the press everything that's going on," says Thompson.
"Just acknowledge you're working on the problem."
4. Assure the public on an ongoing basis. But only up to
a point. "Studies show that after two months, reminding people
starts to overstate the issue," says Thompson. "The
American public tends to be very forgiving if you acknowledge
swiftly there is an issue, and most customers will sympathize with
the company trying to get to the bottom [of the problem]" and
do the right thing.
Prevention is the
Best Medicine:
There may be little you can do to prepare yourself for scandals,
but creating a company values system and instilling it in the
employee mind-set will help, says Thompson, who recalls the time
when an insurance company CEO who came to him after employees
refused to give an elderly woman her money because of some minor
glitch in her paperwork. The CEO wanted the woman to be
compensated-and so did the employees. But the staff believed they
had to strictly follow company policy. Says Thompson, "Your
employees need to understand [your company's] values give them
a certain latitude with dealing with the public."
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