The Art of Crisis Leadership. Kevin Cowherd
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stairs. Anyone who has worn a badge for a living understands this unique challenge: I was going from bright sunlight into a very dark building. Until your eyes adjust, it can be very unnerving, particularly when gunfights and street violence were the norm in the streets I patrolled for a living.
I was the first uniformed officer to reach Jimmy’s side. I could see he’d been shot in the head. His eyes were half-closed. He appeared to be lifeless. I had been to a lot of homicide scenes and this looked like another, except this time, it was Jimmy.
The next step would normally have been to call Homicide, then chalk-off the body. But an officer named Vince Moore arrived behind me in seconds.
Vince had been a paramedic in the military. He immediately began CPR on Jimmy as I got on the radio and gave tactical information and direction to responding units about what had happened, where to go and what we were looking for.
Everything was happening at lightning speed.
Suspects were on the loose. The crime scene needed to be secured. Witnesses needed to be located. The Homicide unit needed to be notified. And an ambulance was on its way and would need directions to our location. People were yelling and screaming—it was a very emotional and unsettling time.
My major assigned me to accompany Jimmy to Shock Trauma. After a quick ride through cross-town traffic with sirens wailing (motorized units had shut down a lane for the ambulance on Lombard Street), Jimmy was now on a gurney in the world’s best trauma unit. If there was any chance to save Jimmy’s life, it would happen here.
There were at least 12 doctors and nurses around him that I could see. I stood about 20 feet away, helpless. The scene of the shooting, which had initially appeared so loud and chaotic, had been replaced by a team of highly-trained medical professionals working with quiet, creative intensity. I could hear nothing but the rapid movement of medical professionals coupled with the familiar sounds of medical monitors.
It was like going from a raucous carnival into an utterly silent library.
I stood there marveling at the efficiency of these dedicated men and women when a nurse approached and said: “Listen, when he dies, we’re going to notify you, so you can notify your superiors and handle this however you need to.”
All I could think was: of all the people who loved Jimmy in this world, I was the only one here right now who knew him and cared about him as a colleague and friend. We were just laughing a few hours earlier—how could this be happening? Life changed so quickly.
It was an incredibly powerful moment, made even more powerful when another nurse showed me the results of Jimmy’s CAT scan. The bullet had grazed his skull, but also cracked it, sending shards of bone fragments into his brain.
Things looked incredibly grim for Jimmy—I was mentally preparing for the worst as the gravity of the day was beginning to set in.
Soon, the docs and nurses seemed to stop working on him altogether. It was as if they had run out of things to do, procedures to try. When someone spotted a slight, involuntary movement of his foot—WHAM!—they were all over him again, working feverishly.
The bottom line: Jimmy Young survived.
He was in rehabilitation for a long time, healing and learning to deal with his brain injuries while living a “new normal.” All of us in the squad had to deal with something too: the post-traumatic stress that invariably affects those who are a part of a terrifying, life-changing event. We didn’t know we had PTSD, but as it turns out, all of us who had a piece of that day’s events felt the impact in ways we never imagined or realized.
Everyone who had a hand in what happened to Jimmy—from dispatchers to responding officers to unit commanders—took part in a group “therapy” session.
One evening, some 25 of us sat in a circle and talked about the events stemming from his shooting. We talked about the role each of us had played—our feelings, emotions, the whole nine yards.
It was incredibly curative and beneficial. Most cops, after a shooting of one of their own, would think: OK, we’ve gotta go out and drink and talk about this.
But this was an incredible and very emotional exercise that lasted nearly four hours. The therapeutic value far out-weighed anything you could get from throwing back beers and shots in a dimly-lit bar. (Which isn’t to say we didn’t end up there afterward.)
What the Jimmy Young shooting taught me from a crisis leadership standpoint is that when a crisis occurs, no matter how traumatic the event, everyone needs to understand his or her role and stay in their own lane. This doesn’t happen without proper policies, planning, training and execution.
Yet, many organizations don’t have the very basic, and most foundational element of crisis preparedness in place: namely, a practiced, actionable plan.
From the police department perspective, all of these moving parts—responding officers, those who canvass for witnesses, who preserve the crime scene, who investigate the crime, who work Homicide, who direct traffic, who dispatch calls—must come together for a singular, life-saving mission.
From a medical perspective, similar coordination must occur on the street by medics, the Shock Trauma team and rehabilitation centers. If all of these various police and healthcare personnel don’t perform their roles with precision and efficiency during a crisis, heroes like Jimmy Young die.
In many ways, a parallel can be drawn about how worldwide organizations must prepare for and navigate through crisis; how they must create organizational muscle memory so they’re ready to meet the moment. Whether it’s a social media attack, court of public opinion issue, data breach, stakeholder relations issue, investigation, litigation, product recall, active shooter situation, or any other issue of adversity, leaders must be prepared for every eventuality. The first order of leadership is to provide a safe place to work. A very basic human need is physical and emotional safety—without safety, performance and productivity is dramatically decreased.
There are many “how to” references and books on crisis planning, management and recovery. However, my goal with this book is to tell real stories, with raw emotion, about how true leaders prepared for, managed, and recovered from crisis, so that their organizations not only survived, but thrived. I’ll also talk about the mistakes that both individuals and companies tend to make under duress, mistakes that can set them back years and alter their lives forever.
Crises cost time, money, customers and careers, and in the worst-case scenarios, lives. In these increasingly uncertain, often chaotic times where anyone with a recording device and internet connection can wreak havoc on your personal or professional brand, the issue is not if a crisis will hit, but when.
Yet crisis leadership is an art, not a science. Many of the decisions I’ve made as a crisis leader can’t be easily explained and are often based on instinct while factoring dozens of nuances that are quickly processed and acted upon.
Certainly, my background has helped me develop this innate sense.
As a uniformed patrol officer in a major metropolitan city, I saw much of the best and worst that life has to offer. I saw a side of humanity that was both motivating and deflating. Promoted to Public Affairs Director of the Baltimore PD after my sworn service days, my job entailed briefing the news media and many other leaders daily on a seemingly endless list of volatile urban issues—pervasive crime, allegations of police brutality, charges of racial inequity, public safety policy and politics. I learned very quickly to be politically astute, but not political. The waters of Baltimore politics are some of the most treacherous in the country, as countless out-of-town leaders have confided.
I also served as chief of staff for the U.S. Department of Justice and as a senior executive within the Maryland governor’s office. I’ve worked on the core executive leadership team at all three levels of government and, in the private sector, on the core executive team of Ripken Baseball, headed by Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr., and former major leaguer Bill Ripken.
In 2009, I continued my career mission of helping people and organizations during life’s most critical times by launching Fallston