What to do when your next crisis hits.
The first call came at 4:45 a.m. Because no good news can be delivered at that hour of the morning, I was fortunate that my phone’s ringer was off. The second call came at 5:45 a.m., and this time the vibrations on the night stand woke me up. In the split second it took me to reach for the phone, thousands of scenarios raced through my mind. Once I realized it was my building engineer, all those thoughts focused on the club.
He started by saying, “We have lost our front entrance.”
Still half-asleep, I responded with, “How do you lose the entrance to the club? Where did it go?”
“We have a 10-inch water line running underneath our main [and only] entrance to the club, and it ruptured this morning, washing out all of the pavement,” he explained. I was glad to hear it was nothing worse, and told him I’d be in shortly.
Crisis is all about time and information, and there is never enough of either during an emergency. If you can limit wasting either of these, it will save you in the long run. On the quick ride in, I was further debriefed, and we put a plan together for our members and the three big groups that were having events at the club that day—one in the morning, one at lunch and one at dinner.
The first group was arriving at 9 a.m., so the team fashioned a creative entry through the golf course. They built a temporary sign at the normal entrance, staged team members to direct traffic, lined two golf holes and the swimming pool with balloons, and successfully got everyone into the parking lot.
As effective as this was, it was one lane and would not work once the breakfast group started to leave while the lunch group started to arrive. (Not to mention safety concerns for the children, who would soon be at the pool.)
So while making the initial fix, we also reached out to one of our members, who owns a road construction company.
Within 20 minutes, he was on site and had pulled two of his crews off other jobs. He then started working his phone with the county, to have a temporary road built on the spot. After several calls, and a couple of tense moments, we got permission to build. By 10 a.m., his company had built a new entrance into the club’s parking lot.
Our focus then moved back to the main entrance and the water company, whose line had caused all of the excitement in the first place. Again relying heavily on the expertise of our member, we were able to have them create a temporary fix, which then became our third entrance over the course of just one day. Three different groups, taking advantage of three different entrances. Unbelievable!
Lessons Learned—And to Follow
It has been said that we are always either in a crisis, coming out of a crisis, or getting ready to head into one. To prepare for when your next emergency comes—and it will—here are some things you can do today to be better prepared for tomorrow:
1. Identify a crisis team that will help collect information and execute the plan.
2. Have an effective system to communicate with your members and team members.
3. Utilize all of your resources, including government agencies, members, and team members from every department.
4. Stay calm. Panic will show on your face. This is the time to assert leadership and have your team take its cues from you.
5. Little things can still make a big difference. At the end of a long day, it was incredibly rewarding to see our valet company move their sign to our temporary entrance, without being asked.
6. Learn and grow from this and every experience, as it will make the next one that much easier!
Many of us regularly create subconscious “crises” in our lives. Anytime you wait until the last minute to accomplish a rote project, you have effectively done that. The endorphin rush created from being on a deadline (aka, a crisis) makes the monotony of doing the project somehow more bearable. Speaking of which, this article was due hours ago…
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