What Leaders Get Wrong About Crisis Communication

My phone tends to ring at inconvenient hours. A board chair calling from a parking lot before an emergency session. A CEO texting at midnight about a story dropping at 6 a.m. An HR director, voice shaking, asking what to say to a 200-person team in 45 minutes. Crisis communication doesn't announce itself politely, and the leaders who navigate it well are almost never the ones who had the perfect script. They're the ones who understood, before the crisis hit, what communication is actually for.

In 16+ years of strategic communications work, I've seen crises handled brilliantly and I've seen them make things dramatically worse. The difference is rarely about the severity of the original problem. It's almost always about how — and whether — leaders communicated through it. Here are the most consequential mistakes I see, and what The Silver Line Approach looks like when the stakes are at their highest.

Mistake #1: Treating Crisis Communication as Damage Control

The most common mistake I encounter is leaders who think crisis communication is fundamentally about managing perception — about limiting damage, controlling the narrative, and getting back to business as usual as quickly as possible. This framing is understandable, but it is strategically backward.

Crisis communication, done right, is about maintaining trust. It's not about making your organization look good in a bad moment. It's about demonstrating, through your words and your actions, that you are the kind of leader and the kind of organization that handles hard things with integrity. The leaders who focus on trust rather than optics almost always fare better — not just in the immediate crisis, but in the years that follow.

I worked with an organization whose executive director had to address a serious internal failure very publicly. The legal team wanted the minimum possible disclosure. I advised a different approach: full acknowledgment, specific accountability, and a clear description of the changes being made. The board was nervous. The result was that donations actually increased in the quarter following the announcement. People gave because they saw an organization they could trust to be honest even when it was painful.

Mistake #2: Waiting Too Long to Say Anything

The instinct to stay quiet while you "figure everything out" is deeply human and almost always wrong. In a communications crisis, silence is not neutral. It is a message — and it's rarely the one you want to send. When stakeholders don't hear from a leader, they fill the vacuum themselves. And they rarely fill it in your favor.

Speed does not mean recklessness. It means establishing a communication presence quickly, even when you don't have all the answers. "We are aware of the situation and are actively working to understand the full scope. We will update you by [specific time]." That sentence, delivered promptly, accomplishes something critical: it signals that you are engaged, you care, and you are not hiding. It buys you time to gather facts without sacrificing trust.

Mistake #3: Using Language That Sounds Like a Press Release

There is a particular kind of corporate language that emerges under pressure — full of passive voice, vague accountability, and phrases like "we regret any inconvenience this may have caused." I understand why it happens. Legal review is important. Precision matters. But when formal, lawyerly language is all stakeholders receive during a human crisis, it reads as evasion. It signals that protecting the institution is more important than addressing the people affected.

The most effective crisis communications I've helped craft are direct, specific, and human. They name what happened. They acknowledge who was affected. They describe — concretely — what is being done and by when. They do not hide behind "we" when an individual is accountable, and they do not weaponize "we" to deflect individual responsibility either.

Mistake #4: Not Having a Plan Before You Need One

This is the one I push hardest on with clients during non-crisis periods, because it's the one that creates the most unnecessary suffering when crises hit. Organizations that have thought through their crisis communication architecture in advance — who speaks, what channels they use, who needs to be notified and in what order, what their core values and commitments are that will guide their responses — those organizations consistently navigate crises more effectively and recover faster.

You do not need a script for every possible scenario. You need a framework. You need clarity about your values, your voice, and your protocols. That groundwork is exactly what I help leaders build, and it makes every crisis communication challenge more manageable — not because it removes the difficulty, but because it removes the paralysis.

"Crisis reveals character. Make sure yours says what you want it to say."

If you're a leader who hasn't thought through your crisis communication approach — or if you're in the middle of a difficult moment right now and need a thought partner — I'd welcome a conversation. This is some of the most important work I do, and I believe deeply that every organization deserves to face it with a clear strategy and a steady voice.