Crisis Management Best Practice for Education Institutions

Colleagues across the further education sector are well-used to working in an acutely stressed and stressful operating environment, with existential risks all around.  When one of those risks crystallises into a genuine moment of crisis leaders need to change gear and work very differently to secure the wellbeing of their students, staff and institution.

In this, MH&A’s second podcast for FE News, we explore how leaders in the further education sector can prepare for, manage and move on from genuine crises.  We talk about: 

• The fact that you can, and should, prepare for crises – establishing ahead of time the structures and ways of working that will enable you to lead successfully.

• The importance of defining the unifying objective that you can use to guide the decisions, prioritisation and actions that will push you out of crisis as quickly as possible.

• The role that your organisational and personal values should play in shaping your decisions, and the critical importance of prioritising people over property and PR.

• The need for colleagues involved in ‘crisis command’ to look out for and look after each other – and to recognise that they’ll need a break when the crisis has passed.

• The way in which a well-managed crisis can serve as a moment of coming together and catharsis for an institution, its people and community.

Join three guests with real experience of crisis leadership in and outside the education section: Professor Matt Hamnett, MH&A’s founding partner, former DfE senior civil servant and sector CEO; Jaine Bolton, also formerly a senior civil servant in DfE; and, Ian French, global risk management expert.

Transcript

Matt Hamnett

Welcome to this, the second MH&A podcast for FE news. My name is Matt Hamnett, the founding partner of MH&A. I’ll be your host today, joined by two fantastic guests. Today we’re going to talk about crisis management in education institutions, a sector clearly under great pressure, a very stressed environment, and lots of challenges that can flow. Really interesting conversation. I think I’m looking forward to today. Two guests. First, Jane Bolton, known to many of you. Hi, Jane.

Jaine Bolton 

Hi, Matt. How are you?

Matt Hamnett

I’m good, Jane, for those who don’t know you. The handful of folks that don’t, could you give us a quick summary of your background? And I guess with a particular slant on your exposure to any crisis management you might have done in your time.

Jaine Bolton

I’m Jane; I’ve worked in the public sector. In education, mainly further education for over 30 years. I helped establish the National Apprenticeship Service and was ultimately the Chief Operating Officer there. I left in 2014. And I’ve subsequently been working as a consultant in the sector with both private and public sector clients. And obviously, through those 30 years, I’ve seen a number of crises in the education sector, including some challenges when I was working at the National Apprenticeship Service. But since then, in terms of working with some of the smaller providers in particular, but also some colleges who face, as we all know, some challenges over the last ten years.

Matt Hamnett

Thanks, Jane. I’m also joined by a relatively recent member of the MH&A team, Ian French. Hi Ian, could you give us a quick precis of your background for new listeners?

Ian French

Yeah, I’ve been working in the commercial risk management space for about 20 years. Most recently, for mainly mining clients operating in Francophone West Africa or other parts of the world that are not quite stable, and therefore quite prone to crisis. I used to lead the crisis and security risk management team at Kroll where I was responsible for the extortion and kidnap response team. So, they’re used to dealing with crises that come very quickly to organisations and helping them navigate them.

Matt Hamnett

Fantastic. Thanks, Ian, your experience is fantastic. We’ve had lots of conversations so far in your time with the firm about some of the experiences you’ve had.

So really interesting today to talk about crisis management and thinking about what that looks like in an education setting. But also, I guess, particularly given your experience Ian, how and why the best practice in crisis management can be applied in education institutions. To kick us off, can you just give us a sense of what do we really mean when we say crisis?

Ian French

Yeah, there are lots of lots of different definitions. But, there’s an ISO definition, which basically says, there’s an unstable condition is happening that either requires urgent attention or looks like it will require urgent attention. And it threatens the organisation’s objectives and long-term stakeholder risks. So, if you think a crisis is a longer-term issue, it’s immediate. But the implications of it if it’s not resolved are longer-term, and they’re quite fundamental to the organisation. That’s probably the best catchall, it’s not business as usual. It’s clearly not business as usual.

Matt Hamnett

I think a really important point there is about the difference between working in an incredibly pressurised environment with lots of risks associated to them and true crisis management. Jane, I wonder if you could help us kind of bring to life what that might look like, north the difference there, in an education institution.

Jaine Bolton

Thanks, Matt. So yeah, I think as you say, it’s hard when you’re working in the FE sector, it’s been a tough few years, and I’d say probably a tough decade. So, it can feel that your everyday business as usual is feeling like a crisis. And clearly, there will be times when activities that you’re involved in everyday become a crisis, because of the severity and the long-term impact in the way that Ian suggested. I think, in terms of my experience of being in the sector, there have been some national crises that I’ve been personally involved in. That’s not to say I created the crisis, of course, but an example of that might be the communication crisis around the capital investment program in the LSE, when clearly, we had to give very quick messages out to the sector in terms of what could be supported and what couldn’t. That was definitely a crisis. I think also, though, at a much smaller level, working in a small independent provider. It could be that the business plan of the organisation was, I’d say probably overly ambitious. And it became really clear that they weren’t going to achieve the targets that they set and the income that they’d set. And that quickly became a crisis for that business in terms of whether it was viable and whether it could continue. So, they can be at any scale, I think, nationally or locally.

Matt Hamnett

I think the really interesting point there is that we’re used to what we call the intervention regime in the sector now, where organisations will very much feel as though they’ve fallen into crisis and a crisis which is existential for them. One of the other areas that I kind of noticed very much when I was in a chief exec position in the sector was the piece around student safety. Student wellbeing, which we will talk about today, and you can put lots of arrangements in place. But when an incident happens, it’s around safeguarding student wellbeing, it will very much become a crisis for the organisation to address. Ian, one of the things that I’m very conscious of is that when these kinds of major risks crystallise and crisis is upon you, often colleagues will feel unprepared because they weren’t planning for this to happen. Is it your sense that you can prepare for crisis management?

Ian French

Not only can you prepare, but it really is beholden on management teams of any organisation to have at least a sense of how they respond to a crisis. They say, it’s not business as usual. And most organisations have been made very efficient, the management team was used to working with what they see in front of them, and they’re very familiar with it. When they get taken out of that comfort zone. It’s new issues, its new people, it’s really quite difficult things to explain. For instance, if the decisions you’ve made are contentious, then very quickly, management teams feel the pressure and feel heat, particularly the leadership. So, preparation can help you develop a plan. And it’s not actually the plan that helps the planning processes, talking about how you’d respond, talking about these things creates the handrails you’d use during a crisis, it’s thinking about how you sustain your activities over the longer term. So, crises don’t happen and finish over the weekend or over a week, they generally last quite some time.

Matt Hamnett 

Yeah, two really interesting points there for me. One that says that you can prepare to respond to a crisis, almost independent of what that crisis might be because there’s a set of things that you can put in place to give you that framework. This is certainly my experience of responding to a few genuine crises over the course of my career. You can very easily fall into the trap of thinking, this is going to take us a couple of days, a couple of weeks to respond to. But actually, the response will have a tail. And there’s something about how you set yourself up, how you resource yourself. In terms of just how you steal yourself for the likely duration of our crisis management piece.

Ian French

Yeah, and of course, during the crisis, you also got to run the business as normal, you know, manage all the stakeholder’s expectations as they’re going through the crisis. It’s quite difficult to balance, the runoff as well, in particular, people seem to forget. You can look at quite a lot of publicly available issues. There’s a Virgin Train derailment, for instance, in 2007. Lost life, really quite tragic. But Network Rail ended up getting fined and prosecuted in 2012. So quite some time afterwards. When an issue happens, think about when questions will come through. Different people come in asking questions about why you made certain decisions. How do you keep those people informed over the longer term?

Matt Hamnett 

I think your point about how the rest of the business will continue is incredibly important. I was part of the COVID crisis commander in a public body a couple of years ago now. And that sense of a gold, silver, bronze command structure I think was really important because it created that focused silver command team to respond to COVID. Leaving gold command, typically the kind of chief exec levels, some of the leadership of the organisation to lead the rest of the organisation and the unaffected part of the organisation. Jane, I wonder whether that’s your experience? Did you think that creating a discrete set of arrangements and resourcing for the crisis so that you don’t lose your BAU is really important?

Jaine Bolton

Yeah. And I think when I’ve seen it work really well in the sector is in exactly that scenario, Matt, where the Chief Exec, leader of the organisation is really focused on business as usual, keeping the ship moving, but they’ve empowered the person who is dealing with the crisis. They’ve really you know, given them the resources that they need and the empowerment that they need. Take safeguarding for instance. I think really working on the policy, the potential scenarios, how we handle this crisis, if it occurs.

All of that helped build confidence in the chief exec, that they can leave the individual to get on with dealing with the crisis, but it’s also helped the individual feel really empowered. So, it’s not just something that happened overnight. They’ve thought about it, they’ve planned for it, they’ve looked at the scenarios, they’ve trained, they’ve monitored, they’ve reviewed. It’s really tried and tested, almost to destruction. So that when there is an issue, there is a crisis, everyone understands their role and gets on with their role. In a big institution, or even in a small institution, that means running the business as well as dealing with the crisis. But just picking up on Ian’s point, it’s so important to not underestimate how much time that can take. Not least because depending on the safeguarding issue or the crisis that occurs, it can be long-running in itself. But you’ve got to learn from the crisis or the safeguarding issue and improve your policies and your practices as a result of it. So, it’s not just about clearing the immediate crisis. It’s also, what does this tell us? What can we learn from it? What can we improve? For the next time if unfortunately, it happens again, or a different crisis occurs? What can we learn from that?

Matt Hamnett 

Yeah, really important point, I’ll come back to the point about governance. It’s my experience that to respond really effectively to a crisis, you’ll need to make very quick, very big decisions, and therefore you need the empowerment, and you need the governance arrangements that let you do that. If you try and run crisis decisions, through BAU governance, it’s my experience that the crisis will run away from you because it’ll just take too long.

Ian, just moving on, I’m really interested in what you focus on when you’re in a crisis, because the crisis could be anything from safeguarding, financial, cyber. It will present to you as a set of circumstances that have jarred the business in whatever way. I think your advice is to have a sense of what the goal is, what the mission is. How do you go about framing that way out? And therefore, what you are working towards.

Ian French

Ensure that you clearly define the crisis.  So, you can set a unifying objective to try and work towards, and that can then drive all meetings involved in crisis management, so that you drive actions to achieve the objective, so that you drive accountability to achieve the objective, without having something like a unifying objective that is used in the meetings, a bit like a glorified project management plan, it’s really well managed. If you don’t have a unifying objective, it’s very easy for teams to be overwhelmed, become indecisive and quite reactive. And if you’re reactive in a crisis, you’re on the backfoot. And then you’re always going to be catching up and you never do. So, unifying objectives is what I say. And like any objective, make it smart, so, are we achieving it? How can we measure it? How do we know we’re getting to move further towards it? How do we inform other people? And it can help you then once you know what your unifying objective is, it can help you get stakeholders on board and help you craft communications, it helps you explain to people. The other thing I think it’s worth talking about in a fee environment is that what’s a crisis for the executive of the institution is not necessarily a crisis of the student body or the staff that, you know, in fact, the student body or the staff might create the crisis. So, it’s quite tricky balancing act to make sure that the organisation manages the crisis and keeps the stakeholders on board as much as possible.

Matt Hamnett

Yeah, thank you. I think that sense of where are we trying to get to such that we can flip back to BAU is incredibly important. Definitely recall instances of colleagues who are servicing the workflow of the crisis. But in doing that they’re not getting anywhere there are on the treadmill of the crisis. I guess, just kind of building on that really interested in how you identify, how you shape that, you know, that program of work, that series of actions that will move you on? Particularly where in doing that, you might have to not respond to some things that aren’t presenting themselves for action?

Ian French 

Yeah, well, the first thing I mean, certainly universal objective, understand who’s in the crisis team managing the crisis? who can you draw on? You’re likely to have, you know, all the normal people, someone who deals with people, someone deals with technology or IT, someone who deals with operations. You’d likely have a legal adviser, it is probably external counsel. But if not then a legal adviser to understand what it does. And you bring them together and you make decisions in the best interest of achieving the objective. You would often face two poor or more poor options. And you’ve got to choose between them. Because it’s pretty fast-paced. And it’s very useful to use values. So, if your organisation has a value set that you work to and is well understood by the team, then use those because it’s much easier to justifya decision made between several poor options. After the act, if you’re i guided by values, if you don’t have organisational values, use your own values, it makes you personally healthier, navigating the crisis because you do feel very exposed. Often, the leaders are the public face, they’re getting questioned. And if they can’t reconcile their decisions to themselves through their own value system, then that’s quite difficult for the longer term. So, try and guide your decisions based on values. And hopefully, Matt, your question about, you know, which ones do you prioritise? How do you do it? That will get answered within that. Generally, people can chase all sorts of activities. So, a very simple hierarchy of actions is to look after people first. Always look after the environment. Look after assets after that, you know, if buildings falls down and no one’s hurt, you can build a building again, you can’t catch somebody back from being injured or crippled or dead. So, look after people first look at the environment, look after assets. And then finally, think about reputation. If you look after people, environment and assets, reputation will take care of itself. Don’t neglect it. But it’s not a priority initially. And it’s not it shouldn’t be a priority in your considerations.

Matt Hamnett 

Really interesting things. I think, Jane, just to teach our viewers at home for that sense is the need for that sort of multidisciplinary expert team, I think is really interesting, I suspect that you and I will reflect when we were in sort of service, that was actually quite an easy thing to kind of draw together with the right empowerment. The institutional level in the system is a bit more difficult do you think?

Jaine Bolton  

Yeah, I thinksometimes it depends on the type of organisation. So, I think in the best colleges that I’ve seen I think that is relatively easy to pull together. It might span different layers of management, different parts of your organisation’s expertise, and, of course, the governing body there, as well in terms of their expertise and their support. So, I think colleges should be well placed to create those multidisciplinary teams, I think in the smaller providers, and there are many in the sector, I think that’s more challenging. Often it is, you know, a really small management team. And I think it’s difficult then to step outside of that. But again, if you look at governance, and if you see the good governance that exists now, in many independent providers, you’ve got those extra resources to call on, when you are genuinely in a crisis. I think I just want to emphasise as well, Ian’s point around what matters most. And for me, it’s always the people, I think, sometimes organisationally, you can focus on your reputation first, and how this affects you. But if you as Ian said, if you focus on the people, and then the environment, etc, I think you’re more likely to come out of it well, in terms of your reputation. And I think certainly in the FE sector, given that all we’re about, it must be people first. And that might be the learners. But it would also be the teachers, the support staff around that learner, as well as your own management team. And I think particularly if, for instance, the crisis is a financial crisis, it’s remembering that everybody in your team has contributed to that in some way or another. And everyone in your team is probably part of the solution. So just remember the stress and the pressure for everybody involved in that particular crisis.

Matt Hamnett 

Yeah, I think a really important point there is that prioritising your people, if you focus on the right things in the right order will put you in a position to manage your reputation, and communications issues well. If you focus on the comms if you focus on the reputation at the expense of the substance. A, you’ve done the wrong things, but B you’ll find it much harder to manage that reputational, that communications piece. I want to come back out to something that I think Ian, Jane, you touched on earlier on around moving on crisis. And perhaps the sense that a well-managed crisis where the worst of the implications are avoided can be a cathartic moment for an organisation, can allow it to move on.

Ian French 

Yeah, it sounds great. I mean, I turn up the organisations that have literally just experienced a crisis, they’ve done no preparation for it, they had to navigate it. They’re overwhelmed. And I say to them – look, you won’t seem it now but your response to this will define you as a leader and as an executive. So that’s that sort of immediate constraint the minds and that is true, it does. You can look at crises that you’re aware of. And you can, you can probably name the chief executive. And you get to judgment about how well they’ve done. So, it’ll define you. But the organisation is much more fluid in their response. So, it’s not business usual, people stand up, and they deliver fantastic results under great pressure. And it’s just capturing those lessons. How did that work? Why did we allow them to do those things? You know, how can we do that in normal business as usual? The team generally have got a shared experience that they can rally around. And generally, if you think about sort of business usual ticking along, think about crisis as a massive disruption. But then afterwards, you should be ticking along at a higher level. And that’s generally the way I’ve seen with organisations I’ve advised through a crisis. Afterwards, they generally think they’ve come out of it better. It’s difficult to think of when you’re in it, but that’s what you should be driving towards.

Matt Hamnett 

I mean that certainly resonates with me. And I think where that sense that colleagues will come together, now they’ll create a kind of watershed moment in the journey of the organisation, and there’ll be a stronger, closer and more confident team as a result. Jane, your reflections on this? You’re on mute Jane. I’m gonna leave that in.

Jaine Bolton 

I agree with that point of, you know, working through the crisis can mean you can be in a much better place. But I think it’s also important to realise just how exhausting mentally and physically being in a crisis, especially if it’s a long crisis can be for the individual, for the team, for the organisation. So, I think that you as an organisation might need that period to reflect on the crisis and to build from it, not to forget to do that, but to give yourself time to recover before you head off to the- what can we learn from this? How can we help this? How can we use this to improve our business and ways of working. Sometimes people just need a bit of time to recover physically, and organisations, I think, need time to recover physically and get back to a steady business as usual.

Ian French 

I think that’s one of the main things around crisis, when you’re in crisis is look out for each other and empower people to say, look, you need to take some time out. I advise the further education college; they’re going through some political protests. And the leader was very exposed, he felt very exposed. And he was felt he had to carry the whole responsibility for all the decisions. And we just say, look, just step back, you’ve got a team, use the team, and look out for each other. And, you know, that helped him a lot, I think. But yeah, if you extremely wearing. And it’s extremely stressful for quite a lot of people in the middle of a crisis. And they don’t really realise it, because they’re making decisions or acting on instinct, if you like until we get to the other end. And the other end might not come it might not be right structures are solved, it just kind of peters out if you’d like. So, I agree. Again, you need to recover and recognise that you need to recover.

Matt Hamnett 

Yeah, I mean, it’s very much my personal experience with that kind of chief exec role that you want to manage the crisis, you want to move on, you want to get back to business as usual. Finding the moment that you think you can take, can feel almost impossible, but medium long term will undermine you if you don’t find a moment to take the energy. Just to wrap up, Jaine, you’ve got kind of fantastic career histories, particularly for folks who are young. Ian, what’s your best example of a crisis well handled?

Ian French 

I’m trying to think. I was advising a gold miner with operations in West Africa. And they experienced several things all at once, with a relatively small management team, who were, you know, all around the world. And I thought they came through it very well. Basically, they had a COVID, they had coos in several of their operation countries. They had the local population, getting agitated with the local police who gave them protection. And they had people who because the COVID were locked in the camp for about 150 days, really trying circumstances. And, astonishingly, the people on the camp came out, a really cohesive team. The executive team came together after some initial bumps. And as I say, I think it was relative, you know, I think if you ask them now, they would think that as a management team, as an organisation, they are far more effective as a result of sort of navigating that tsunami of issues if you like.

Matt Hamnett 

Thank you, Ian. Jane?

Jaine Bolton  

Well, I’ve been involved in some of the big national crises, as I mentioned at the beginning around capital education, maintenance of lands, etc. But I think the ones that I remember most are the ones in smaller organisations: colleges, and independent providers. But particularly in independent providers where they’ve been facing a crisis, typically driven by being over ambitious in terms of volumes and income. But that has, then when those ambitions haven’t been met, that has meant they become financially unstable and hit the crisis point. And I think that working with those organisations to help them either to stabilise the business or to exit the business but maintaining the provision and maintaining the opportunity for the learners and supporting opportunities for the staff. I think those are the most rewarding, where it’s made a real difference at the local level, to people to, you know, to trainers, to staff who are delivering training, and to learners who are benefiting from that, of maintaining that, despite the crisis, I think, is probably the most rewarding, protecting provision and protecting the people as part of that.

Matt Hamnett 

Yeah, I agree with that Jane. If I look at some of the things I was involved in central government, responding to the financial crisis in 2008, and so on. You take a certain satisfaction and a huge amount of learning from your involvement in some of those processes, but where you’re working at the institution level, and you managed to resolve the issue, addressed the risk. Without the sort of student experience missing too much of a beat. I think that feels like a commission completed. Ian Jane, any final thoughts?

Ian French 

Yeah, I’d say a crisis is just like a come as you are party. You know, when a crisis happens, you are where you are with what you’ve got. So do please prepare; preparing is talking about. It doesn’t need to be a plan. Just think about it. How do you do it? Who are your stakeholders? What do you think are your stakeholder objectives? How do you interface with them? How do you respond? Prepare, because they are come as you are parties, and you can’t go get what you haven’t got.

Jaine Bolton 

I like that idea of come as you are parties. And I think, for me, it’s the take time to really know your team, know who’s in your team, who you can depend on their particular approach and attitude. And then really work as a team on scenario planning, practising, talking, really building up that team bond, that team experience, and testing out some of the crises that you may come across in the sector in your role. But I like the idea of come as you are party when it’s a crisis. Because that is what you are, you bring yourself and that all. That’s going to help get through this crisis.

Matt Hamnett  

Yeah, very wise. And of course, you know, we’ve talked today about the moment of crisis, the moment of the risk crystallising into an existential issue. Exceptional risk management will reduce the likelihood, hopefully, reduce the impact of serious issues when they come. Both, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. This is one of those topics, which can be quite challenging to talk about because the best examples shouldn’t be talked about, confidentialities etc. And maybe aren’t known about because if they’re well handled, maybe they don’t kind of reach the public consciousness. So, thank you for bringing that to life for us using examples is where you could, but hopefully, some really illuminating commentary on some of these issues. Thank you. If you found today’s podcast interesting and would like to talk to us more about some of these issues. And if anything, else indeed, you can find us on LinkedIn or if you Google – MH&A we’re one of the very first search results.