By: Natalie Johnson
The instinct that destroys executive reputations is not silence. It is the urge to fix everything at once. A senior leader gets hit with an allegation, a breach, an accident, a product failure, and within hours the pressure to say something substantial collides with the fact that nobody yet knows what happened. Most leadership teams resolve that collision badly, either by going quiet until the story has been written for them or by announcing a recovery plan before they have finished counting the damage. Torund Bryhn, a crisis communications adviser who works with senior executives, argues that the failure is structural rather than temperamental. Crisis response and reputation repair are two different jobs, run on two different clocks, and collapsing them into a single scramble is what turns a bad week into a permanent mark on a career.
Reframing and Rebuilding Are Not The Same Job
Bryhn draws a hard line between the two. Reframing belongs to the crisis itself. It is the work of telling stakeholders what happened from your vantage point, and Bryhn is blunt that this is not a licence to spin. “It means being forthright about what happened, what you believe you did wrong or did not do wrong, what you take responsibility for, and how you understand the situation.” Sometimes that requires contrition. Sometimes it requires correcting a misunderstanding. Sometimes it simply requires supplying context that was missing. The message reduces to a single position: this is what happened, this is how I understand it, and this is where I stand.
Rebuilding is a different discipline entirely, and it runs on actions rather than statements. Only after the crisis has settled can a leader assess which stakeholders lost trust, what has to change, and what evidence people will need to see over time. That might mean changes to behaviour, leadership, policy, relationships, or how the executive engages with a particular constituency. The temptation to start that work early is exactly what Bryhn warns against. “If you immediately start announcing all of the wonderful things you are going to do to repair your reputation, it can sound disingenuous. You have not even had time to understand what happened yet.” An executive promising reform before the facts are established is telling the market that the promise is theatre.
Substance Is Not the Same As Detail
The dominant assumption in crisis response is that substance means disclosure, and that a leader who is not releasing details is stonewalling. Bryhn rejects the equation. “The most substantive thing you can sometimes do at the beginning of a crisis is not to provide information before you are ready to provide it responsibly.” The discipline is to match the level of substance to what is known, starting with a holding statement that confirms awareness and commits to a return. The first move in any crisis, she says, is that statement, and senior executives should keep a template ready, so they are not drafting from a blank page while the pressure builds.
When the demand for information keeps escalating, and the facts are still unresolved, Bryhn points to what she calls a non-information response. The leader stops narrating the crisis and starts narrating the handling of it. Meetings with the people involved. A review underway. Outside counsel engaged. A press conference at three o’clock. “In a crisis, people are not only watching what happened. They are watching how you are handling what happened.”
That is a sharper observation than it first appears, because it means the response itself is evidence, and a visible, orderly process buys the time that a premature detailed statement would spend. It also explains why Bryhn insists on a team. No single person can gather facts, read stakeholder sentiment, manage media, and make decisions at once, and the function of the team is to keep the response moving while making sure speed never outruns judgment.
Alongside the holding statement, Bryhn says leaders should immediately begin gathering two separate things: the facts and the perceived facts.
The facts are the who, what, where, when, and why.
The perceived facts are what people believe happened and how they are reacting emotionally. The gap between the two is often wide, and closing or acknowledging it is what determines the shape of the response.
Planning Is the Infrastructure, Not the Document
Fragmented media has made the old playbook obsolete. A press release on a corporate website no longer reaches anyone, and placing one story in one outlet rarely moves a stakeholder base that gets its information from a dozen scattered sources. Bryhn frames this as a targeting problem rather than a volume problem. Find out where clients, employees, vendors, partners, and investors receive their news, then reach them through those channels repeatedly. “If it is important that your version of the story gets out, you need to approach it almost the same way you would approach marketing.” Industry associations, conferences, trade publications, and owned channels like a newsletter or LinkedIn all become part of the map, and the map has to exist before the crisis does.
That map is one product of the exercise Bryhn recommends, which is not a hundred-page manual. She prefers a tabletop session: a couple of hours with the leadership team, and working through the ten crises that could realistically hit the organisation. This is followed by what each one would demand:
- Who responds?
- Who calls the board?
- Who talks to employees?
- Who has authority to approve a statement?
- Where the phone numbers are?
The answers should then inform holding statements, which are drafted in advance for the scenarios that can be anticipated. This should be repeated annually, more often for higher-risk organisations, to reassess which crises now sit at the top of the list.
Bryhn quotes Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States, on this point: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
The crisis will not arrive in the shape anyone predicted, which is not the point. The point is that the thinking has already been done, the holes have been found, and the practical questions are answered before anyone is under pressure. That is what leaves an executive free to concentrate on the substance of what is happening.
Follow Torund Bryhn on LinkedIn for more insights on crisis communications, executive reputation, and stakeholder strategy.
