“A crisis is an opportunity riding the dangerous wind”
- Chinese Proverb

It’s a beautiful spring afternoon, you feel energetic and alert, and you’re ready to start working on that important client presentation due next week. Suddenly, your assistant drops by your office. She is out of breath and looks like she is about to deliver some bad news.

“I think we have a big problem,” she says while trying to hide the obvious panic in her voice.

Effective crisis management is a very useful time management skill because unexpected things tend to happen in virtually every project.

But what is a good way to handle such a crisis situation?

Do you drop everything you are doing on the first sign of trouble, or do you try to stick with your plan and continue working on your top priorities?

Here are three practical strategies to help you deal with your next crisis…

1. Don’t overreact

Alec Mackenzie points out that “shooting the messenger” is usually counterproductive in the long run. You need to acknowledge that mistakes will happen no matter how much you plan or how well you prepare.

If people in your organization are afraid to communicate problems or emergencies because of your overreaction to their news, they may wait as long as possible or even stop telling you when things go wrong, which will just reduce the time you have to deal with problems while they are still small.

2. Figure out if it’s a real crisis or it just seems like one

You’ll discover that what at first may appear to be an urgent crisis often turns out to be nothing at all.

A real crisis is something that is truly important that requires your immediate attention.

If the situation is a real crisis, then you may have to drop everything you are doing and deal with it.

If it is not a real crisis, and it doesn’t require your immediate attention, you can often delegate it and treat it as a learning opportunity for your staff.

3. Avoid management by crisis

Management by crisis is allowing unexpected events, interruptions, problems, or emergencies to dictate your priorities and actions.

Sometimes we do need to react quickly to a crisis and contain it before it does more damage. The problem comes when crisis management becomes the routine rather than the exception. If you spend more of your time putting out fires than doing your work, you are managing by crisis.

When crisis management becomes the routine, it can easily lead to “Urgency Addiction.”

People that are addicted to urgency enjoy putting out fires, they like stepping in and solving problems, and their bosses often reward them for doing so. They have no incentive to avoid or prevent the fires because they get a payoff every time they put one out.

When crisis management becomes your normal way of doing business, it’s usually pointing to a more fundamental problem that you need to solve.

An old Chinese proverb says, “The superior doctor prevents sickness. The mediocre doctor attends to impending sickness. The inferior doctor treats sickness.”

Don’t just treat the symptoms of the latest crisis, cure the underlying disease and take steps to prevent it from recurring.