---
title: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Crisis Managers
description: Learn seven practical crisis management skills that help leaders make decisions, maintain situational awareness, and guide teams under pressure.
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---

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Crisis Management

# The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Crisis Managers

 Michael Herrera

 Updated on: September 21, 2026

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Effective crisis managers do more than stay calm under pressure. They create structure when information is incomplete, make decisions when time is limited, keep the team focused, and maintain a clear picture of what is happening.

Those abilities are not simply personality traits. Many of the most important crisis management skills can be practiced and strengthened before an actual disruption occurs.

The seven habits below focus on the behaviors that help leaders organize information, make decisions, coordinate people, and keep a response moving when conditions are changing quickly.

**In short**

- Take ownership of decisions and actions.
- Use a simple, repeatable response process.
- Prioritize the consequences and decisions that matter most now.
- Maintain an accurate picture of the situation as it changes.
- Use the team's knowledge without allowing discussion to stall action.
- Put people on the crisis team who can perform under pressure.
- Maintain clear working documents that keep decisions and actions visible.

## What Makes a Crisis Manager Effective?

A crisis manager helps turn a fast-moving, uncertain situation into a coordinated response.

That does not mean one person has every answer. Effective crisis management depends on gathering the right information, involving the right people, making timely decisions, assigning actions, communicating clearly, and continually reassessing what has changed.

The specific structure will differ by organization, but the habits below provide a practical foundation.

For a deeper treatment of crisis-management practices, see MHA's free [Crisis Management: A Handbook for BCM Professionals](https://mha-it.com/resource/cm-handbook-bcm-professionals/).

## The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Crisis Managers

### 1. Take Extreme Ownership

During a crisis, time spent assigning blame is time not spent stabilizing the situation.

Effective crisis leaders take responsibility for moving the response forward. They make sure decisions have owners, unresolved issues are escalated, and agreed actions actually happen.

Ownership does not mean one person does everything. It means the leader accepts responsibility for making sure the team addresses the situation rather than allowing uncertainty, organizational boundaries, or internal politics to become excuses for inaction.

### 2. Keep the Process Simple

A complicated response process becomes harder to use when people are under pressure.

The team needs a repeatable method for understanding the situation, deciding what to do, taking action, and checking whether those actions are working.

One model MHA has used is APIE:

- **Assess:** Determine what has happened, what is affected, and what information is still missing.
- **Plan:** Set immediate objectives, priorities, decisions, and assignments.
- **Implement:** Carry out the agreed actions.
- **Evaluate:** Check results, update the situation, and adjust the plan.

The value is not the acronym itself. The value is having a simple process the team already understands before the crisis begins.

For a deeper explanation, see MHA's guidance on the [APIE crisis-response methodology](https://mha-it.com/blog/using-the-a-p-i-e-methodology-to-focus-your-crisis-management-team-decision-making-and-action-planning).

### 3. Prioritize and Execute

A crisis can produce dozens of problems at once. Trying to address all of them with the same urgency can slow the response and distract the team from what matters most.

Once an incident is underway, the team should prioritize based on the situation it is actually facing. That may include:

- life safety
- current and potential operational consequences
- time-sensitive decisions
- critical dependencies
- customer or stakeholder impact
- legal or regulatory obligations
- actions that could prevent the situation from becoming worse

Likelihood is useful when assessing risks before an incident. During an active crisis, the event is already occurring. The immediate task is to understand the consequences, decide what requires attention first, and execute.

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### 4. Maintain Situational Awareness

Situational awareness is more than staying composed.

The crisis team needs a shared and continually updated understanding of what is known, what is assumed, what has changed, and what still needs to be confirmed.

Effective crisis managers keep asking questions such as:

- What do we know right now?
- What information has not been verified?
- Which people, locations, systems, customers, or services are affected?
- What dependencies could create additional impacts?
- What decisions have been made?
- What decisions are still required?
- What could change before the next briefing?

This broader view helps prevent tunnel vision and keeps the team from making decisions based on information that is already outdated.

For more on early response priorities, see [In Time of Crisis: What to Do in the First 24 Hours](https://mha-it.com/blog/first-24-hours).

### 5. Make Decisions Interactively

No crisis leader has complete information or expertise across every part of the organization.

Good crisis managers use the knowledge in the room. Operations may understand customer impact. IT may understand system dependencies. Legal may identify obligations. Communications may see reputational or stakeholder concerns that other team members do not.

The purpose of involving the team is to improve the decision, not to require unanimous agreement on every issue.

The crisis leader should draw out useful perspectives, challenge assumptions, identify disagreement, and then make sure the appropriate decision-maker acts when action is required.

### 6. Choose Crisis-Capable People

The most senior person is not automatically the best person for every crisis-management role.

Crisis-capable team members need business knowledge, sound judgment, the ability to work with people from other functions, and the temperament to operate when information is incomplete and pressure is high.

They also need to be willing to raise concerns and challenge assumptions when necessary.

This is why crisis-team selection should consider capability and role fit rather than relying only on job titles or organizational seniority.

For a deeper look at team composition, see [Crisis Management Team Roles and Responsibilities](https://mha-it.com/blog/crisis-management-team-roles-and-responsibilities) and [8 Tips for Building a Good Crisis Management Team](https://mha-it.com/blog/building-a-good-crisis-management-team).

### 7. Maintain Core Crisis Documents

Good decisions become much harder to execute when the team cannot see what has been decided, who owns each action, or how the situation has changed.

A practical approach is to maintain a small set of working documents that support the response.

MHA commonly emphasizes three core documents:

- **Briefing agenda:** Provides a consistent structure for crisis-team meetings.
- **Situation report:** Captures the current status, known impacts, important facts, and unresolved issues.
- **Incident action plan:** Records objectives, actions, owners, and immediate priorities.

Organizations may use different names, formats, or additional records depending on their needs. The important point is to use a consistent documentation process that supports situational awareness, accountability, and handoffs throughout the incident.

For more detail, see [Crisis Event Documentation: The Documents You Need to Weather the Storm](https://mha-it.com/blog/crisis-event-documentation).

## How to Build Stronger Crisis Management Skills

Reading about crisis management is useful, but the most important skills have to be practiced.

Organizations can strengthen crisis-management capability by:

- **Running realistic exercises.** Give the team incomplete information, competing priorities, and decisions that have consequences.
- **Practicing the response process.** Team members should know how information is gathered, decisions are made, actions are assigned, and results are evaluated.
- **Testing roles and decision authority.** Exercises should expose uncertainty about who can make which decisions before that uncertainty creates delays during a real incident.
- **Practicing briefings and documentation.** Teams should be able to maintain a usable situation picture while the incident is moving.
- **Debriefing the decision process.** After an exercise or actual incident, examine not only what happened but how the team reached decisions, where information was missing, and what slowed the response.
- **Updating plans and training.** Lessons are valuable only when they result in changes to plans, roles, procedures, training, or exercises.

If you are planning an exercise, see [How to Plan a Mock Disaster Exercise](https://mha-it.com/blog/plan-a-mock-disaster-exercise).

## Effective Crisis Management Is a Practiced Capability

The strongest crisis managers are not people who somehow know exactly what to do in every situation.

They know how to create structure when the situation is unclear. They keep information current, use the expertise around them, make decisions at the right level, focus the team on the most important actions, and keep the response organized as conditions change.

Those habits can be developed. The time to practice them is before the organization is depending on them.

## Strengthen Your Crisis Management Program

MHA Consulting helps organizations develop crisis management teams and plans, train participants, and run mock disaster exercises that test how the team responds under pressure.

Learn more about MHA's [crisis management consulting services](https://mha-it.com/crisis-management) or [schedule a consultation](https://mha-it.com/contact) to discuss your current program.

---

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What does a crisis manager do?

A crisis manager helps organize the organization's response during a disruption. The role typically involves maintaining situational awareness, coordinating the right participants, supporting or making decisions, assigning actions, and keeping the response focused as conditions change.

### What skills are most important in crisis management?

Important skills include decision-making under pressure, prioritization, communication, situational awareness, collaboration, problem-solving, and the ability to work with incomplete information without becoming paralyzed by uncertainty.

### How can crisis management skills be improved?

Use training and realistic exercises that require the team to gather information, set priorities, make decisions, document actions, and adjust as new information becomes available. Afterward, review how the team made decisions and update plans, roles, and procedures based on what the exercise revealed.

## Further Reading

- [In Time of Crisis: What to Do in the First 24 Hours](https://mha-it.com/blog/first-24-hours)
- [8 Tips for Building a Good Crisis Management Team](https://mha-it.com/blog/building-a-good-crisis-management-team)
- [Crisis Event Documentation: The Documents You Need to Weather the Storm](https://mha-it.com/blog/crisis-event-documentation)
- [How to Plan a Mock Disaster Exercise](https://mha-it.com/blog/plan-a-mock-disaster-exercise)
- [Dropping the Ball: 6 Common Crisis Response Mistakes](https://mha-it.com/blog/crisis-response-mistakes)

---

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#### Michael Herrera

Michael Herrera is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MHA. In his role, Michael provides global leadership to the entire set of industry practices and horizontal capabilities within MHA. Under his leadership, MHA has become a leading provider of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services to organizations on a global level. He is also the founder of BCMMETRICS, a leading cloud based tool designed to assess business continuity compliance and residual risk. Michael is a well-known and sought after speaker on Business Continuity issues at local and national contingency planner chapter meetings and conferences. Prior to founding MHA, he was a Regional VP for Bank of America, where he was responsible for Business Continuity across the southwest region.

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