Roads to Resilience

Practice 3: Crisis Teams With hotels in nearly 100 countries and territories, IHG is always dealing with natural catastrophes, civil unrest and other crisis situations. IHG have the awareness to recognise unfolding incidents, a strong communications network to report it, and also a clear process by which to respond. When a crisis occurs, “ we have codified and embedded process management, we go straight into that crisis response mode following the process that we have already previously laid out, we have a crisis management team as well at both a global and regional level so that processes kick into place if something comes up ” (SVP Head of Global Internal Audit). The Crisis Teams are carefully selected because: “ you must have a rounded team, with the right crisis owner that has the authority to make necessary decisions and include the right risk managers, the right communications people and then you supplement it with specialists ” (SVP Head of Global Risk Management). These specialists include people who, “ are trained to deal with newspapers and reporters, there are dedicated crisis spokespeople ” (Hotel Director of Security). Crisis teams need to make decisions fast because, “ the whole thing about emergencies and crises is you’ve got to think to a certain extent on your feet, based on what you know to be correct. Our emergency response team are the guys that go and establish what the emergency is and communicate back to us with the details ” (Hotel Director of Security). As is often the case within IHG, employees are proud that they have advanced ways of dealing with risk but there is no complacency: “ I think we recognise that crisis management is not something that’s static, it’s something that we need to constantly improve and you never do it completely right ” (Head of Security Risk Management). It is recognised that “ crisis management is about leadership, and it’s about values, and behaviours ” (SVP Head of Global Risk Management).

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Roads to Resilience: Building dynamic approaches to risk to achieve future success