Building a Crisis-Ready Culture: Why Preparedness Starts at the Top

The Leadership Gap in Crisis Preparedness

Crisis preparedness cannot be delegated to a compliance team and forgotten. When executives treat business continuity as someone else's problem, that attitude cascades through every level of the organization. Research consistently shows that executive sponsorship is the single most reliable predictor of effective crisis response. In their 2023 survey, Disaster Recovery Journal found that executive support for business continuity management remained high at 96%, with 42% reporting significant support, up from 38% in 2021 and just 30% in 2018.

This increase matters because executive attention translates to resources, priority, and cultural emphasis. When the CEO asks about crisis readiness in quarterly reviews, department heads pay attention. When board members request updates on business continuity testing, managers ensure those tests happen. Without that top-down pressure, crisis preparedness becomes one of those important but not urgent tasks that perpetually gets pushed to next quarter.

Why Training Gaps Persist Despite Growing Threats

The training gap persists because organizations confuse awareness with competence. Showing employees a slide deck about emergency procedures once a year does not prepare them to make split-second decisions under pressure. As one U.S. Navy SEAL maxim puts it, people don't rise to the level of the crisis, they rise to the level of their training. Your workforce will perform during emergencies exactly as well as you have trained them to perform, not a single degree better.

FEMA data reveals that 60% of adults have not practiced an emergency drill, despite 80% living in counties that have experienced natural disasters since 2007. This disconnect exists at the organizational level too. Companies invest heavily in planning documents while underinvesting in the repetition and muscle memory that turns plans into reflexive action. The result is plans that look professional on paper but fall apart the moment someone needs to actually execute them.

The Business Case for Regular Crisis Drills

Regular drilling produces measurable benefits that extend beyond crisis scenarios. According to a 2024 EMA Research report cited by BigPanda, the average cost of unplanned IT downtime has risen to 14,056 dollars per minute, with large enterprises facing costs as high as 23,750 dollars per minute. Organizations that conduct regular tabletop exercises and functional drills consistently demonstrate faster recovery times, lower financial losses, and better coordination during actual incidents.

Tabletop exercises, which are discussion-based simulations where teams walk through hypothetical scenarios, represent one of the most cost-effective training investments available. They require no special equipment, can be completed in a few hours, and reveal communication gaps and procedural weaknesses before those gaps become expensive problems. JetBlue's Director of Business Continuity, Penny Neferis, describes using annual hazard risk surveys combined with targeted tabletops to address the highest-priority concerns, ensuring training investments align with actual organizational risks rather than generic templates.

Building Crisis Muscle Memory Across the Organization

Effective crisis training must extend beyond the designated response team. When Hurricane Michael hit the Florida panhandle in 2024, Coca-Cola Bottling had comprehensive plans for supporting 3,000 employees across 14 affected locations. Then the unexpected intensity took out cell phone infrastructure, rendering their primary communication system useless. The incident demonstrated that even excellent plans can face unexpected setbacks, and organizations need teams who can adapt when the playbook becomes irrelevant.

Cross-functional participation in crisis exercises builds the adaptive capacity that plans alone cannot provide. Cybersecurity stopped being an IT problem long ago, and crisis response requires coordination across business units, HR, legal, communications, and operations. When representatives from each function participate in regular simulations, they develop relationships and shared language that prove invaluable during actual incidents. The alternative is discovering coordination gaps while your systems are down and customers are waiting.

Creating Accountability Without Creating Fear

One of the barriers to effective crisis training is that employees fear being judged during exercises. They worry that making mistakes in a simulation will reflect poorly on their competence. Leaders must establish that training exercises are learning opportunities, not performance evaluations. The entire point is to make mistakes in a safe environment so you do not make them when stakes are real.

Post-exercise reviews should focus on systemic improvements rather than individual blame. When an exercise reveals that the escalation pathway is unclear, the solution is fixing the pathway, not criticizing the person who was confused by it. This psychological safety encourages honest participation and produces more valuable insights. Organizations that treat exercises as gotcha moments quickly discover that employees stop engaging authentically, which defeats the purpose entirely.

Leadership Sets the Tone

Practical Steps for Executive Sponsorship

Executive sponsorship means more than signing off on a budget line item. It means visible participation in tabletop exercises, regular updates to the board on preparedness status, and tying crisis readiness metrics to performance reviews for department heads. PwC recommends that boards push management on whether crisis response plans are up to date and ready to deploy, treating robust crisis preparedness as a competitive advantage rather than a compliance burden.

Effective sponsorship also means integrating crisis management with business continuity, disaster recovery, and incident response planning. These functions are often developed in silos, but a centralized approach that tests all plans together is critical for organizational resilience. The board should ask whether the crisis plan is aligned, coordinated, and tested alongside disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Organizations with this integrated approach consistently demonstrate better outcomes when disruptions occur.