Communication is vital in an organization and lack thereof can certainly lead to lots of
questions, distrust, anger, anxiety and more. In the podcast with Jane Jordan, she speaks
about the four stages of managing media through a crisis. Stage 1 is determining what
happened to cause the crisis and collecting facts. Stage 2 is moving away from the incident
to the “victims” and how the organization responds to the crisis. Stage 3 is where blame is
assigned and stage 4 is where the crisis ends. The steps she outlined are crucial
components in managing the crisis, but in the article I came across, what this organization
decided to do illustrate exactly what should not be done. The article spoke about the
serious lack of communication between Boeing management and its employees regarding
the potential layoffs at one of their facilities in Seattle.
Stage 1 of this crisis took place when management made an abrupt announcement before
Christmas in 2013 to about 2,000 employees that half of them would lose their job with no
other information to follow. It is not uncommon for businesses to relocate or downsize, but
the manner in which this information was communicated was in poor taste to say the least.
During the communication process, the sender will share a message with the receiver that
will hopefully be encoded correctly, but what happens to that message when there is a
breakdown in communication. A message cannot be accurately perceived if the receiver