The Home Depot: Leadership In Crisis Management

The Home Depot: Leadership in Crisis Management

Introduction Established in 1979, The Home Depot has proved to be a leading retail company founded upon providing excellent products at competitive prices sold from knowledgeable sales representatives. Through this concept, The Home Depot has dominated both professional and do-it-yourself sales across the world. In 1992, The Home Depot was faced with a new challenge. Hurricane Andrew struck with vengeance and devastated 75,000 homes across Florida. Since 10% of The Home Depot’s stores were located in Florida, this quickly became a corporate emergency. The Home Depot stepped up to the challenge and stood behind their customers. Depot froze prices for supplies the community would need
His experience in the third world countries made him the perfect candidate to lead Depots crisis management project. When 2004 rolled around, Florida was viscously attacked with four storms in a seven week period. Through the devastation, The Home Depot utilized this period as a learning tool. The storms of 2004 developed three main “Crisis Management” concepts for The Home Depots: speed, preparedness, and chain of command. Speed was crucial for the community and The Home Depot strived to open as swiftly as possible after the storms ceased. The Home Depot stayed ahead of the storms by having a surplus of storm relief inventory, as well as workers close enough to be called upon when the major threats had passed. Finally, the employees of The Home Depot understood who was in charge and calling the shots. From these concepts a “Crisis Command Center” was born for category two hurricanes or worse. The Command Center consisted of conference rooms where representatives could meet and develop a plan of attack. With the click of a mouse they were able to determine what their customer’s main needs were. The main goal of the Command Center was to insure employee safety, re-open stores, and make sure computer systems
The two that stand out the most to me are the company’s “Commitment to Resilience” and “Deference to Expertise”. The Home Depot’s commitment to resilience can easily be seen over the years where the company produced a quick turn around after major natural disasters, as well as their response after the company’s latest reputational crisis Also, the company’s deference to expertise can be seen as top executives gave more power to the individual store managers. The executives realized that the specific store managers had more expertise for the individual store location than executives did. The fact that The Home Depot closely follows all five of the principles stated above shows that the company is a highly reliable organization