There are some lessons which can not be learned by reading books. Not everyone gets exposed to such situation, not everyone needs to go through this or learn this.
There are some roles which require this skill set, Indian Police Service, Indian Administrative Service, IR negotiators, armed forces, all of them are trained for these kind of situations.
In corporate world, legal, liaison, security mangers, IR managers, all together play this role, if such situation arises.
It’s possible that similar situation may arise in front of you & you may need to manage same temporarily till the time specialist resources take control of situation.
In different situations, I have seen that angry unsatisfied protesters, from 10 to 1000, can create a challenging situation for business.
Few situations, you can anticipate & go prepared a bit, but not everything happens as per script. Few situations, you are in the situation without any preparation & now manage. I don’t think there is much difference in both cases 😊, as situations are so tense, it requires on the spot decisions.
Unplanned story,
In one such situation, we had planned to take control of distributorship with land parcel belonging to organisation & hand over to new distributor. It seemed quite normal routine as both old & new distributors had very nice history. But suddenly, we saw that there was resistance to vacate the site & handover possession, we saw local police supporting the old distributor, we saw that mob of 1000 people gathered to protest & attack the facility. We had six member team along with new distributor’s team, & I suddenly realised that everyone from our side had disappeared looking at the situation. I opted to be there argue & explain first with Police, gave threat of making some calls to their superiors in district HQs. I suddenly realised situation coming under control, I realised that our team started reappearing again, the new distributor came back, the old distributor started cooperating, crowd become manageable. After drama of six hours, we completed legal formalities of taking control & handover same again. Lot of learnings....
Planned story,
We were supposed to take control of one such Distributorship & land parcel in communally sensitive area. As per market information there was someone very influential behind that distributor. We had prepared a very new simple guy to take over the Distributorship after we take over control. Very few in the team were aware about the timing of the action planned. Our legal had taken proper action to brief right authorities & kept papers ready for court. Our task was to take control of site do some paper work & than handover to new distributor. Legal was to take next steps of completing legal formalities. We three were supposed to play crucial role in this, I could see fear & pain in the eyes of my colleagues. I was completely unaware of the background, (& little calm as family members being from police background) when I reached there, a person was standing at the gate with licensed revolver. I had to still enter the room to take control. Once we entered without fear of gun, he made few phone calls & some politicians with red beacon car appeared. All these drama continued again for four hrs, unfortunately, they threatened our new simple distributor, who opted out on the spot & went back with his team. We had to run the facility ourselves for few days till we arranged someone to takeover it as new distributor.
There were many more such situations, negotiations & managing Auto union, taxi union, labour union, farmers groups, managing Social Groups, Activist Groups, reporters, grieving stakeholders, sometimes along with govt machinery, sometimes with own team.
You can consider all these as draining looking at your core job, but I feel that learnings from such situation management are enormous, the networking you develop while managing such situations helps you in achieving your challenging targets.