It's usually not the crisis that hurts you, it's how you respond.

This is the message we give to clients either experiencing or preparing for a reputational crisis.

People accept that people make mistakes. But they expect them to respond to those mistakes with integrity, honesty and expertise. And we often judge that based on how we see them treating those human lives most affected by what has happened.

Respond well isn't good enough, you have to be seen to respond well, too. Or to quote Theodore Roosevelt: "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."

What Heathrow Airport has discovered over the past few days is just how much scrutiny individuals and their decisions come under when the lights go out.

When rehearsing crisis responses, we stress how important it is to have separate command teams, because nobody can run a crisis around the clock for long.

But Thomas Woldbye's decision to - having assessed the situation - hand over to his deputy and go to bed before the decision had been taken to close the airport has made headlines - and divided communicators.

That's because, while it may have been best practice operationally, the optics of it are terrible.

What it tells the thousands whose lives were enormously disrupted by the decision to close Europe's busiest airport was that the boss had more important things going on - his own sleep.

He may have been responding well, but he was not seen to be responding well.

As communicators, we know that every decision taken during a crisis will come under intense scrutiny - either immediately or further down the line.

So it's not enough for us to simply ensure decisions are communicated in a clear and reassuring way. It's our job to look at each decision that goes into the log and challenge it on the basis of how it will look to those most affected.

Because when the lights come back on, our reputation as well as our operations will have been affected. And the big decisions need to consider both.