The CEO Survival Guide: Crisis Communications
If your company has a media crisis plan – congratulations. You’re smart to be prepared. It often isn’t a scandal or crime that brings down a business – it’s just an unforeseen event or natural disaster. As we all know, bad things happen to the best of companies. The worst part is usually not the precipitating event; it’s the way it plays out in the public through local and national media.
Even if you have a crisis plan, you aren’t really prepared unless you ask, “Are we 100% ready to do the media interviews?” If not, you’re inviting a “secondary” crisis into the picture that can spin out of control. In the 20 years I worked as a news reporter, I saw it over and over again. The crisis isn’t the thing – it’s the company’s ability to anticipate, react, reassure and open the lines of communication that keep it out of the quicksand of negative publicity.
A crisis (definition) is an event, revelation, allegation or set of circumstances that threatens the integrity, reputation or survival of an individual or institution. FYI: It doesn’t have to be true – it simply has to be public, or have the potential to be public, and cause harm.
What this means is that it doesn’t have to be true to do serious damage. You are on the hook, even if the facts are wrong, unknown, or simply rumors. You’re in trouble too, if there are other stakeholders in the event, and they aren’t telling the same story you are. You have to get control whether or not you deserve this or saw it coming.
In order to handle the media interviews, everyone involved in executing your crisis plan must understand the best practices of giving media interviews in a crisis. Our survival guide offers these tips on talking to the press:
• Anticipate issues
• Get out front
• Act, don’t react
• Be visible, don’t hide
• Tell the truth
• Fully inform spokespersons
• Talk directly with stakeholders
• Don’t compound the problem by not communicating
• Express empathy, concern
• Take responsibility
These principles are logical, but in our experience, not easy to execute. Your first instinct is to deny there is a problem. As a result, you delay returning press calls, avoid answering tough questions and get caught up in the anger or defensiveness that will take you down, if you don’t get them under control.
A crisis plan usually calls for a team to come up with messages – “talking points” for the media.
This is fine, but those talking points often don’t answer the really tough questions coming your way from reporters. Your spokesperson goes into the news conference or media calls ready with the sheet, and gets slammed with questions he or she can’t adequately answer.
We recommend a three-step approach that builds on the talking points approach:
Step 1: Get the team to think like reporters. Prepare at least 20 questions you might get from the media. It’s important to write down the worst questions you hope and pray they don’t ask.
Why? Because you can be sure those are the questions you’ll hear.
Step 2: Prepare your talking points, using these tried-and-true approaches in your prepared messages:
• Take responsibility
• Own the problem
• Don’t hold facts
• Promise follow-up
• Set expectations
• Create timelines
• Focus on the future
• Apologize if necessary
Step 3: Practice out loud, in a mock interview, before you respond to media calls. Use a tape recorder to check facts, and be certain you come across as candid and sincere. Listen not just to the words, but your tone—if you feel angry or defensive, you need to get your emotions under control. Most people are very bad at hiding their emotions and a crisis is not the time to test your ability to keep it in check.
A friend, who is a consumer reporter, told me the story of a spokesman for GM some years ago, who demonstrated the perfect response to a crisis. “GM had forgotten to put the lids on ashtrays in a model of Cadillac; dashboards were going up in flames,” recalled the reporter. She said the spokesperson’s first words in the interview were – “What can I say? Somebody goofed.” The reporter said it was brilliant. “He immediately defused the situation – crisis averted.”
Handling media crises doesn’t just have to be a game of survival – many companies do it so well that they earn the respect of the press and the public. Handling a crisis like a pro can be a tremendous opportunity to develop press relations, and be seen as a “standup” corporation.