Crisis collaboration
Benefits scandals, a data breach or hurricanes can stir up parties, companies and NGOs overnight. Handling a crisis poorly can ruin your reputation forever. How can you lead public relations as a team in case you take a hit?
Preparing for a rainy day
You cannot predict disasters but that does not mean you cannot prepare. PWC’s 2019 Global Crisis Survey revealed leaders experienced on average a corporate crisis every 20 months. Despite that, less than half have crisis communication plans. If your organisation does not use such a document, draw one up as long as it is calm before the storm.
Find the most probable shake-ups in your sector and analyse the reactions. Leading academic Timothy Coombs identified three primary ways to respond: denial, diminish or rebuild. You have seen the former in political debates where one side attacks the accuser or blames another party. Mark Zuckerberg, similarly to other business leaders, followed a less confrontational strategy at his Senate hearing by downplaying the organisation’s power or overall consequences. In case of enormous errors, your best way to get back on track is to publicly take responsibility as the University of Missouri discovered. The researchers recommend honesty but caution that accepting blame can only be a first step.
Your crisis communication plan should spell out strategies for the first 36 hours as well as who is in charge of what. The more you are responsible for the crisis, the more senior the messenger should be. This might come as a surprise and spook the communication professionals amongst you. CEOs and Secretary Generals are (usually) business savvy and well connected, but they are not always stellar spokespeople. You can build crisis capacity by organising team trainings with the leadership, communicators and heads of departments. Participants should practice how to give live interviews, react on social media and take decisions in the most likely worst-case simulations.
How do you evaluate Dutch Prime Minister Rutte’s recent resignation?
Stealing thunder
“No comment” is not an option. In her excellent book “Crisis Communication Strategies”, Amanda Coleman recommends issuing holding statements in the first 20 minutes. What sounds impossible at first, turns out to be manageable if you draft different ones for the most probable crises in advance. You will always have to tweak the text but seeking preliminary sign-off from the leadership speeds up the response. The goal is to show swiftly that the organisation is aware of the incident. When you spot clouds on the horizon, do not take your time but actions.
Social media has accelerated how a crisis develops. United Airlines can tell you a thing or two about it. When law enforcement forcibly dragged a passenger out of an overbooked plane, cellphone videos went viral leaving little time to recombobulate. The company agreed to a settlement of $140 million; moreover, its market value dropped by $250 million.
Besides speed, compassion matters. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, BP’s CEO Tony Hayward added fuel to the fire twice. Firstly by downplaying the incident, comparing the “relatively tiny” spill to the size of the ocean. Later on by comparing the disruption on his life caused by the spill to the disruption to the lives of inhabitants of affected coastal areas, infamously saying that he wanted his “life back”.
Irrespective of your assessment of the impact of the accident or incident your organisation is involved in, it is paramount to focus on those affected and a willingness to work to make things right. Therefore, even if your company is not responsible for spilling nearly 800 million litres of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, put the financial figures aside and set the right agenda by empathising with the victims.
How would you have handled these three PR disasters differently?
Weathering the storm
When it rains, it pours. You have to watch out not to drown in the deluge of requests. Audra Diers-Lawson, Chair of the Crisis Communication Division of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), provides very useful tips in her guide “Crisis Communication - Managing Stakeholder Relationships”. When you map the environment, look at four factors: power, legitimacy, relationship history and relationship valence.
Following her findings, we recommend to rank the stakeholders on your list by answering four questions (from 0 - not at all to 10 - very high):
How strongly can the person/group influence the organisation’s decision?
How legitimate is their interest?
How well do we know them?
How fond are we of them?
Summing up the score will not only help you prioritise but also prepare your engagement strategy.
Employees turn out to be amongst the key stakeholders when you complete the exercise. If their primary source of information is external news, they will ask questions in the best case and turn into loose cannons at worst. What sounds like a burden can easily be turned into an asset. Staff members are authentic ambassadors at the frontline who share news on the organisation with friends, family and customers. They can feed back how stakeholders view the organisation over time. When you are testing your crisis plan, make sure communication can quickly flow through internal channels top down and bottom up, and that you provide blueprints. You can only weather the storm with your team.
How could a member of your team impact the image of the entire organisation in a similar way as this soldier?
Three tips for crisis collaboration
Prepare for a rainy day by drawing up a plan and training the team.
Steal the thunder with swift statements and empathise with affected groups.
Weather the storm through employee advocacy.
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