Crisis Com

By Dale Goldhawk and Gary Ralph

Crisis Com is a must-have book for executives, directors, managers, spokespersons, PR pros and others who might be involved in handling a crisis in an organization. The co-authors are two of the most experienced crisis consultants in Canada. Dale Goldhawk and Gary Ralph have decades of combined experience in real life crisis management - and crisis instigation. This is one of the best looks at crises and one of the best manuals on crisis communications available in Canada.  It has become essential for every organization to have the capability to prevent and to manage crises. This book proves that; it is the best resource you can have to prepare for crises of all kinds. It is by authors who have done it all. This is NOT theory. It is real life! Lived!

• Language: English
• Publisher: ACI
• Release date: Jan 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781999486747

Book preview

CONTENTS

This book is both an instruction manual and an explanation of the essential components of crisis communications. To keep the book as interesting as possible, expanding your understanding as you go, we blend instruction and information.

Instruction on managing crises in organizations is presented under the Chapter heading Managing crisis with the specific topic following as in Managing crisis - quick action

Personal recollections of Dale and Gary are presented in chapters bylined 'Gary' or 'Dale'.

Pure information helping you to understand the process, the media itself and various kinds of crises is presented in chapters with only the content noted in the heading.

CHAPTER ONE Crisis potential

CHAPTER TWO Crisis manager

CHAPTER THREE Managing crisis - 5Ws & 2Hs

CHAPTER FOUR Managing crisis - Media basics

CHAPTER FIVE

DALE Meet a journalist

CHAPTER SIX Attracting media

CHAPTER SEVEN

GARY Living through crisis

CHAPTER EIGHT

DALE Advocacy journalism

CHAPTER NINE

DALE Crisis kinds - government

CHAPTER TEN

DALE Crisis kinds - healthcare

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DALE Crisis kinds - consumers

CHAPTER TWELVE

DALE Crisis kinds - workplace

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

DALE Crisis kinds - environment

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

DALE Journalism from the inside

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

GARY News reporters

CHAPTER SIXTEEN News economics

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

GARY News media vs PR

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN News media vs advertising

CHAPTER NINETEEN

DALE Managing crisis - quick action

CHAPTER TWENTY

DALE Managing crisis - don't run or hide

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

GARY Managing crisis - blind spots

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Managing crisis - learning basics

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Managing crisis - security

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Managing crisis - bad advice

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Managing crisis - critical tools

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

GARY Managing crisis - preparation steps

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Managing crisis - interviews

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Managing crisis - questions and answers

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Managing crisis - social media

CHAPTER THIRTY

GARY Managing crisis - social and traditional media

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Managing crisis - digital com

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

GARY Managing crisis - MY story

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

DALE Managing crisis - com resources

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

DALE Last thoughts

CRISIS COM

Understanding organizational crisis

Dictionary definitions of 'crisis':

A time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger.

A time when a difficult or important decision must be made.

The co-authors of this book have a combined century of experience and knowledge in the companion fields of journalism and public relations with a specialty in crises. We began, decades ago, working in the same newsroom of a large, metropolitan newspaper. We moved to different employers, into our own companies and even onto opposing sides but remained friends and now colleagues.

Dale became a television personality and a social advocate who often caused problems for the kinds of clients Gary represented. Gary focused on public relations work providing advice and training to many clients from business, government, charities and non-profits. You will find both views throughout this book.

Most of the time, we arrive at the same place with lots of insights and stories along the way. Sometimes we might digress but this just makes for a more interesting book; after all, as Yogi advised, ‘When there is a fork in the road, take it.’

Part of dealing with a crisis, of course, is curing the cause, and we can’t help you with this because we know little about electrical equipment or highway planning or paying ransom in Bitcoin. The rest of dealing with crises is handling the public impact of the mess – let’s bundle all of that under the heading of ‘crisis communications’ and we know a lot about this. We have been there and done that more times than we can count.

We have worked with or witnessed a number of organizations which have handled crisis communications with intelligence, aplomb, planning and effective execution. Others have not and sadly may not.

CHAPTER ONE

Crisis potential

Your company has been hacked by North Korea and the personal data of a legion of your customers is being held for ransom to be paid in Bitcoin.

You run a large electric equipment supply service; two of your high voltage workers, high on newly legalized marijuana, apparently goofed while installing equipment that subsequently shorted out causing widespread disruption in a major city.

Your company has bought a large subsidiary along with all its assets. Too bad these included a large industrial site contaminated with years of toxic chemical buildup. Now, government is demanding a cleanup that will extend to an adjoining residential area.

Speaking of government, you're a big wheel in a branch of government that is planning a new highway route that threatens the very existence of a small, but beloved, town along your mapped route.

Imagine your shock if a senior staff member in your non-profit organization were to be arrested and charged with sexual assault of a minor taking part in an organization event or your CEO was sued by a number of women citing harassment and sexual assault.

Your insurance company employer has seemed heartless in denying a claim from a surviving spouse; your hospital has screwed up treatment of a patient; your government agency has denied benefits to a disabled man; your company is digging a huge pit in a former cornfield.... And it all becomes or threatens to become public!

The list goes on - depressingly.

What to do? What to do?  What can you do if your company, government, non-profit or charity do when facing a crisis that may turn into a catastrophe? The good news is there is a lot you can do. The bad news is that much of it is not easy to do – unless you have learned and planned well in advance of the roof caving in.

Of course, it can’t happen to you, can it? You are a superb manager, a talented executive, a consummate planner. Your ‘people’ are professionals who never put a foot wrong. Your company has been around awhile; your customers are loyal; your products are the greatest...  Get over yourself.

A crisis can hit any organization, any time. Disaster can hit and be over with the speed of light or drag on until your company, government, non-profit or charity has been dragged to the depths and beyond.

Look at the names of companies and execs whose thumbs-down crests are emblazoned on the wall of international crisis infamy: United Airlines in 2016 after videos of passenger mistreatment blasted out on the Internet; Toyota, which, in 2010, recalled almost 9 million vehicles for safety defects including accelerator jamming; of course, Martha Stewart was jailed in 2004 for obstructing justice, making false statements and committing perjury. There was the Exxon Valdez, Enron’s scandalous behaviour and BP with its exploding, burning, leaking Deepwater Horizon oil well despoiling the Gulf of Mexico.

Harvey Weinstein dominated the media for a time in 2017 and the media itself, in the guise of the venerated BBC, had its own mess in 2015 with publication of putrid tales of its deceased show host, pedophile Jimmy Savile. Facebook, Google and the rest of the huge tech companies have had privacy concerns of epic proportions.

It seems every country, every government of every country, many companies, charities and non-profits, institutions, clubs and other such assemblies, have had their crises. To some, they have meant ruin but for others the miscues have been troublesome blips in otherwise placid and constantly profitable histories.

There have been positive legends created - those who rose above the muck and mire and showed us all how it is done. There was Tylenol, still vaunted, to a tedious and outdated extent, as the best at crisis communications, and, no doubt, dozens of others so proficient you have never realized they had crises.

In 1983, the drug maker, Johnson & Johnson, won a reputation for positively handling crisis when it gave accurate facts to the public after three people died because someone had injected cyanide into Tylenol capsules. Then the company developed new tamper-resistant packaging for its product. For every Tylenol in this field, though, there are hundreds of abject failures and tamper-resistance now looks like unleaded solder for tin cans in the age of cybercrime.

It is tempting to create a national DIM Award – for Disaster in Making to be offered to companies that have set themselves up for monumental crises.  In our top 10 DIM recipients might be fashion retailer H&M; R&B star The Weeknd cut ties with H & M in January, 2018, after the Swedish concern published an ad showing a black child in a hoodie bearing the phrase Coolest monkey in the jungle. The Toronto performer noted online he was shocked by the ad and wrote on Twitter – woke up this morning shocked and embarrassed by this photo. I’m deeply offended and will not be working with @hm anymore.

The competition for a DIM Award has been fierce. For every Tylenol, there are hundreds of organizations which have staggered to survive crises with blind luck their preferred tool. It is of little use to hope and pray you won’t be among those who couldn’t handle a crisis. This book aims to increase your chances of avoiding or lessening the impact of a crisis through state-of-the-art crisis communicating. Easy to say, isn’t it?

(Dale talks, in dedicated chapters throughout this book, about his background and the kind of resource he has been to people affected by crisis. Gary does the same from the PR side. The two collaborate on chapters with hard-won advice for the crisis-afflicted.)

CHAPTER TWO

Crisis manager

Every organization should have staff dedicated to assessing and managing crises. Few organizations however will recognize the need or have the resources to create a Crisis Department or to appoint even a single person as Crisis Communications Manager. Frankly, relatively few will ever have crises and would find it hard to justify this kind of staffing (or the optics of having a Crisis Manager). So, even though everybody should create a permanent guard against crisis, most won’t.

[We realize 'risk management' is an important process in many companies. This kind of risk management is the identification, evaluation, and prioritization of risks so they can be avoided or ameliorated. A typical risk manager tends to focus on financial risk or attacks by adversaries with little attention to communications aspects discussed in this book. Even in companies with dedicated and highly skilled risk managers, additional or even separate crisis communications managers and/or skills are needed.]

At the very least, every company, non-profit, charity or other group should designate a person who can step in as crisis manager if it is hit by disaster. This person can spend some time studying the role if ever his or her organization’s stuff actually gets caught up in the fan.  This book is a good place to spend time for either the just-in-case crisis manager designate or for the person who fills the role on a permanent basis at the most enlightened organization.

As a manager, you (and your team, if any) must have access to knowledge about every nook and cranny, every function within your organization. You should be trained in communications methods in general and in the workings of traditional and social media, enough to understand how your organization may be approached and covered by media in a crisis. Above all, you must have the imagination to opine the chances for things going wrong and how they might be made right.

Every organization should consider it can become a target of a crisis. Crises range from having your digital information hacked and held for ransom to a shutdown of all your operations due to the storm of the century.  Crises can be local or global. Fortunately, however, crises are rare.

The basic task of a crisis manager (you) is to prepare for the serious negatives that may never strike your company. Just to get to this basic task, you will have to get an idea of what crises could hit and, to do this, you should create an annual assessment of the potential for disaster in or around your organization.

Traditional public relations advisors provide crisis communications advice but few have ever experienced a real crisis. Amid advice offered online, in books and manuals and in person by self-proclaimed experts, is how to set up a crisis communications management team. Most of this advice is misguided and to follow it means adopting a recipe for failure simply because crises are so rare.

Typical advice tells organizations to form large crisis communications teams. It calls for teams to train and rehearse regularly.  All this advice is very ambitious, seemingly rational, but totally impractical unless we're talking about real fire drills.

Crises are not only rare, they are, naturally, disliked by executives. Very few, if any, executives will approve the tying up of a number of managers and aides for hours or days at a time as they train and practice crisis communications. Few if any leaders will approve realistic budgets for crisis communications and, in fact, most will likely refuse to enter this as a budget item at all.  To budget money or management time for a crisis that may never occur is anathema for senior executives and likely verboten as a topic for serious discussion in boardrooms – unless one happens.

Regardless of a dedicated budget, but with tacit approval from the top, a senior person should be appointed as the crisis communications manager. The best person for this job is the head of public relations for the company. If he or she is too busy or does not exist at the organization, another person with skills in public relations or, at least, human resources, should be chosen.

The designated crisis manager must take communications training from trainers who have been through crises with successful track records or good training resources like this manual. The manager must follow training with an assessment of the organization’s crisis potential. Only then can this manager request resources needed to prepare the organization for crises that may, someday, actually happen. Physical resources must be as limited as possible since anything above the minimum likely will not get approval from on-high or will be cut when a crisis is nowhere to be found.

Spokespersons do not have to be members of a crisis communications team. An organization of any size and needing a public face for any reason should have trained spokespersons and these can be conscripted during a crisis. An organization of any size should have a bare minimum of two trained people, including the CEO if at all possible, in this role.  It is helpful to have spokespersons trained to deal with crises as well as sales, marketing and branding appearances but it is not mandatory for our purposes since the company CEO and crisis communications manager should be the initial – and perhaps the only - spokespersons in any crisis.

So, you have just been appointed your organization’s crisis manager. As your first obligation, you might suggest a new title for your role such as Events Manager or Special Assistant to the CEO – a title that won’t emphasize the negative in a headline such as, "Crisis manager heads probe..."  Kind of hard to argue that you don't have a full-blown mess on your hands when your title underlines the situation! Avoid your current title, such as Director of Human Resources; journalists could associate your regular job with the crisis – a Human Resources title will indicate the crisis most affects employees.

The second thing on your ‘To Do’ list should be to learn all you can about managing your part of a crisis. ‘Your part’ does not include solving the cause or halting the progression of the cause of the crisis. In most cases, the cause will be a major glitch in the operations of your company or other body. A fire, explosion, toxic chemical leak, large-scale hack, embezzlement, fraud, theft, food poisoning, strike, assault by employees on customers and on and on. Your analysis will pinpoint potential causes of crises.

Communication is usually a consequence of a crisis, not the initial cause.  In the majority of crises there are experts who can handle technical details and who will end or reduce the physical effects of the source of the crisis.

Crisis hard-wired experts include firefighters, first responders, high voltage workers, chemical engineers, computer engineers and programmers, auditors and accountants, food scientists, negotiators, police and/or lawyers ... Ah, lawyers, don't you love them? We’ll discuss lawyers more later in this book. Your job is to deal with Crisis Communications while coordinating with these technical experts and that is job enough.

CHAPTER THREE

Managing crisis - 5Ws & 2Hs

As a crisis manager you must know enough about the functions of all parts of your company to discuss them with your fellow employees, your executives and outside consultants. You