Even if you are ready to communicate, it’s likely your organization isn’t.
Let’s assume for a moment that you’re actually prepared to communicate. You have your risk assessment, your stakeholder map and a current distribution list. You’ve maintained updated statement templates and you’ve tested the process regularly. Is your organization ready for crisis communication as well?
‘The call’ comes, you capture the key facts, you plug them into a statement template and you send it up the ladder for approval. Time is precious but you’re confident you’ll get the green light immediately.
Instead, you get one, more or all of the following responses:
- No response – approvers are too busy to get back to you
- The Legal morass – the dreaded “You’re going to have to run this by legal”
- An interminable approval process – additional layers of approval, these could be corporate, investor relations, legal, or some other newly identified entity
- Statement edits – from everybody, independently
- Additions – “You have to add this (new or note new information) before you send it”
Any and every one of these responses delays communications. None should apply, but often all are applied. You are back into the approval morass, back to delay and possible defeat.
What happened?
Simple really – the stakes went up. Your organization is under stress from an unplanned event. Everybody is surprised, everybody is reacting, and everybody is busy. The possibility of delay and failure has escalated at every level.
I’ve come to understand that organizations usually act like people, because they’re made up of people making decisions for the organization. The greater the immediate risk, the greater the likelihood that policy and practice goes out the window, replaced by very human reactions.
Everybody wants crisis communication output to be perfect. Everybody wants to weigh in, everybody would like someone else to make the final decision, and everybody is afraid they will personally be blamed. All the team building, supportive policies, cooperation and consultative values evaporate. And the process stops at the worst possible time.
And time is precious. Stakes do go up, and delay rapidly ratchets them even higher. But at this very moment when speed is of the essence, the capability for rapid crisis communication is constricted.
In virtually every actual crisis I’ve been a participant in I’ve seen courageous individuals make key decisions that break this vicious cycle of delay, usually at the risk of their own careers. As a communications professional and as a person of integrity, you need to be ready to pull the trigger when nobody else will. Frightening, yes. Necessary, likely.
Let’s not stop here; what can you do to provide protection for yourself?
Sanitize your initial statement
Your initial statement should be an action statement, with minimal facts and maximum intent. Acknowledge the event, state your intentions and promise more information. By minimizing facts, you minimize risk of misstatement. Maximizing intent promotes fast approval.
Minimize your initial distribution
Prepare a short list of contacts for your initial distribution. Key media, key elected officials, key agencies and key internal stakeholders.
- Use the list of required response notifications. By regulation your organization is already notifying key response agencies. Use this list to match to key contacts for your initial statement.
- Add the top local media.
- Add key elected officials and known community leadership. Use your government-relations cohorts to identify this list.
- Add an HR contact for additional distribution to corporate leaders. Note: Most crisis planning includes notifications to employees from the operational side. Have HR map this for their distribution, and add their distribution responsibility as a preparedness requirement. DO NOT neglect to plan ongoing, continuous distribution of updates to employees via HR tools. Employees are a greatly neglected stakeholder group throughout a response
Solidify the pre-approval process
Request approval to use key facts, scrubbed templates and distribution lists for the initial statement, based on your receipt of the original call. Leadership must understand that this initial statement will be released as surely as agency notifications are made, and as automatically. Move the approval fight to subsequent releases, not the first one.
Mobilize your leadership
Remind your leadership that establishing immediate initial crisis communication opens the door to ongoing communication. Remind them that fast communication opens doors for additional information sharing. Immediate crisis communication is frightening when we’re under stress, but it is the best action to take. Help doubters to personalize this process: If they have bad news that impacts their families, is it better to share it or hide it? Will their family trust more if they share it or if they hide it? Does bad news get better with age, or worse?
You have minutes to establish your organization as a reliable, trusted provider of response information. If you don’t succeed, other sources will step in to provide their version of the truth. Remember that many sources can complete the ‘what+why=truth’ equation – with misstated ‘what’ and misspoken ‘why’. And you will have lost your opportunity to communicate.
Plan now to make sure your organization is ready for crisis communication.