America mythologizes the rugged individual; the lone cowboy out on the range who can herd the cattle, find the gold, rassle up the rustlers, woo the heroine and speak sagely to the townsfolk before dispatching the villain. We all want to be like Shane, or John Wayne. We synthesize this rugged individualism into our communication persona, both as individuals and as organizations.
As individuals, we strive to be the strong silent type. We treat transparency as a weakness, keeping our problems to ourselves and controlling our image as much as we can. We hesitate to admit worry or fear, and we never admit failure. We practice a repressed form of communication, with information shared sparingly, defensively, hesitantly and reluctantly. We don’t talk in elevators. We don’t talk to sales. We don’t go up to Corporate. We don’t ask for help with projects.
Organizations do the same thing, so we end up with silos between departments, competition between business units, secrecy across operations and exclusive org charts to protect our turf. Our organizations look like us!
Then crisis slices into our existence. Something terrible happens and we react, then respond. As we live.
I remember a Sunday morning many years ago, when the Sunday newspaper had a front page story accusing my boss, and by default my employer: Lying, cheating and stealing. Abusing staff. Falsifying records. Explicit and exposing. Extra, extra, read all about it!
I remember how hard it was to get dressed and out the door to church. I remember thinking everyone was looking at me, feeling like every spotlight was on me. I just wanted to avoid everybody, sit in a corner by myself and avoid interactions, even with friends.
That is how we all feel when we walk in to a crisis. Even if it isn’t our fault personally, it’s our organization’s fault, or one of our coworkers fault. We suffer guilt and shame by association. Yet here we are, having to step in to stop an incident and start rebuilding our facilities, lives and reputation. We are afraid of blame, accusations, questioning, examining, all the intrusive interactions suddenly thrust upon us by the agonizing, public debacle we’re caught up in.
At that point, we discover that we’ve become our own worst enemy. As we begin to respond we run into the very communication barriers we’ve unconsciously erected in our everyday existence.
Communication barriers we’ve erected
What barriers have we unconsciously erected in our ‘day jobs’ that impact our ability to communicate in a response?
Hesitancy to share information:
In the best of times, it is hard to be open when we’re wrong, and now it’s the worst of times. We each hold a personal resistance to transparency that is magnified by stress. As communicators, we will have to push for maximum transparency, even when we ourselves are resistant. Our problem won’t age well. Our public won’t wait.
As painful as transparency feels right now, not sharing will hurt more, and for much longer. An organization that hasn’t communicated transparently in the ‘good days’ now is forced to communicate transparently on a very bad day. It’s your reputation at stake now, and you need to talk about it.
Frozen edit and approval processes:
Every day, our organizational chart reinforces who has authority over us. Our job descriptions spell out who we answer to. We exercise a daily process of draft and review: We draft, THEY review. We’ve all had the experience of getting our draft back with markups, revised words and commas, different paragraph structure and edits to punctuation, terms or tenses. We’re used to it, and we’ve likely labeled each editor’s peculiarities in our minds. We know who will always want to invert a sentence, who favors semi-colons; who wants colons: And all this during everyday message creation.
Now multiply this daily process by the stress of the situation and the import of the message. Content freezes in the edit/approval structure. Nobody is willing to say ‘OK’. Everyone wants ‘one more thing’ changed. Messaging stops.
Dinosaurs roaming the earth:
Our organizations aren’t prepared for today’s demand for fast response communication. Today’s communication reality is dramatically different from even a few years ago. Information is pervasive, actions are public, everyone is the media, there are no secrets. The communication curve is vertical. Everybody knows everything, or wants to know everything, right now. Accuracy is flexible. Truth is optional. Opinions are facts. The time span between an incident and public reaction is infinitesimal. Our world grows smaller and smaller.
As communicators we live in this new reality, but responders don’t. Yes, technology is impacting response planning, but not at the pace it has impacted response communication. While it takes only seconds for a Tweet to go around the world, response actions are still limited to time and space. It takes time to get people and equipment on-scene. It takes time to set up response efforts. It takes time to set up shelters, desks, cafeterias, restrooms. All response activities include the expenditure of time. Many response activities remain unchanged from 10, 20 years ago. The world isn’t physically smaller and equipment isn’t that much faster.
So almost everyone we work with is still thinking the way they always have. They aren’t aware of the dramatic difference in communication expectations. They don’t know that today’s stakeholders don’t want to know if you’ve ordered equipment, they want to know when it will arrive and where it is right now. They don’t want to know there are SCAT teams at work, they want to see them right now. They don’t want to know that the fire might be out in an hour or two, they want to know why it isn’t out right now.
Immediacy is everything. Everywhere. Only fast and continuous communications can buy patience.
Wrong arena:
Corporate-level executives may be outstanding in their field, but when it comes to response communication, they’re usually standing in the wrong field. They don’t understand that their reputation rides more firmly on communicating about response actions than it does on the response actions themselves.
Their mobilization priorities will reflect this, with vast sums of time, money and bodies mobilized to physical response, yet hesitation to commit time and resources to communication. A VP, perhaps even the CEO, will be dispatched to the incident location. Scores of executives will be mobilized to reinforce the physical activities of the response.
And we communicators will suddenly get answering machines, out-of-office notifications to emails and empty offices when we’re looking for resources or approvers. Today, trees don’t fall in the forest without the every interested person in the world hearing it. At the time when the world is looking for information and updates, our resources; approvers, spokespeople, Subject Matter Experts, are headed out to the wrong field.
Poor resourcing:
Communicators and Web servers have one thing in common: Every organization has only as many of each as are absolutely necessary. We all know where the budget axe falls first, and it isn’t on Marketing or Sales. On a good day, this is a good decision; expenses are minimized by cutting costs, income is maximized by increasing sales.
Most companies view communication as a cost center, so there are barely enough of us to maintain everyday functions. Sales grow at a given pace, market share increases at a steady rate. Stock value increases gradually. And every support function grows apace.
An incident blows this equation to pieces. Our organization will suddenly start spending money like water. They will hire contractors or call in already response resources. But they likely don’t have plans for an exponential growth in communication needs. They should.
In a crisis the cost of everything goes up; fail to communicate effectively and the cost goes up again, exponentially higher. The only thing protecting our brand, market share, consumer acceptance, right to operate or stock price is effective crisis communication. Yet it is likely that our organization has no plan for rapid escalation in communications.
What can we do to eliminate communication barriers?
Hesitancy to share information:
Desperate times require desperate measures. Accept the truth: We’re exposed by this event and hesitancy is not going to minimize our exposure. Not engaging now isn’t going to prevent the embarrassment of public scrutiny.
The best way to get out of the spotlight is to dive deep into it. Engage transparently. Share all possible information that will help our reputation. Our organization has probably done a lot of good things in the past that we can share, and if our people are actually involved in response actions they’re probably doing them well. Share these positive actions.
Frozen edit and approval process:
Thaw this out now, not during a crisis. Cultivate an understanding of the urgency of response communication at the corporate level. Practice like you want to play, with mini-drills consisting of a select scenario and a single initial statement containing responses to key stakeholder concerns. Push for pre-approval of short, specific and appropriate mini-statements for each stakeholder concern.
If you’re in a crisis and your editors and approvers are frozen, shorten your statements to the briefest possible content. Minimize words and ideas to minimize edits and delay of approval. If this doesn’t work, hope that Unified Command overrides your organization’s delay by fiat, salvaging some of your reputation by default.
Dinosaurs roaming the earth:
We all use new technology without fully considering it’s impact on our lives:
- We order shoes online and they’re on our front porch tomorrow
- We send emails to deal with customer issues.
- We answer work calls at every hour on our cell phones.
- We use Waze to get across town as fast as possible.
- We Skype with our relatives on holidays.
Everyone in our organizations does this, but many don’t consider that:
- Zappos has taught us to expect anything on our porch by tomorrow
- Gmail has taught us that we’ll get instant response to our concerns
- Samsung has led us to expect immediate contact and comment from any individual.
- Waze has taught us anything can be done faster.
- Skype has taught us that we can expect instant video images of whatever we’re interested in.
Connect these dots with your people. Help them see that it’s not just the world around them that has changed; they have changed too. Every stakeholder expectation is also their own expectation. Then examine communication protocols, and response protocols through the same expectations we hold every day.
Wrong arena:
Of all responders, communicators should have the most direct line to executive staff. But they’re likely outstanding in their fields, not ours.
The best leaders make other people better. They do this by directing their efforts and resources to maximize their people’s performance. As their people succeed, they succeed. We need to coach our leaders to remember this context for their actions in a response. There will be plenty of occasions later in the event when our leaderships’ presence will have huge impact, but right now supporting and facilitating our actions will have larger benefit.
Poor resourcing:
Response communications should have a large share of all first response resources. Anything less is a threat to your organization. Our organizations will excel when it dedicates the resources for us to.
Who can we call on? Do we have contingency agreements with outside firms? Can we even count on other communicators within our own organizations? If we can’t answer ‘yes’ to these question, we are under resourced for the most critical task we’ll ever have. Be sure we can say yes!
Call a truce!
Don’t be your own worst enemy. Work now to identify, eliminate or ameliorate unconsciously erected crisis communication hurdles. Make sure your organizations’ crisis response plans include clear processes and resources for effective communication. The more we do to prepare, the more likely we will be able to communicate effectively when our organizations most need to.