How to communicate in a crisis
When the world might feel uncertain for your community, it’s essential that leaders of organisations communicate with some simple principles in mind.
Crises bring out the best, and the worst, in people and in organisations. How you communicate will define how people remember you for years to come. Don’t underestimate the shadow that one tweet can have, nor the vacuum that will be filled by the lack of them. If you don’t communicate, other people will do it for you. But what exactly should you say, and when? For more than a decade I’ve observed some of the best — and worst — planning their communications to announce massive job losses, emerging scandals, election defeats and victories. Here are the lessons I’ve picked up on the way:
Don’t manage the crisis — lead it
You should not get stressed about the things that are out of your control, nor can you manage them. But your decision to respond in the way that you do is the differentiator between nailing it, owning it, and leading your people to a brighter future, even in those days when it looks dark. Your choice of behaviour needn’t be improvised. Go to your organisation’s core values — its moral system — and show that you trust them to see you through. If your core values don’t help in a crisis, they’re not core values. They should help you make decisions, quickly, and have great confidence that the decisions are probably right. So spend time with people who know how to nail core values, and then put them through the grinder:
“If this happened, would these core values and our decision-making processes be enough to get kicking into gear quickly?”
We call it a pre-mortem — how will our organisation get killed, and what are we going to do to overcome that when the time comes?
We find that most organisations don’t pressure-test their core values and decision-making processes, meaning one presides over the other. You might see lots of core values and feeling good together, but no process so people quickly grow tired and cynical: “I love this organisation but I don’t know if I can keep going through this”. Or you see process galore, but a lack of humanity, like this:
Communicate early: get to the ‘scene’ as quickly as you can
If your organisation is facing a train-wreck situation, then get to the site of the train-wreck as quickly as you can. Be with your people early on in the crises. Listen to them first, and ask them what they want: they don’t need you to tell them there’s a crisis if they’re telling you already that there’s uncertainty. In the past few weeks we’ve had more “This is a period of uncertainty” email headers than we can humanly cope with. I don’t need told that once, let alone every day, several times, first thing in the morning in my intray.
Don’t sell them your wares, your ideas or your opinion at the start of a crisis. I learned this the hard way, when former employees experiencing crises would tell me that I jumped to solutions all the time. I thought I was being helpful. They thought I wasn’t really interested in them, that I wasn’t listening.
So ask them what they want. If you can offer it, promise it and see your promise through. If you can’t, say you don’t know if you can. Better to say “I don’t know,” than say nothing. And if the train-wreck is inevitable, let everyone know as soon as possible so that they can brace for impact, or get out of the way.
Don’t communicate to some parts of your community, but not share the same information with the whole community, at the same time, on your main website or Twitter or Facebook pages. Cliques and inner circles are not what get you through crises: community is. The International Baccalaureate got this move completely wrong when it wanted to inform tens of thousands of learners that the examinations to which they had been working for years were no longer going to take place. Instead of addressing the students who pay the fees and do the work, they told only the examiners and coordinators, and asked them to keep the news secret for 20 hours. Fat chance. Bad news spreads faster than good news. Most of us find this out when we’re awkward teenagers. Multinationals are no exception to this life rule.
When you ask people to keep things secret, it’ll a) get out and b) you’ll have people fielding the most important questions for you, instead of you doing it for them — read the replies to this one customer of the IB and you see the challenge:
The story was broken by tweets within two hours, and nearly a day before official news broke on a pre-timed tweet via the Buffer app. In retrospect, that kind of news should just have been broken, with loads of detail, to help everyone in the community have what they needed, as soon as possible.
Communicate often: don’t drift out of the ‘scene’ after you’ve gone in
If you drop some major news, make sure you’ve got people on hand on social media who can respond to every question anyone might have, for at least the first 72 hours. If you’re global, that means three shifts, without gaps. And along with the people, make sure you’ve done a pre-mortem of all the questions that people might have, forming the best answers you can provide at that time. Releasing massive news on March 22, with no details of how you will resolve the problem for your community until March 27, is too slow. You lose trust, you lose community, you create a vacuum and vacuums tend to get filled with whatever the community shout the loudest.
Communicating everything
In digital land there is no limitation on the detail you can share, so aim to share as much as possible. Undertake a pre-mortem on all the questions that people might ask, and all the ways your message could be misunderstood, and write up a short answer for every one of those points. And if you don’t know the answer yet, say so, and explain you’ll work on it for tomorrow.
The IB did this well, 24 hours after their first announcement, with a detailed written interview with the Director General: reassuring, detailed and thought through. This is the kind of text that’s great to share at the same time you share the decision. It lets people rationalise at a time of emotion, instead of filling the gap with their questions and angst.
Be yourself. Write as you talk. Talk as you.
We are all just people. If you’re the CEO, Director-General, Director, Head of School, Principal, Prime Minister or Communications Chief, you are also just people. Show it. Speak and write with the tonal values of you, not just the tonal values of your organisation. David Ogilvy, the original Scottish-American madman of Manhattan, understood the problem:
Do not … address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.
Think about how your message will change the world of the people you’re communicating it to, and put yourself firmly in their shoes. Imagine you’ve got to witness their reaction and put an arm around their shoulders.
— What do they want to hear?
— What can you tell them that will fit their ears, and what tough truths will you need to share?
— And then how will you listen to them afterwards, and take on board their grief, frustration or anger?
Make sure you know the answers to these questions before you set out to communicate. Ideally, work out the answers to this well before the crisis arrives.
And if you really do have to write it down, write it just as you’d say it to them, on the sofa, one-on-one. As Hemingway is reported to have said,
“It is easy to write. Just sit in front of your typewriter and bleed.”
It’s far easier to say it out loud and write down exactly what you said, than to write what you want to say and then say it. If you need to, ask a friend to write down how you speak. Censor any jargon, any work-speak, and any ambiguity. Don’t do what United Airlines did when they dragged someone off their plane for no reason at all: “re-accommodating a passenger” does not make this OK.
Remind people of your purpose
The worst thing many people do when leading in a crisis is to state “Number One Priorities” that relate to the crisis — we can see through this instantly. As flames leap from the train wreck behind your head, you cannot say that safety is your number one priority now. This merely looks you look reactive. Instead, state your goals, without prioritising them: “We have a goal to make sure that all our people are looked after at this time.” Now people know what their job is: to realise that goal. You’re leading them, not managing them. And even in a crisis, you are now doing one better.
Best of all, though, don’t rely on language that hints at your strategy. The crisis may derail your current strategy, or really need you to follow it through. The chances are, you don’t know yet. So don’t commit to changing, pausing or pursuing your strategy, which could viewed as feckless, hesitant or heartless, respectively. What do you do instead? Re-commit to your long-term purpose as an organisation.
In any time of crisis, the thing your organisation has to fall back on is its mission, or purpose. If it is not clear, you’ll hit road bumps as people debate the decisions you take at every turn. If you can show the rationale deep in your purpose, it will give people greater confidence in what you’re telling them. And this is why we emphasise the importance of a strong mission in any organisation. If you can’t rely on it in a crisis, then it’s not worth the plastic sheet it’s printed on.
