The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
What really happens when a crisis hits an organization—and how technology is influencing decisions and reputation impacts. Come hear what happened when experienced leaders were actually in the middle of a crisis—and capture the lessons before it happens to you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Your host, Tom Mueller, is a veteran crisis manager and trainer with more than 30 years in the corporate communications and crisis fields. Tom currently works as an executive coach and crisis trainer with WPNT Communications, and as a contract public information officer and trainer through his personal company, Tom Mueller Communications LLC.
Our goal is to help you grow your knowledge and awareness so you can be better prepared to lead should a major crisis threaten your organization.
Music credit: Special thanks to Nick Longoria from Austin, Texas for creating the theme music for the podcast.
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#CrisisResponse #management #leadership
The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
EP 5 The Human Element in Crisis Leadership: An Interview with Ed Thompson, Part 1
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On this episode, we speak with seasoned crisis management leader, Ed Thompson. With 26 years in the US Coast Guard and a second career as a crisis manager in the energy sector, Ed's journey offers a trove of insights—from tactical incident commander to strategic crisis manager. Tune in as he details the importance of understanding the scale of a crisis, tailoring leadership styles, and building formidable teams in the face of adversity. Ed’s wisdom is invaluable, whether you’re in the boardroom, the control room, or just finding your way through life's inevitable rough patches.
Ed doesn't stop at the mechanics of crisis leadership; he delves deep into the human aspects of response. Hear first-hand how a leader's positivity can bolster an organization's morale, lighten the personal burden for those at the frontlines, and maintain optimism amidst daunting circumstances. As we pivot from one year to the next, let Ed's stories of resilience and leadership in the face of adversity inspire and guide you.
We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Leadership in Crisis
Tom MuellerHi everyone and welcome to the Leading in a Crisis podcast . On this podcast , we talk all things crisis management with the goal of making you and us better leaders in a crisis . We deliver that through interviews , storytelling and lessons learned from experienced crisis leaders . I'm Tom Mueller and with me today is my co-host , Marc Mullin . Marc , how you doing today .
Marc MullenDoing great . Tom , Nice to be here . I'm looking forward to our conversation today .
Tom MuellerPart 1 of our interview with Ed Thompson . We have a really interesting guest with us today . He is Ed Thompson . Ed is a very experienced crisis leader who , unlike many of us , has experienced both on the agency , the federal government side , as well on the industry side , so he's seen crisis management from many different viewpoints . So we're really looking forward to hearing some of Ed's stories and lessons learned from incidents that he's worked over the course of his long and industrious career . So , ed , welcome to the podcast .
Ed ThompsonWell , thanks , tom . Good to meet you , Marc .
Tom MuellerEd , we like to have folks on this podcast kind of do a self introduction . So if you were turning up at a crisis conference somewhere and needed to talk a little bit about your crisis experience , what would you tell people ?
Ed ThompsonWell , I guess I'd have to say I started with oil spills and marine casualties . My first major oil spill , which is counted in the millions of gallons , was 1975 . And it's been in and out of the program and in and out of crisis management and emergency response for my whole 44 year career . It's done some teaching as well at the Coast Guard Academy . I hit a lot of the major oil spills in the 20th century , including the Exxon Valdez and those kind of things . So I've seen little ones , big ones , seen hazardous chemical spills , did a lot of work on the strike team on chemical response and when I shifted over to industry again it was a learning experience because now I was running fire teams and fire departments and medical emergency response and business continuity and all that . I always kind of finish a segment of my career feeling like I got more out of it than I should have . But it's always been interesting , fun . Okay , not always fun , but it's always been interesting and a learning experience . You meet some wonderful people .
Tom MuellerYou retired from the Coast Guard as a captain . So during your tenure with the Coast Guard of some 26 years , as you mentioned , you worked a lot of oil spills and medical response incidents . In that you worked as an incident commander for the Coast Guard , right ? Yes , and what other roles did you work as part of your Coast Guard career ?
Ed ThompsonWell , I think , for better or for worse , I think I've done everything except finance , and thank heavens they had the wisdom not to put me in finance .
Ed ThompsonI've done everything on the command staff except lead public information , done a lot of liaison work , done operations , in fact the focus as you get into smaller responses , which by far the majority , regardless of your position , whether you're in the command staff or operations , you really have an operations focus and so I've got a lot of operational experience . On response , planning was , to be honest with you , was something I had to mentally and spiritually learn to do , because when you're a knife in the teeth operator , you wonder what is the purpose of planning in the first place . It took me a while to learn the value and it even took me a while to actually not rebel against doing exercises in the middle of a large response . First and foremost , I think I'm mostly an operator with command experience , but I've learned to not only respect but to love the planning section , because they mean a lot to your credibility and to your capacity to carry out a successful response .
Tom MuellerYeah , for our listeners who aren't intimately familiar with the incident command system process yet , planning section within an incident management team is one of the critical sections for getting plans in place and organizing the entire response team . So it's a super critical role and you've got to be a very talented operator to be a planning section chief , and the fact that you were able to get in there and do that is a testament to your capability as well . But , ed , I wonder if you can kind of think back on some of the incidents you've worked , in particular the leaders that you've worked with over your career . For folks who are tasked with being an incident commander or a section chief , what would you say are the characteristics that kind of help that leader be successful in a crisis situation ?
Ed ThompsonYou've got to know where you are in terms of the scale of the response and the type of the response .
Ed ThompsonFor a small response which , quite frankly , the incident command system was made for the incident commander to be face to face with the incident , like a firefighting , like a burning building or a wildland fire or something like that , you are there on scene doing the job and tactically involved .
Ed ThompsonThe greater the scale of the response and as types shift from immediate operational issues , you begin to become less of a tactical incident commander and more of a crisis manager , if you will , which is perhaps a misnomer , but you become less focused on the operation of the incident command system and much , much more externally focused on how that incident is impacting , especially if it's a large scale response .
Ed ThompsonThere's probably nothing bigger in scale than a large scale oil spill . It impacts hundreds of linear miles , of thousands of square miles , it impacts people's livelihoods , it impacts the environment and impacts people that are not even geographically close to the incident and suddenly you're no longer capable of tactically running the operation and dealing with the externalities that are there . It emphasizes the need for a strong team , because unless you can build a strong team with people who have the expertise to focus on those particular aspects of the response that need to be focused on . You're not going to be able to extract yourself from the details and begin to deal with the external factors that impact that response and can spill success or failure if you're not careful .
Marc MullenSounds like you're justifying the existence of planning , because that's what you're describing . You have to step away from the beach and start focusing on the broad picture .
Ed ThompsonThat and you have to relentlessly seek out people that are impacted by this response and interact with them . I have a life saying that I usually apply to most of the aspects of my life , and that is never ask a question you don't want to hear the answer to , but in a response you almost have to do that . You've got to ask the questions that get the hard answers and the hard responses so that you know where to trim and form the response to properly address the issues and pressures that you know are going to come .
Tom MuellerYeah , your comments there at about the scaling up of an incident and being able to step back from the operations role is just , is really telling . So I wonder , if you think about the people that you've worked with who are able to do that well , what are those characteristics of them that enabled them to be successful ? Right , you're not focused on pulling boom or you know moving skimmers . You're thinking about human impacts and managing a large team . Now , right , you're almost a project manager , project leader role . Now , thank , you ?
Ed ThompsonYes , you are . And as a project leader , if you were , if you're building an offshore drill rig , by the end of the project you're going to know a lot about welding , you're going to know a lot about metal forming and those kind of things . So I don't want to say that an incident commander for a large response has to be ignorant of how the response is conducted , because it's critical that they're able to establish expectations and set expectations in public . That makes sense . But they have to be able to trust their team , build a team , manage the team , which occasionally includes moving somebody out of a role that isn't doing well with it to a role they can do well with it . It's all those leadership and management things . For , rather , you know large-scale or even medium-scale operations that that if you're good at it the response will go as well as it can go , and if you're not good at it or if you ignore those things , you'll have some issues .
Marc MullenAs the response grows , as it gets more complex , how do you decide where people should really be , and how do you decide for yourself ? What if you yourself begin to get the inkling that I'm sitting in the wrong chair ?
Ed ThompsonYeah , that's a level of self-awareness . That last part you mentioned is a critical level of self-awareness because self-selecting out and gracefully in transition is an important aspect . Very large-scale responses for a corporation or even a government agency . They're going to bring in an incident commander that has positional as well as agency or company standing as the financial indenture capability to be able to commit the company to those large-scale things . They don't necessarily know anything about the response at hand , but they are critical to the success of that response and so in that case somebody like me belongs as a deputy incident commander and I can go in there and keep the wheels turning and make sure things make sense and chat with the , with the incident commander and give honest feedback or whatever , but just to run the machine and try to achieve success for that incident commander . So to know when that occurs is important , because if you don't have the positional standing within the agency or company that you have , you're not going to be successful and even the outside world will look at somebody differently based on their position within that agency or corporation .
Ed ThompsonThat's on Valdez , I was deputy incident commander for Prince William Sound . Admiral Clyde Robbins was the incident commander , and rightly so . I spent the day keeping the wheels turning in Valdez and for the Valdez response . He spent his day outside the command post going from place to place to place to meet with people , talk to people , find out what was going on and see firsthand whether the data coming from the field matched what his eyes saw when he went on scene . That was his style and it was often uncomfortable to be the Deputy Instructor and Commander for Prince William Sound and have Admiral Robbins come back and say , well , this is what's really going on . It isn't what you think it is , but Clyde Robbins , being Clyde Robbins , the wonderful person he was , he delivered that gently and it was illuminating for me and it taught me a lot about what the incident commander for a large scale response should be and the criticality of the role of a Deputy Instructor and Commander .
Tom Muellerd , just to expand on that a little bit , because each Section Chief is going to have a similar challenge to that on a large scale incident , such as Prince William Sound cleanup , as you mentioned . I think back to Deepwater Horizon incident and the ever-expanding nature of that over the first three or four months , and the challenge was always maintaining situational awareness as things got bigger and bigger . I found that a huge challenge to do . What's some tips that for people to do to be able to try and maintain that situational awareness as things are evolving ?
Ed ThompsonFirst and foremost , the folks that are there facing their piece of the incident , the tactical teams , the field commanders , if you will , the task force leaders , those kind of people . They have to know their responsibility to pass information up . That's the first thing and they've got to honor it , and one way to do that is to go visit them and talk to them . We've become much more aware of that , but there's still a couple of places where we fetch up , and the last place an incident Commander wants to be is where the Command Post competes for information with the field . For example , if an overflight goes and collects information about distribution of pollutants or whatever and brings that information back to the Command Post and the Command Post fails to share it with the field in a timely manner , that creates a rift between the Command Post and the field that'll be difficult to mend . The real issue is that information needs to be first and foremost in the hands of the tactical people that are actually doing the work . Back when we didn't really honor this a great deal , or back when we didn't really understand how to do it well , in the late 70s , early 80s , I was on the Gulf Strike team and I got , from some people's perspective a bad reputation . I never felt bad about it . I was known as the guy that would go hire a helicopter in moments of notice , and what I would do as the overall leader for that response is I would fly from site to site in the response , get ahold of the tactical leader , throw them in the helicopter , take them up and let them see an aerial view of what they were dealing with , and I would do that every few days . I would refresh their tactical view . People didn't like spending money on the helicopters . It really drove home to me the criticality of information flow .
Ed ThompsonAnd information first and foremost belongs to the people who can use it to actually mitigate the circumstance that you're in , and then , secondly , is used by the command post for communication and planning and those kind of things .
Ed ThompsonIf you do it right , it's seamless , if you do it wrong , it's a mess .
Ed ThompsonThe other thing , and probably the hardest thing to sort out , is information is good up to a point in time , and so if you're clear with your receiving public and with your receiving agencies that this is what I know as of seven o'clock this morning , or this is what I know as of six o'clock this evening , and get them used to hearing that and get them to understand that at 10 o'clock in the morning the situation may have developed differently since it was when you had the picture at seven and you're out there Collecting that information now . It helps and and actually can buttress you a news helicopter that flies over something and says , aha , this is different . It's critical because information flow and information is critical to building trust within the unified command . If the agencies feel there is a different response going on in the field than is in the incident action plan or is being depicted on the situation unit , that destroys trust and that that begins to develop animosity within the unified command and we'll begin to invigorate the enforcement arms of most agencies .
Effective Leadership in Crisis Response
Tom MuellerYou've highlighted some , some very sort of out of the box approaches here in terms of , you know , getting your incident commanders or , you know , your bureau chiefs , up into helicopters to have a broad view . So that's really demonstrating a leadership aspect in the crisis situation , and a very positive one . But let me take you to the other side of the coin there and think about you know incident commanders or section chiefs , or section chiefs or executives that you've worked with , who you know , who had trouble in that setting , who , for some reason or other , didn't carry the day , and I wonder if you can talk to you know what are the issues that sort of worked against those people being successful , whether their own personal issues , capability how do you see that ?
Ed ThompsonAn introvert can be a great incident commander , but they really got to work at it . You've got to naturally be looking outward . You're going to naturally be embracing outward . Incidents create a lot of personal burden on everybody in the response . Everybody in that response is carrying an extra burden personally during that response . The incident commander has no business sharing their personal burden in public . They have every business lightning the personal burden for the people involved in the response .
Tom MuellerEd , can you be more specific on that ? What , what did you see in in a command post or in a response setting that that triggered that thought ?
Ed ThompsonI've seen senior people in a response complain about how disrupted their lives were in public , and that's like hoisting the tallest lightning rod you can think of , because you're going to get a whole lot of who cares what your burden is . You just destroyed the environment across this piece of the globe . I also know an incident commander that got in trouble for allowing team members to spend money calling home on Christmas Day to the ire of people who were pinching pennies , and that's a good example . And so it's all those things . Your personal burden is not to be shared . Everyone else's personal burden needs to be lightened to the extent that the incident commander can , and one of the best incident leaders , crisis leaders I saw .
Ed ThompsonWe were in the midst of a response that Shall we say what was at least the second manifestation of this failure that was undoubtedly going to result in significant enforcement action . Everybody knew it was going to be bad . Everybody thought it was going to be terrible . We went through An incident potential exercise that literally covered the walls of the room with Bad potentials that were coming out of this thing and this person . She never lost her positive Demine , her and every interaction With company , with agency people , was professional , was upbeat and and all that . And I once in the elevator Said I'm amazed at your positive attitude and I'm I'm inspired by . She said that's all I got . That's all I got to offer . And it was . It was one of the one of the strongest statements I've ever heard .
Tom MuellerBut that's huge , isn't it ? I mean being the sort of the cheerleader for the responders , you know , because when you're in the slog of dealing with a crisis that goes on for weeks or months , everybody's sort of getting tired and wants to be home and you know there's constantly problems coming in that need to be solved and it's you know , it's just Anxed all the time . On some days , it seems like , and a good leader Is somebody who's going to sort of transcend that and be a cheerleader , right , and let folks know hey , what you're doing is a good thing , we're helping solve a problem here .
Ed ThompsonThat's exactly right .
Tom MuellerAnd I've just found , I've worked with a couple incident commanders who were just inspirational In that sense and I was just amazed at every day after day after day , they'd come out and post a command post meeting and , you know , be cheerleading for people and highlighting the progress that we're making and the difference that the people in this response are making .
Leadership and Impact on Morale
Tom MuellerAnd , just you know , the leadership aspects of that on morale are just huge .
Ed ThompsonYou're literally on a large scale response . You're leading thousands of people , many of whom you will never meet , and your demeanor and attitude percolates through that organization . It needs to be positive .
Marc MullenIt's interesting how your comments match up with Public affairs . Are there tricks work ? Because I've seen in exercises and actual events where the response just becomes dots on a map or a chart of items ordered and so on and so . But your emphasis on people , I think , is really critical throughout the response If we settle down and look and realize that our actions impact people , the event impacted people , and not just the public , but the people that have to be in the room instead of home at their kids birthday party , and so I really appreciate what you're saying .
Ed ThompsonYou got to carry the burden of that response and it's a and it's not a burden that you can publicly put down .
Tom MuellerEd , thank you very much for your time today and for sharing your expertise from various aspects . Given your career history , really appreciate your spending time with us today and we look forward to talking to you sometime again in the future , if that's okay .
Ed ThompsonOh , I'd be excited and kind of flattered . You guys thought of me , so thanks .
Marc MullenThank you .
