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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The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
EP 6 Cooperation, valuing people, and keeping morale up - Part 2 with Ed Thompson
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On this episode, Ed Thompson - who has worked crises from both the federal agency and the industry sides - shares his wisdom gleaned from years of emergency response. A former incident commander and deputy incident commander, Ed discusses how maintaining open communication with command staff, taking time for on-the-ground interactions, and gracefully accepting public criticism can all bolster your crisis response. And regularly renting a helicopter helps, too.
Ed, Marc and Tom share their experiences and discusses issues that can arise when company staff are working shoulder to shoulder with state and federal agencies, and what to do when politics threaten to disrupt critical working relationships. Ed also tells us where he sees communicators making mistakes - and how to avoid them. Leading in a crisis can be a complex endeavor, and Ed offers his advice to manage the gauntlet successfully.
We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Crisis Management Training and Communication Strategies
Tom MuellerHi everyone and welcome to the Leading in a Crisis podcast . On this podcast , we talk all things crisis management with a goal of making you and us better leaders in a crisis . W e 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 Mullen . Marc , how are you doing today ?
Marc MullenDoing great . Tom , Nice to be here . I'm looking forward to our conversation today .
Tom MuellerWell , 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 crisis response from both the federal agency side as well on the industry side , so he's seen crisis management from many different viewpoints . W e'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 . Well , thanks , tom . Ed , I'd like to talk to you for a minute about training issues . I know you spent many years in the Coast Guard and the Coast Guard is known to do crisis training for its staff . You've worked for large energy company who also spent a lot of money doing training . There's a lot of small operators out there right who don't have the human resources to do a lot . You know what's your guidance for helping leaders in an organization prepare to lead in a crisis and how do we train people to do that .
Ed ThompsonWell , that's a big question .
Ed ThompsonWell , first off , trust your people to answer questions , and what I mean by that is a lot of times we get used to in corporate world in particular , some aspects of government as well , where you have talking heads that I had one public affairs person make the quip that you know we look like idiots so you don't have to kind of thing , whereas honestly , I think the people closest to the incident that know what's going on can in many ways , be some of your best spokespeople , so long as they know their boundary .
Ed ThompsonIf you're a tactical leader at a particular site conducting a certain tactical operation , there's no one on planet Earth that knows more about that particular aspect of the response than you do , and so your boss should trust you to speak to that and should also coach you to know when to say that's outside my boundaries , you have to go talk to somebody else , and there's no shame in it .
Ed ThompsonThat training , I think , is easy to achieve . Compliance with that training can be spotty , because once people start talking , some of them can't shut up and other people can't get started on that and want to shove it off . So you've got to find the people that know their boundaries and know how to speak in public and use them so that the incident commander doesn't have to be everything to everybody all the time . Subject matter experts that you know and who can speak in public without embarrassing the agency or the company spreading out some of that load , I think is important to success being trained for that , because people like you , tom , and you , mark , have a world of experience on how to encapsulate information and get it across .
Tom MuellerThe training aspects are just huge , and you've highlighted a couple of important issues here .
Tom MuellerOne is , you know , have subject matter experts who can speak , and knowing your subject matter is one thing , but then getting a little media coaching is another thing . Right , going through a media training program in an agency or in a corporation , putting your people through a media training program like that goes a long way to , you know , increasing their comfort level . Because I'll tell you , on some of the large incidents that I've worked , you know we deploy people who never thought they were going to be deployed out into the field to help manage an incident . Right , and those are folks who would be back in the office and say , well , I don't need to do this training because I'm not going to be a spokesperson for the company or for the agency . And yet when a big one hits and we're pushing everybody out to the field to help us communicate in local communities along the , you know , wherever we're impacting , now , all of a sudden that person is a spokesperson and everyone needs to have a little bit of training like that .
Ed ThompsonYeah , you're so right , Tom .
Marc MullenI do have a quick question for you , though , and that is would you do this again If you're called back ? Would you go back into the hot seat ?
Ed ThompsonThere are aspects of response that invigorate me . You can't describe it and in many cases it's inappropriate to say how much you love going through a response and solving a problem and feeling like you actually made headway against an intractable problem . There's a great sense of satisfaction in that and you make friends forever , to the extent that large-scale responses become reunions of people that you knew from way back when , that you knew and trusted and enjoyed working with , and you know them , they know you , you know when you've got to cover over , where they're going to get tired or maybe miss a step , and they know you where you miss a stitch and you back each other up and it's a . So there's that , there's that . So yeah , I would do it again . I guess the short answer to your question is yes , I would do it again .
Marc MullenBut at the same time we may be we may be like that , Tommy Lee Jones and the guys that went up in the rocket ship to stop the comet from striking the Earth Old and expendable .
Tom MuellerWell and you never know a large enough incident .
Tom MuellerYou know there's there's going to be a need for many , many experienced people who can come in hit the ground running and get a response rolling quickly and be able to effectively manage those external communications and the media positioning and , you know , getting those press releases out quickly and through the approval process quickly . You know all of those are things that can slow and hamper response . So , hey , experienced hands can do that well . We've talked a little bit around some of the communications aspects of dealing with a crisis . I want to just zero in for a minute here at and when you think about the public information officers who you've worked with over the course of your career , and liaison officers , you know there's a particular skill set there , much as there is for , you know , an op section chief or a planning section chief . But as you've worked with PIOs and liaison officers , what do you see as sort of the critical skills that you know will enable somebody in that role to be successful ?
Ed ThompsonIt goes back to the scaling of the response . If it's a fairly small response , then the PIO doesn't shift their day job behaviors too much . They'll do some media briefings and they'll also coach management to do media briefings . Where I've seen public information folks get in trouble is not realizing , not getting ahead of the response and not growing the PIO staff fast enough . One of the most difficult things I have seen in a response and honestly I've said this lots of times sometimes the most difficult thing to do in a response is to get help , is to understand a that you need to ask for and what are you going to do when all these people show up at the door ? Getting and using help effectively is critical and where I've seen PIOs getting trouble is they don't grow it fast enough , they don't get in front of it fast enough .
Ed ThompsonThat hurts . That really hurts , I think to the individual and I can speak from personal experience it feels like a , a giving up of control to build a large organization . There's a certain sense of you should be able to do it all . How come I can't do it all anymore ? But as the incident grows or , even more importantly , as you attempt to get ahead of the incident . You've got to devolve some of those aspects of performance to other people and let them do it and let them be successful at what they do and begin to become the conductor of an orchestra , as opposed to the lead singer .
Marc MullenI appreciate that input . What's interesting about it is that communicators don't necessarily focus on effective management skills , so that's something we need to be thinking about . Is , tom , as you say , how do we get ready to do a press conference ? We drill to it , but here , at this point , we probably need to figure out how do we actually build a functioning JIC (joint information center) .
Tom MuellerAnd how do you hit the ground running ? That's one of the big challenges that I've seen in PIO and liaison functions is hey , we're starting today , we've got 15 or 20 operational periods coming , what's our plan ? And where people get lost is well , today , I can only focus on today and getting a press conference or a press release or whatever it is , and we really coach people to have a 72-hour plan right away . I've ven developed a template 72-hour communications plan . So if I walk in the door as PIO , I already have a schedule for 72 hours of what's going to happen regarding communications . At least I know where I want to go over that time period . T here's no reason you can't walk in the door as a PIO and have something like that already in your mind and ready to go , and there will be lots of curveballs coming in at you , but there's no reason not to show that leadership right up front .
Ed ThompsonAnd you mentioned liaison , and liaison and public information are joined at the hip in so many ways . Both are reaching out perhaps to different constituencies , but both are reaching out to collect information and present information and to make sure that those things are getting through , and liaison is a tremendous source of it's a great way to avoid surprises . You can hear it rumbling in the liaison , you know it's coming sooner or later and you can hit it off at the pass . So it's a tremendous source . And getting liaison and the jig to work together and basically understand each other's boundaries but also have a very porous boundary for information sharing and information retrieval is also a challenge and part of that design of the jig you talked about .
Tom MuellerFor our listeners who may not be familiar with some of the jargon here , liaison is one of those critical roles within an incident management team that's focused on government relations , on regulatory relations and on keeping you know the government regulatory stakeholders informed about what's happening . It's so critical because it keeps regulatory agencies informed , but it also keeps local government entities , municipalities , counties , all those elected officials informed , and it's the role of this liaison officer team to do that . And , of course , the information that they're using to communicate to those stakeholders is generally developed from the public information team within that command . One of the challenges I've seen at in various incidents that I've worked is working closely with regulators in a command or in a joint information center , particularly sort of West Coast , california , washington state seem to be , you know , particularly dealing with companies . I wonder what advice would you have for , you know , staff who are going to find themselves working on a major incident in a joint information center with those regulators ?
Ed ThompsonWell , every agency is different and it's good to know who the members of the Unified Command are going to be and it's good to know how they work and what you can expect during a response , and some agencies will bring a storm and some will bring calm weather , and you're not going to change that , but you can work positively with it and be a positive experience for them . I have found that even the agency persona is going to be what it's going to be, but people always respond to honesty and a positive outlook .
Tom MuellerMy experience on that is you just need to go in with a very patient attitude and knowing that there's going to be tension in the room and just do your best to honor the commitments that your company's made and to support this response effort , while dealing with all of the other issues that you're likely to hear from an agency .
Ed ThompsonThat's right . Nothing beats delivery . Delivery on promises is everything .
Building Strong Relationships in Crisis Response
Ed ThompsonOne of the best examples of it working well was when , as a response progresses , agencies shift from emergency response mode , if you will , to more fundamental agency roles of enforcement and those kind of things . In permitting and as we progress through a particular response , we agree that it would be a good idea for the crisis manager for that response to sit down with the agency and say look , up to now we've been working very closely together in public to proceed through this response and as we go further , we understand that you may want to distance yourself from us so that you know you can more effectively do your enforcement role . I cannot tell you how much that agency appreciated that discussion and it actually built a stronger relationship with that agency .
Tom MuellerReally interesting point there , ed , because I've not heard of an incident commander opening the door for that distancing within the unified command . It makes perfect sense , but typically we find it's a forced kind of issue politically where the politics have entered into the response now , and so the agencies feel pressure to disengage with the company that is the responsible party for an incident .
Ed ThompsonWell , having that discussion was not at the incident level , it was at the crisis level and it was and it was the right place to do it , because then the more politically driven aspects of the agency could consider it and parse out the parts that were going to stay with the response and partner with the response and be public partners and parse out the parts that we're not going to be partnering with and so forth . And everybody did it with eyes wide open and it became another aspect of the cooperation . It actually smooth things out because it avoided that wedging that you alluded to , tom .
Tom MuellerWell , I have about exhausted the questions I have for Ed . Although , to be honest , I could talk to you all day about this stuff and and never get tired of it , I you know . I kind of just want to throw it back to you and to say anything else that that you'd like to add here in terms of advice to people who want to become better leaders in a crisis ?
Ed ThompsonI guess you always have to ask yourself what am I not doing that I should be doing , because there's always more to do than you can do . Be able to have that discussion with your command staff as an incident commander and say , okay , what am I missing ? You know , one of the things I would strongly recommend is , if you feel like you're being trapped in the command post , please be inclined to get out , be out with the rest of the unified command , get out there , see what's going on , talk to people , praise them , cheer them on , thank them and and also get out there and take a few punches in public because you are going to . It's not a pleasant always a pleasant feeling to be on a response , but it can be a very productive and satisfying thing if you do it right .
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 .
