The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
Interviews, stories and lessons learned from experienced crisis leaders. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Being an effective leader in a corporate or public crisis situation requires knowledge, tenacity, and influencing skills. Unfortunately, most of us don't get much training or real experience dealing with crisis situations. On this podcast, we will talk with people who have lived through major crisis events and we will tap their experience and stories from the front lines of crisis management.
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.
Your co-host, Marc Mullen, has over 20 years of experience as a communication strategist. He provides subject matter expertise in a number of communication specializations, including crisis communication plan development, response and recovery communications, emergency notifications and communications, organizational reviews, and after-action reports. He blogs at Blog | Marc Mullen
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 21 Ambassador Lewis Lucke Part 2: The Challenges of International Disaster Management
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We continue our conversation with retired US Ambassador Lewis Lucke around his experiences managing huge crisis responses in Iraq and Haiti.
Find the ambassador's entertaining memoir of his career as a foreign service officer, Duck And Cover, Improbable Tales from a Career in Foreign Service, on Amazon here.
We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Crisis Management and Challenges in Haiti
Tom MuellerHi everyone and welcome to the Leading in a Crisis podcast . On this podcast , we talk all things crisis management and we deliver that through storytelling , interviews and lessons learned shared from experienced crisis leaders . I'm Tom Mueller , coming to you from Texas today . With me , as always , is my co-host , mark Mullen , joining us from Washington State . Hi , mark .
Marc MullenHello Tom , looking forward to our time together today .
Tom MuellerOn today's episode , we're continuing our conversation with retired US Ambassador Lewis Luck . Let's rejoin the conversation now . Ambassador , I know you've had some challenges working with difficult bosses , or tough bosses in some situations like this . What's your advice to folks who might have to deal with a less than sympathetic boss when you're in tough situation like this ?
Amb. Lewis LuckeYou enlist your allies wherever you can find them and try to get the help that you need in order to pull sanity out of what sometimes seems to be cosmic disorder . I tried to do that in Haiti and sometimes I just had to kind of put my foot down and say , look , qualified to do this job . I was an ex-ambassador and had the Iraq responsibility , and Haiti . So I mean , find somebody else better than me if you can , but in the meantime , let me do my job and put your foot down and say , look , if this is going to work , you got to let me do my job . And that's what I did and , to their credit , they cooperated and backed off , so it worked out fine .
Marc MullenSo how long were you into the response before you really knew that it was going to work ? I mean , there had to be a period of time when you were just doing your best and wondering if everything would be on fire in the morning .
Amb. Lewis LuckeBut we didn't really have the luxury of even wondering . I mean , it was just get up and do it again and solve the problems of the moment , the hour , the day and the week , if you can . Yeah , we had a lot of different organizations tugging at our sleeves and rightfully so , sort of the point of the spear . Not only did we have all the international actors , you know , the Canadians , the French , the Mexican army , the Mexican Navy was there , I mean all kinds of folks , all kinds of organizations there , and the UN probably , most importantly . Well , we also had a host of NGOs that were that sort of I say this in a nice way littered the ground in Haiti , because it's called the Republic of NGOs , because the government institutionally is so weak .
Amb. Lewis LuckeThe , this multitude of NGOs try to come in and fill the , fill the void . So we have to deal with them and and that was fine because in a lot of ways the NGOs Were the boots on the ground that we could provide In . In some cases certainly not all cases have been many cases we could provide them the funding to do what they had the expertise to do , because they had the people and the ability to get out , you know , for example , to distribute the , actually distribute the food , to actually procure and distribute the water to . You know , all of the stuff . The , the NGOs , are really well , much more well equipped , trained and had the personnel capabilities of doing their job better than we did , and it was our job to work with them and their job to work with us .
Marc MullenSounds like , organizationally , you had a massive and critically important logistics function and another equally important liaison function because , yeah , you had to get people in the country and you had to coordinate the efforts of a plethora of response organizations
Amb. Lewis LuckeIt hasn't had any food in three days , don't have any water , and you know we could task the military with Excuse me getting a helicopter to these places and getting getting the relief that they needed .
Amb. Lewis LuckeBut that would be like there would be like three thousand of those a day . It seemed like I mean , we're absolutely Overwhelmed . And and the other thing is you would get all these people well connected quote unquote well connected people from Washington that would call you because somehow they knew how to get a hold of you or they knew your email or they knew your phone number . They would call you and we didn't have phones to start with and we had all that stuff got reestablished over time . They would call you and ask for special , special favors . So you know , you try to comply with if you can , while not losing sight of the big picture of you know this . This is overall . We have a needed overall coordinated Response that's gonna be gonna be able to take care of not just the people that, you know, squeaky wheels . All across the board , because the needs were were overwhelming .
Tom MuellerOne of the challenges that I'm sure you dealt with there was donations coming in of various things and I wonder if there's an example of you know sort of how you dealt with that and you know , did they get in the way of what you really needed to get done ? You know specifically around , you know housing or tents and that .
Amb. Lewis LuckeWe as an agency weren't really overwhelmed with donations . It like , I think , in G NGOs were a , a lot of very well-meaning people sort of flooded into , flooded in a port of breasts , from all over the place the US and Canada and the DR and all around the region to try to help , and A lot of them were ill equipped to help . They didn't speak any French or they didn't have a cell phone . They didn't have anything about the local money . They weren't trained for a A austere environment , shall we say , to put it diplomatically , which is what Haiti is a very austere environment . And so they weren't they really know what they were doing . Many did , but it was . It was a . It was a big mess to start with . Also , a Lot of the NGOs , the organizations , would . They were flooded with well-meaning donations , which would have been a whole lot . It would have been a lot better to handle it if they had simply been given money as opposed to being given Commodities , because you can handle money and and procure what you need most of it locally . You don't have to bring it in from the outside . So I mean , there were all those kinds of things . What was the other one ? Tom , you asked the tense issue . Oh , yeah , okay , we had . We had this immediate Not immediate , but after about three or four weeks at dawn notice that hurricane season was coming or rainy season was coming , and we had Massive , hundreds of thousands of people , of people living in the streets in in the open , and they were .
Lessons in Crisis Management and Leadership
Amb. Lewis LuckePeople were afraid to go back into buildings . They'd either been completely destroyed or they were Arched architecturally suspect , and they were . They could potentially fall in on the people that continue to inhabit them and and sometimes did it , well meaning people always thought that you know , well , we need is let's , let's have zillions of tents , and in fact , tents in a situation like Haiti just were not . It was not the proper Approach . I mean , in some places probably it could have been Haiti , where you had the open spaces were very , very limited .
Amb. Lewis LuckeIn the , in a very crowded urban area , everybody was crowded into what used to be either parks or Open spaces or , you know , areas that had been sort of cleared of rubble and so forth and probably Probably turned into something far more permanent than they should have been , and tents Fall apart , they rot , they fly away in the wind and when we were going to have in abundance where the rainy season started , so we just did not need more tents . They were , there was . It was not a good , it was not a the optimal solution . What we needed was more was tarps as opposed to tents , because tarps could last longer , they were more durable , they could Be outfitted with , you know , framing , so in some cases , in order to be able to last longer and be more of a sustainable uh solution , without , without even pretending that they're they're going to be permanent , because hopefully they weren't going to be permanent , uh , I would .
Amb. Lewis LuckeMy story , I think I mentioned to you , was that president Clinton , was there and he and president , uh , George Bush 43 , used to kind of come with great frequency and Clinton kind of took me aside at the airport , uh , one at the tarmac , and said , ambassador , I have 600 000 tents from Bangladesh I'm ready to give you or bring in for you . I said , oh , please , Mr President , do not do that . And I gave him that speech , I just gave you . So we don't need them , please don't . This would have hurt us more than it helped us .
Amb. Lewis LuckeSo instead we would politely turn that down and procured uh , our Via , our shelter people and our , um , our dark Uh experts . We brought in 300 000 - 350 000 tarps , very durable , uh high quality tarps , and they lasted , for you know , several years . In some cases I I would go back to Haiti and see these things still being used , but that was the solution and we brought in , though , that number before the rains really hit and that was sort of logistically , that was a . I think that was a big win for uh , for the recipients of those tarps .
Marc MullenSo when did you start thinking about demobilization ?
Amb. Lewis Luckewe , uh , after I guess about a month , you know , when we figured out there was there was sufficient food and sufficient clean water , and we were , we were flowing in , uh , medicine and it wasn't a , it wasn't going to be a , an absolute humanitarian disaster other than the , the immediate damage of the quake and the people that were that were injured , uh , and died from that . I mean , it was every , every day . I mean every week it got a little bit better . You know , one week we would get cell phone service would be , would be a back , another we would have actually a place to sleep , or even though , for the three hours a night or whatever that we had , and and and Slowly , order was , uh , I wouldn't say order , because Haiti , you know , haiti is just a tough wrote , a ho in the best of times and , by the way , for , coincidentally , I'd actually been in Haiti three weeks before the earthquake and I'd seen it sort of when it was kind of at one of its more hopeful stages , things were looking a lot better than they were during and right after the earthquake , and better than now , but anyway , so I guess , by after the end of the first month , it was starting to .
Amb. Lewis LuckeYou know , were starting to see much more economic activity . Trade was reestablished . We had brought in a dock from Florida to serve as an artificial port because the unloading cranes were damaged at Haiti . So things got fixed and we did not need to be spending a huge amount of taxpayer money on things that we shouldn't be providing long term , when the Haitians or the Haitian government or the Haitian private sector or the authorities otherwise should have been providing Ambassadors , you sort of step back and look at the experience that you've had in dealing with some of the largest response issues that a person really could be asked to deal with .
Tom MuellerI know there's leadership lessons that come from that and I wonder if you could just pull out a couple of those lessons . When you think about younger foreign service people coming up through the ranks who might get tapped into leadership roles , what are some of those key behaviors or lessons that you've taken away from situations like this that you'd pass on to younger crisis managers ?
Amb. Lewis LuckeNumber one have a structure in place to be able to respond competently to these kinds of things . In other words , in our situation in Haiti , we had the dart and we had the military assets . I mean , somebody was running the airport and it wasn't us , it was the US Air Force , for example . You use , in other words , have an organization and use the tools that are available to you and use them competently . Have a large enough vision that you can see where your needs are and then be able to delegate authority to people to do their job and not micromanage people . Let them do their job - until they screw up their golden .
Amb. Lewis LuckeAnd then , I think , demand accountability and feedback .
Amb. Lewis LuckeMake sure that there's good communications in both , in all directions .
Amb. Lewis LuckeLet people know what you're thinking , take their feedback , listen to the people that you hopefully have brought in , because you trust them and you know of their record that they've been able to do this in other places or in different ways . It's not rocket science , but you've got to have , I think , a good managerial sense , common sense and understand how to work productively within an organization , and all of that entails and be able to probably some kind of biblical verse that whatever , look to the hills from whence come , with your help . I mean , the military just pulled our irons out of the fire every
Lessons Learned From Crisis Leadership
Amb. Lewis Luckeday . I mean they were wonderful and it wasn't all sweetness and light but it was , but after a fashion it worked really , really well and we did a lot of follow up , a lot of studies about lessons learned and we went around the general and I , General Keene and I went around and gave seminars on how to do this kind of stuff and with an emphasis on how , specifically how you do quality , successful civilian military court .
Tom MuellerAmbassador , thank you very much for coming on and sharing some of your experiences and your crisis leadership stories with Mark and I and our team . We really appreciate you coming to join us today . It's my pleasure , thank you very much . Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast . If you like what you're hearing here , please subscribe and like the podcast and also tell your friends and colleagues about us as well . And if you'd like to reach the show , you can email me at tom at leadinginacrisiscom . We will see you again soon on another episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast MUSIC .
