
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.
The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
EP 33 John Breed on counseling CEOs and leading in a crisis
Unlock the secrets of crisis leadership with the wisdom of corporate communication maestro, John Breed, manager of community and external affairs at ChampionX. We think John wins the award for working with most CEOs in a career, and he shares some of his tips for managing those relationships, particularly in a crisis. Our conversation traverses the essential traits that make or break leaders during turbulent times, with a particular focus on authentic empathy and comprehensive industry knowledge. John's storied career, working shoulder to shoulder with top CEOs, lends credibility to his insights.
Venture into the high-pressure environment of offshore drilling where communication is as vital as any safety equipment. Through a detailed analysis of a real-life rig fire, John walks us through the sometimes complex web of communications and information sharing among contractors, employees, and customers. This episode is rich with stories from the front lines, offering listeners a rare behind-the-scenes look at the meticulous orchestration of crisis drills and communication plans.
Reach Tom Mueller at tom@leadinginacrisis.com
Reach Marc Mullen at marcmullenccc@gmail.com.
We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Hi 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 from experienced crisis leaders. Thanks for joining us. I'm Tom Mueller. With me today is my co-host, again, Marc Mullen. Marc welcome back.
Marc Mullen:Hello, Tom, happy to be here.
Tom Mueller:And our guest today is John Breed, who is a highly experienced corporate communications executive who's had a wide range of experiences and in fact I think John wins the Guinness Book World Record for working for the most CEOs in one career. So he's had a lot of C-suite experience and we're going to try and tap some of that experience for lessons learned here on the podcast today. So, john, welcome to the show.
John Breed:Yeah, it's great to be here and yeah, I don't know if I hold the record maybe close anyway, I just keep wearing them out.
Marc Mullen:I don't know.
John Breed:But I have been blessed to work with a lot of great leaders over time and across a number of industry segments and different challenges and different opportunities, so hopefully the experience is good to share.
Tom Mueller:Well, john, if you don't mind, could you take just you know, 30 seconds or so and give us a quick bio of you know the John Breed work history.
John Breed:Yeah, that's a challenge.
John Breed:I can't explain anything in 30 seconds, but I'll try to keep it brief. Someone once said don't ask John what time it is, he'll tell you how to build a watch, anyway. So I started out as a landman in Texaco and New Orleans, leasing property for us to drill on. Had an opportunity to move into government affairs, was a state level lobbyist for a few years. Spent some time in DC, moved to Houston with Cooper Industries diversified global manufacturer, was there 17,. Served two very different chairmen actually three chairmen there and was in the CEO suite a lot of times there. Moved over to Noble Drilling offshore driller, did communications work and investor relations in that role. 18 months stint over at ExxonMobil before landing at what was Apergy, a spinoff from Dover, which merged in 2020 with ChampionX to form ChampionX Corporation, now operating in 65 countries around the world. So just a variety of experiences.
Tom Mueller:Wow, that's fascinating background there, john. So again, thanks for being on with this. Hey, as you think about those executives that you've worked with over time, is there an example you can share with us of a leadership style that worked really well in a crisis situation or otherwise? And you know, maybe one you know that didn't work so well? That might offer some lessons learned for us.
John Breed:Yeah, I think the best leaders that I've seen in a crisis have two things going for them. That I've seen in a crisis have two things going for them. One is they genuinely have empathy. You know, in the middle of a crisis, for the neighborhoods that may be impacted, the employees that may be impacted, customers who may be impacted, they genuinely get it and they have a capacity to show empathy. You can't script that, you can't write that, you can't impart that, you can't really train up in that. You've got to have some sense of connection to your audiences and, to varying degrees, all of them have shown that, but I've worked for a few that genuinely got it. They genuinely, at a heart level, connected, and I think that that's a characteristic that every leader ought to try to show day in and day out, but particularly in a crisis, you need to have empathy.
John Breed:The other is industry knowledge. It's too late to learn your industry If you've come into that CEO suite and let's just say, those who came up through the industry process have a deep knowledge If you were just hired in and nothing against MBAs but if you just came in, maybe your background was more financial and you've spent less time on the plant floor or on the deck of a rig. In a crisis is not the time to learn that the fundamentals of the business and how, how things can go right and how they can go wrong. So I think those two characteristics I have seen both work to varying degrees and I would say those two are most likely to lead to a successful outcome. If you can be empathetic and then you, then you've got a knowledge of the industry. If you have a knowledge, you kind of know what it takes to get stuff back in order.
Marc Mullen:So, john, listening to that immediately makes me wonder what do you do when you're walking into an incident and your ceo doesn't have that?
John Breed:but I I think there's an opportunity there maybe to reach down the bench one level and the CEO can still say and show I'm going to ensure things are done right. I'm going to be here to make sure that we're putting things back in order and to do that I'm going to tap another leader who's going to be devoted full time. You know we do still have a business to run and we have a duty to our customers and our shareholders and our employees to keep things on track. I'm going to focus on that and meanwhile I'm going to designate this other key member of my team. And they're going to be living this. They're going to live it until we're done and maybe not be the face in the camera all the time.
John Breed:It may mean recognizing you have a weakness and to me that's at the heart of leadership too that you know if you're, you can't let your ego. You can't let your ego drive the situation. And I had one very valued CEO who used to say I'm not running for office, I don't care how many times they run my photo in the paper. You know I'm not trying to get elected. It's not a popularity contest. You know I want us to run the business. Well, sometimes that means having a surrogate who's, and then you got to really drive that. You got to reaffirm like periodically. You got to show up and suit up, still show you're engaged, but you don't have to be in the firefight 24-7 to still make an impact.
Tom Mueller:Yeah, there's a lot of judgment that goes into that as well, John, and I like how you sort of brought in the ego piece of that, I think, back to Deepwater Horizon and the BP CEO, tony Hayward at the time. And Tony was CEO and he just felt like he had to be out on the front lines and he was down on the coast in Louisiana and doing interviews and talking to fishermen and he was just going day after day after day on the beach in the heat and, you know, eventually he got tired and in one interview you know he said something that cost him his job.
Tom Mueller:Yeah, and you know and it was. If you get the broad context of his comment, you understand what he was saying and why he made that comment. Because he was just explaining a meeting he'd just come out of with a group of fishermen. But he only gave a part of the explanation there. Yeah, and it cost him his job, but the role of the CEO really isn't to be the person trudging up and down the beach every day. Right, you can come out and make that appearance and, as you said, you make sure people know you're engaged. You've got company resources applied to this, but here's my senior executive in charge and accountable for delivering this.
John Breed:And, as I recall, that's the path that they picked. The guy that came in after that was from Mississippi, had grown up in the oil field. When they made a course correction, I think they made a good one. People remember the mistake, but I think decisions happen in two parts right. There's the choice you make and then there's the choices that follow, and I think when they did course correct, they did a good job.
Marc Mullen:I'm just curious to know when you're in the room and you've got your leaders going and something starts to go sideways, how does the communications head convince a CEO ego that you have to change course, because egos quite often erupt right after threat, does I think?
John Breed:One of the toughest challenges that a communications person faces is to speak truth to management. Sometimes that's, you know, otherwise worded as speak truth to power, but we owe them our best advice. It's not the time to worry about who you might offend and sometimes that means you've got to call it like you see it. Now they're free to ignore that, but hopefully that's not the first time the comms guy's been in the room. You know if you, if it's like industry knowledge if the CEO doesn't know who will be reacting and can trust them in the middle of a firefight, then they've missed a bet. You know you need, there needs. The relationship between a comms person and their management team is very intimate because ideally you're trying to capture their voice, you're trying to help them articulate what's going on better and you have to be kind of inside their head. That also means they have to be willing to trust you when you make a call.
John Breed:I think you have to start that relationship of trust well before a crisis and it's not necessarily about training and that sort of thing. Do a crisis, and it's not necessarily about training and that sort of thing. Do you know their life history? Do you know their career progression? Do you know enough about them to be a trusted voice in the room?
Tom Mueller:Yeah, there's no small challenge in that right. That takes a certain level of maturity on the part of the communications lead and spending some time. But there's a confidence level too that you have to muster in order to be able to work in that C-suite environment. And even when you get into a major crisis response right, and then you're in a chaotic environment with many different things happening, you're not in control of the situation. You're hearing things from news media, from social media. Chaos reigns.
Tom Mueller:make sense of all that. And you know it's still counsel a CE
John Breed:You know, one of the things I deeply believe is how you practice, is how you play, and you hear, I mean that's almost like something you'd put on a bumper sticker or t-shirt, but I think there's an art to crafting realistic scenarios and then playing them through Ideally 10 minutes in. People forget it's gameplay and that you, you know it needs to be.
John Breed:It needs to be tense enough and realistic enough that everybody kind of gets into the moment. And a good example when we crafted the last one here, we had a major facility in Oklahoma get blown away by a tornado. Well, there's hundreds of tornadoes in Oklahoma every year and but we then we expanded the scenario to include like a role for HR, like our payroll center also got impacted. Well, how are you going to issue paychecks? We deliver products to the Permian from that facility. Well, how are you going to get products all the way from Oklahoma to to the Permian and if you can't ship or assemble? So we try to have a role for everybody and that builds that muscle memory. It's like stepping back on a tennis court. You know you're going to play lousy at first, but the more you play you get that muscle memory.
John Breed:And we craft in a role for the leaders of the business too, the CEO. We would craft in that and we even factor in we don't always do it, but we factor in having a chairman and board update midway through, because they're going to be an audience too. I mentioned earlier that when we were talking, that in one of our scenarios the person we had tapped to be leading, you know, to be leading. The scenario had to be away suddenly and we tapped our general counsel to be in that role and she had to take off the general counsel hat and think more broadly as an enterprise leader in a crisis. Now she still had all her lawyer training, of course, but she had to delegate out the legal part and act more as a commander role, and so we try to broaden that experience. But I think that builds the trust we're talking about.
John Breed:I know what's going to be coming at me, I know how to anticipate this and I know how the comms team is going to respond. We can filter that blur of the noise that's coming in and resonate. Here's what you really need to be focused on right now. You know there's all this other stuff, but got to ignore that Facebook post. You got to get back to this other thing. I know there's other things. That's troubling, but we got to focus in the moment of this.
Tom Mueller:So, John, it's fascinating to have a general counsel slide into the executive leadership role or the incident commander role for it. Would that have happened in a normal course of
John Breed:It would have. Okay, she's a full-time member of our crisis management team. We have a triage approach where we triage every incident and decide what resources are needed and if we convene the full team and it may not be the case for every organization, but she's on there, she wants to be a part of that so she had received all the same training that the leaders had, in case she had to slide over and actually did great I should add that you know she wasn't just sitting in the chair, she actually.
John Breed:you know, once she had that hat on, she was all in.
Tom Mueller:Yeah, It'd be fun to watch that suspending her disbelief of, you know, not being a lawyer now, but putting on the bigger hat.
John Breed:Sometimes you've got to pull people off the bench. Right, they're on the bench for a reason and if they're on your bench, make sure they have the tools.
Marc Mullen:I think that's a great idea to get your corporate attorneys into that environment of a response. It will pay off in the long run because they understand much more about the pace and the challenges of being in that hot seat. So I think that's a great strategy.
Tom Mueller:Yeah Well, john, one of your earlier comments just piqued my interest a little bit, and that's around the drilling operations. I know that's part of your history and you know that's. One of the riskier aspects of the oil and gas business is when you're out there drilling wells. So I wonder if you have any particular stories to share about, you know, drilling rigs and that part of the business and issues that had to be managed.
John Breed:Yeah, a couple come to mind. And you know it can be a very dangerous aspect of, you know, the energy industry. It can also be incredibly safe. But there are a lot of risk unique to offshore drilling that aren't present elsewhere, even on land drilling. One is distance, one is inability to deploy resources If something's happening.
John Breed:Offshore, by definition, everything is remote and communications may be a challenge. You can't just send someone in a car to go see what's going on. Challenge, you know getting getting. You can't just send someone in a car to go see what's going on. You you have to rely on the, the management aboard the rig to be in the moment and giving you the critical information you need. One one I can think of involved a fire aboard a rig. There was a gas made its way into the drill stream, had a sudden ignition on the drill floor and unfortunately a few employees were injured and there was a bit of communications gap and knowing exactly what was going on, and we faced a situation where the customer actually put out an inaccurate press release before we as the operator did, and then we were in the situation of having to decide how to correct that bad information.
John Breed:So I think that's a particular challenge where, when you're offshore, you have to walk hand in glove with your customer. You can't be on different pages, but you're going to have a blend of third parties your employees, their employees, contractors You're going to have a lot of things going on. If there's a gap in communication with your customer, then you can have this. You can have misinformation get out, incomplete information get out, and you don't want to ever be at odds with your customer. You want to make sure you're aligning with them. Get out, and you don't want to ever be at odds with your customer. You want to make sure you're aligning with them.
John Breed:So I think that's another area where, in offshore, it was not unusual to do crisis drills in tandem with your customer, like if you had a, if they, whoever had contracted to drill the. Well, we would often do. We do scenarios in hand and glove with our customer and that avoids that miscommunication. The best examples I can think of are where that existed. Everybody knew who was on first, what was going to happen, who needed to deploy, who should I call? And that can be particularly true for the communication side that, if you know, the sun never sets on some of those companies around the world that you could be drilling wells in virtually half the time zones of the world.
Tom Mueller:That's a lot of opportunity for something to go wrong. Right, and to your point about planning there, John. I mean, if you've got, you know an incident that happens on a drilling rig, as you mentioned a fire, so who owns that communication? Is that the drilling company or is that the owner of the lease? You have to negotiate that ahead of time.
John Breed:Approval may be required, but it can't unreasonably be withheld Like they have to if you send a draft statement, they can't sit on it a day or two. Same for the contractor. If the major operator wants to be in control of the press, that's going out, same thing. You would have a duty to return stuff quickly back to them. Usually the contract dictates who's in the driver's seat. They that can change regardless of what the contract says. They may decide. It's better if the contractor answers it. You know if we have more of the facts. If it's, it's more on our watch than um are.
Tom Mueller:Are people injured on board?
John Breed:Yeah, it may go and we might have they may want us to be closer to it at the time, or it can be in tandem. It can be, you know, in tandem.
Tom Mueller:So, john, one final question for you. This is a bit of a sticky one, and it's around ROV video. It's around ROV video because typically you know if you're operating a rig, you're going to have ROVs nearby monitoring things. You know, when you get into a crisis situation, people want to see that video. I wonder if you've had any conversations, experience around that or recommendations for people.
John Breed:So we would not tend. It's kind of like the issue with the police Do you give, do you immediately give, you know, body cam footage out before you understand what's even there. You give that out and suddenly you know in CNN there's an expert witness interpreting what they're seeing and they don't really. You know, it's at best a snapshot in time. It's not going to tell the full story. We would be reluctant to release such a thing.
John Breed:I've even had stranger requests, like during Macondo. Japanese news agency said can you fly us out to one of your working rigs so we can see a BOP, how it should have been? You know, and I don't think you want to be held up and you know like you can get drawn into somebody else's crisis, and so can we come aboard your rig and we know you've got ROVs in the water. Can we just see how it should have been? And so I think you have to push back a little bit. You know, and request for that. It's probably the most interesting thing that they could put on TV, because they're going to run out of you know, run out of things to say and it's going to be interesting, but then I don't know that it ever tells the full story.
Tom Mueller:Yeah, that's an evergreen issue for offshore companies today, you know is how would we deal with that? Right, and it's, it's a it's a fascinating issue we could probably spend a whole episode chatting through, but it is a key decision point that companies will probably have to wrestle again soon. You know, during deep water horizon, we wrestled that issue for a good while and um, and then eventually that feed became public and that became, you know, the daily story of what was happening with that feed and you know, people would would call in and say, hey, can you adjust camera 12 to the left a little bit? I want to see what's happening there, or seeing something and interpreting it themselves. And it's out on the Internet and it just got really, really crazy, sort of fascinating, crazy but crazy. So anyway.
John Breed:You know the ROVs are typically for monitoring or they're actually there to make adjustments. You know they have the tools on those arms that are meant there. You know they're also maintenance tools and so I think we'd be reluctant to turn them into like it's kind of like live streaming C-SPAN. There's a lot of uninteresting things going on.
John Breed:You know, know, and they want to focus on one thing. But if you've ever seen like when they're reading reading speeches at midnight, that's an empty chamber. A lot, a lot of rov footage looks like that. It's just routine, nothing big happening. And if you surrender all that, you know, I don't. I don't know what benefit the public gets long term from that yeah, I always.
Marc Mullen:I always personally thought, when BP decided to broadcast the whale head flowing, it was a brilliant idea, because you could only watch for about 15 minutes before you nodded off yeah it was not. And I never did see Tom. I never did see the submarine with the bulldozer blade on it in those videos.
John Breed:Yeah, I just I don't know. I would be afraid that third parties, environmental activists and others would snag that video and it would just forever brand the company. It would be used in fundraising campaigns. Can't trust the industry? Let's put offshore off limits. It would be used to target trust the industry. Let's put offshore off limits. It would be used to target the whole industry, not just that one company and not just the crisis at hand. It would be used in other ways.
Tom Mueller:Yeah, all right. Hey, john, we're going to stop there for this episode and thank you again for taking time to share your experience and your stories with us. Really appreciate you being with us.
John Breed:Yeah, I hope it was interesting enough. It was fun talking to y'all.
Marc Mullen:John, thank you for your time today. It's been fascinating and revealing. I really appreciate your perspective from the corporate level, as you've been able to share with us.
Tom Mueller:And that's going to do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. Thanks for joining us. Hey, if you like what you're hearing, then please subscribe and like the podcast and tell your friends and colleagues about us as well, and we'll see you again soon for another episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast.
Marc Mullen:Hi, this is Mark. We all know that in a crisis, nothing is more important than doing the right thing and making sure people know about it. In recognition of this reality, your organization has both a physical response plan directing response actions and a crisis communication plan guiding communication efforts. These plans should work together to enhance your ability to do the right thing and to make sure people know about it. But do you know these plans work well together? I can help you be sure by reviewing both plans to ensure that they do. A small investment in this review can yield a large return in the effectiveness of your plans. If you're interested or want to learn more, please email me at markmullenccc at gmailcom. You.