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 46 Risks of hosting a high profile personality, and building challenging crisis exercises
Destin Singleton joins us on the Leading in a Crisis podcast to unravel the complex dynamics of hosting high-profile figures at your organization. Imagine receiving a call from the White House with just 72 hours to prepare for a presidential visit to your facility. Destin takes us behind the scenes of her tumultuous experience managing a last-minute presidential visit at an oil refinery in 2017. We weigh the potential benefits against the significant risks of such high-stakes situations and explore how to brace for the unexpected when your company becomes the stage for a national spotlight.
Our conversation doesn’t stop there; we shift gears to dissect the art of large crisis exercises. Are you more inclined to "play to win" or "play to stretch your team"? Through Destin’s insights, we unpack these strategies as applied by leading multinational corporations. Whether you’re pondering the impact of social media influencers using your brand as a backdrop or refining your crisis management tactics, this episode promises to equip you with practical advice and thought-provoking perspectives. Join us as we navigate the challenges and opportunities of hosting prominent guests and conducting effective crisis exercises.
If you would like any assistance with your crisis planning or training activities, including tabletop exercises or a case study to stimulate your team's preparedness, reach out to Tom, Marc or Destin.
Tom Mueller - tom@leadinginacrisis.com
Marc Mullen - Marcmullenccc@gmail.com
Destin Singleton -
https://www.linkedin.com/in/destinsingleton
We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Hey everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis podcast. On today's episode, mark and I are going to continue our conversation with Destin Singleton, and on today's episode, we're going to talk about what might happen if your organization was approached by a high-profile presidential candidate or a high-profile social media influencer who want to use your location as a backdrop for an announcement or an event. How could you, or how should you, process that request and what are the upsides and, more importantly, what are the downsides of an event like that coming to your location? Well, destin has a story to share about that, where she managed an event and she shares that experience with us. In another topic we cover today, we also talk about large crisis exercises and the difference in approaches that we see when we do exercises with large multinational corporations. There's a play to win the exercise kind of approach, and there's the play to stretch your team and really build your capability kind of approach. I think you can guess which one we favor, but we talk through those issues and how we like to approach dealing or organizing major crisis exercises. So let's join the conversation with Destin now.
Tom Mueller:Well, I'd like to switch gears, you guys, if I can, and I want to talk about dealing with high profile personalities, and you know how your company can and should go about evaluating. You know requests for site visits or just things to think about. We have so many social influencers out there today. People who will show up and record videos, use your company location as a backdrop for something remarkable or something ridiculous. You just never know until it comes out. In particular, when those people show up at your location, there's some things you need to think about. Destin, I know you've got some experience and some thoughts with that, so walk us through your story here and we'll discuss best practices coming out.
Destin Singleton:Yes, thank you. So, yes, so I was working for a large oil company, a refiner, Back in 2017, we got a call from the White House and so, essentially, there was going to be a presidential visit at one of the refineries and we had 72 hours to prepare. We had very little information about objective that sort of thing. So we and we knew, based on history and what we had seen in the public when these kinds of visits have happened to others, we had seen, for example, an organization host the president and the president had their logo right next to them and the speaker actually used their name incorrectly, say incorrect facts and potentially even say this organization was, you know, was a problem because of this reason. So you know, this kind of high profile mentioning could be a tweet, could be a visit, could be or sorry, not tweets what do we call X mentions now?
Tom Mueller:Tweets. It still works for me.
Destin Singleton:So, anyway, these kind of things can make or break, or to honestly make and break. Because of our, you know your reputation, because of our you know kind of, you know, disparate social beliefs and values, so anyway. So really, how do you prepare for what potentially could be chaos?
Tom Mueller:That's a great question, Destin how do you prepare for what could be chaos?
Destin Singleton:Any thoughts before I jump into what we did in 2017?
Marc Mullen:Just say no, how fast can you string barbed wire?
Destin Singleton:No. Honestly saying no was an option, Right, you string barbed wire no, honestly saying no was an option Right, and obviously I became involved after the CEO had the initial conversation. But saying no is an option and but you know I'm not saying that could also hurt you.
Tom Mueller:So I mean, I'd be inclined to, to consider the proposal. It would just, depend there's a bit of a trust factor here right In knowing who's coming out. How much can you control the situation and how much you know can you influence the messaging that's going to use your facility as a backdrop, and those are all wild cards, though.
Marc Mullen:Well, and one of the challenges is they're never coming to bolster your reputation. They're not interested in what your benefit or cost of this process. So maybe the answer is you just make sure you have a whole bunch of signage from your competitors and you put that up around the podium.
Destin Singleton:Very good, Marc, but I mean, honestly, that leads us directly into what we decided to do. So, essentially, we treated this 72 hours later visit, which was very quick, but essentially as a kind of a simmering emerging crisis. We've got a a speaker coming to talk about something we don't know. We did not get the speech ahead of time. Um, we don't know exactly who's coming. Um, we don't know exactly what will be talked about. We don't know exactly, um, their objective. So definitely, let you know, worked really closely, trusted the White House advance team, worked really closely with them and let them lead, you know, media from a national standpoint and tried to work with them to have a better understanding of what will happen that day.
Destin Singleton:Result of all of that at the end, but essentially using our crisis skills to think about how do we minimize what could be a risk to the organization and ultimately, what we did was we acted really quickly, assembled a team, we thought about what the site was going to look like.
Destin Singleton:We did everything we could to, you know, make everything look nice. We did some signage, but the signage was a bit distant, was not on the podium and evaluated those risks and tried to mitigate it by not being the center of attention, being the secondary to the attention, and that, you know, played well. We also developed various um, uh, uh scenarios based on what could happen, what mentions what, what uh could be said about um, about us, in our, in our organization, our industry, even Um and so uh work to develop kind of statements to support those among other things. But we just wanted to make sure that the optics were good and very much engaged our local employees and local stakeholders and local media, where it made sense, because those were our stakeholders and we wanted to take care of those and let the White House take the lead on the main message that the White House wanted.
Tom Mueller:Yeah, what was the outcome for that?
Destin Singleton:In the end the speech was we never saw it ahead of time and so it was again kind of a complete wild card.
Destin Singleton:We were told that we would have it 72 hours later. Still didn't have it, and so, you know, it ended up. The topics and discussions were somewhat benign and discussions were somewhat benign. However, I think by our you know, based on everything that we evaluated later, that we were able to kind of minimize our visibility in order to do to you know, essentially kind of reduce that risk. But in the end we had the CEO and the site leader thank me and the team for preparing them in the way that we did and we came out stronger with our local stakeholders and minimized the potential broader public risk. And so, really, just, you know, how do you prepare for chaos? You think of everything that could happen, um, and you work to minimize the areas where the greatest risk lived and try to what is it? Roman manual said never's not true for everything, we all know that but utilized this event to build goodwill where we could, but in the end, very, very good local support and minimized the high visibility public risk.
Tom Mueller:Yeah, that feels like one of those situations where you want to over-respond in your preparation so that you can plan for eventualities. Yeah, I'm sorry, Marc, go ahead.
Marc Mullen:No, that's okay To go back to your spring cleaning idea. How do you take that? And that's an example of where you had lessons learned from that exercise. And now you take them back and you fold them in, because four months from now, when a mayor visits, in his mind he's the most important politician on the planet. So you've still got to say what do we learn from this? How do we incorporate it in? So next time we go through this, we don't have to run the whole circus, we just go right to lessons learned absolutely, absolutely and and bringing that um.
Destin Singleton:It's just part of the, the ongoing um building and improvement over time, um, but and and it. What I'm counseling clients now really is, you know, as the, you know, the communication style that is kind of happening now in the public sphere is just very different and it's a bit chaotic. And so I mean, and it's not a, that's not a message, you know, for or against anyone. This is just a message about how we are communicating broadly, in the national scale right now, and global scale honestly. And so what I'm counseling clients is really just be prepared for some of those scenarios Like where would you come into the public discourse and how would you deal with that If you get a true social mention, if you get that tweet, that X mention, and you know if your CEO is called out? You know, just being thinking through those scenarios. It's what you were saying, mark. You know, sit down, talk with your team. Where could you end up in that broader, you know public discussion and plan forward and plan various scenarios.
Marc Mullen:So if we read them on a B-Principle, you plan on that kind of discussion over an emerging issue, but you knock on the CEO's door at 2 am and say we need to talk. That's when you decide to go out on your own shortly after. Yeah, involuntary, but that's something I've seen, though, with even highly drilled organizations is one of the dangers of all. That is that the focus becomes how do we do well in an exercise and everything's built around this and you even get high fives afterwards and it's like we're in our little pretend world that never really quite touches the real world. And so what I have to often remind my clients is we're not trying to get ready for an exercise, we're trying to get ready for an accident or an incident. And yet exercises are very insular and it's easy to end up and even have a plan that at 3 pm over a nice cup of coffee at your desk. It works perfectly.
Tom Mueller:Well, I try to coach folks in exercises is, as you've said, marc, you know, the goal isn't to win the exercise, the goal is to practice for the real thing. So, stretch yourself a little bit and if I'm in the room with the team, I'm setting stretch objectives, you know. Hey, yeah, the goals say get a press release out, do a press conference. Okay, I want to see a stakeholder engagement plan. I want to see a 48 hour, a 72 hour communication strategy. I want to see you know, and how many, what, where are you going to have press conferences? How many? You know all of that stuff. So it's pushes the team to think a little more strategically rather than okay, let's get a press release out, let's do this press conference and we've won.
Destin Singleton:The difference between getting your license to operate from your regulator which is what you're talking about, tom and being truly ready, and especially for communications teams. That would be a part of response. That would be a part of response both from the liaison and PIO sections that you know in ICS, that you know, yes, you have to be prepared to work in the chaos and be, you know, much more ready, and so I do the same, tom. So if I'm supporting an organization, I help design a realistic you know external response. You know how would social work, how would the media, what would the media be?
Destin Singleton:coming and asking them and really trying to develop something that is as hyper-realistic as possible especially to support those teams and potential incident commanders, that sort of thing, so that they are ready for that external aspect of a drill or of an exercise, of a real situation Right.
Tom Mueller:Well, destin, thanks for joining us on this episode of the podcast. Really a fun conversation, and if you want to have more of this fun conversation with destin, reach out to her directly and she'd be happy to entertain you and even take you on as a new client okay so there we go, everyone.
Tom Mueller:thanks for thanks again for joining us for this episode of the podcast. We really appreciate you lending your ears to us. Thank you again to Destin and Mark for joining me here, and we'll wrap it here. We'll see you again soon for another episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast.
