Tom Mueller: 0:07

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. On this podcast, we talk all things crisis management with an emphasis on leadership. I'm Tom Mueller. Thanks for joining us again for another episode. On this week's episode, we're going to talk to a new author who has a new book out on in the crisis communications realm. And she is Michele Ehrhart. Now, Michele is a former vice president of global communications at FedEx, and uh where she led uh crisis response efforts across cyber breaches. Cyber breaches. Did you write this, Michelle? This is across cyber breaches, workplace tragedies, and brand impacting events. A lot of experience on the other end of the line here. Now Michelle serves as C as a chief marketing and communications officer at the University of Memphis. So she has moved into the education realm just to try that on for size. And I'll bet there's some interesting stories coming out of that so far. And she also serves as CEO of Heart Communications, which is a reputation management firm. Now, her book is called Crisis Compass and is really intended to be a guide for any company trying to prepare for crisis or being ready to respond to a crisis. Michele, thanks for joining us.

Michele Ehrhart: 1:43

Thanks so much for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Tom Mueller: 1:46

So, first of all, you've got a lot of experience there, but why write a book?

Michele Ehrhart: 1:52

I think I used to joke early in my career with anyone who would listen, I had a book in me. I thought maybe it'd be fiction, but as I decided to pivot in my career, I started to think about what I wanted to do after I left FedEx. And I left FedEx in 22. And I was thinking about heart communications and what did I have to offer that someone might be interested in? And I kept circling back to crisis communications. And I kept thinking, when you're in a crisis, what you need is someone who's been through many. And I had been, and that was the area that I could lend a lot of expertise. But then I started to think about what if you can't find that person or you can't, you're a small business or you're a startup and you can't afford it. What do you do? And that's really where the book came about. I started thinking about how I became a crisis communicator because I did not seek it out. I bumped into it, I fell in love with it, and it became really the pinnacle of my expertise. So what book would I would have, what did I need when I started out in crisis comms? What did I wish I had? And that's the book I wrote. So that anyone, whether you're a small business or the CEO of a Fortune 50 company, could pick up this book and get something out of it.

Tom Mueller: 3:13

Now, I read in your bio that uh, and you just mentioned you kind of bumped into crisis communications along the way, right? It was part of your career progression, and you were kind of in the marketing space, but thinking about communications. And um, but you had to kind of make a decision at one point to take a role that would give you that type of experience, right?

Michele Ehrhart: 3:36

Right. I had a leader tell me early in my career, and he he was talking in a town hall, but it felt like he was talking directly to me. And he talked about sometimes the best path up in a company is sideways. So think about looking for areas where you can grow and learn that allows you to have enough skill set and leadership to be prepared for the next level. And that I took that to heart. And I actually made several lateral moves early in my career at FedEx to gain more experience. And I was up for a director role, and it came down to me and one other person, and the other person got the job. So I went back to the vice president who was hiring, and I said, Tell me what I could do better. What do I need to do in order to be considered? And he said, Well, let me tell you why the other person got the job. It had everything to do with the experience in media, and I had some PR and media experience before I came to the company, but I didn't have any within the company. And after he shared that with me, I thought, well, I have two choices. I can figure out how to get media experience, or I go back to marketing, where I have a lot of experience and years of background in it. And as I was contemplating that and talking with him about it, a few days later I got a phone call from my senior vice president who said, What do you think about moving into a media relations role? And I thought, well, that's great, because what company at this level and magnitude would be willing to invest in me like that? And then he said, It's in media relations focused on crisis communication. And I thought, oh wow, I'm going from the frying pan to the fire because I had spent a lot of my time storytelling beautiful stories about a great brand that everybody loved the shiny, happy side of. I took the role and four months later had an opportunity to get promoted and would not have been qualified had I not taken that lateral role. And I joke in the book about that four months being the longest five years of my life, because in four months I list out in the book all of the things that I encountered and worked on and became a spokesperson for. And it is years of experience that most people would get. But because it's a global company, there's so many potential reputation-crumbling situations that you encounter. And I had spent my entire career up to that point on the brand side, making things look good, sound good. But learning about the vulnerabilities of the company made me a better marketer, a better communicator, and certainly a better crisis communicator. So it was a pivotal moment in my career and it changed everything. And so that's one of the things I talk about in the book about making sure as you are you are the CEO of your own career. Think about lateral moves and opportunities to go and learn and do new things. It doesn't have to be a promotion for it to be beneficial.

Tom Mueller: 6:51

Yeah, some really great career advice there. And you know, you're you're taking me back to um early in my career where I started kind of in operations roles. And I worked in the oil and gas industry my entire career, other than the four years as a journalist. Um, but I've counseled younger people over time to go look for some of those operational roles that take you out to the facility level. Learn the business from the ground up. And you will meet people there who are, you know, engineers, managers, who are also early in their careers. And you're going to follow those people through the company your entire career. And so it's huge. And I was just amazed at how many contacts I had across the executive levels of the company because of that time I spent early in my career out in the field.

Michele Ehrhart: 7:45

So that's such great advice.

Tom Mueller: 7:48

Yeah, unfortunately, most young people I spoke to were like, no, we want to be here close to headquarters where things are happening, right? And it was, um, I stand by the advice, but it was hard to get people to listen to it. You offer a lot of good advice in the book, Michelle. Um, you know, and preparing for a crisis, developing a crisis plan is a key part of that, as well as executing when things go wrong. In your view, you know, which is the most important? Preparing for the crisis or executing during a crisis?

Michele Ehrhart: 8:23

Yes. You have to do both.

Tom Mueller: 8:28

Good answer.

Michele Ehrhart: 8:30

The reality is this if you find yourself in a crisis, that should not be the first time you have thought about what you're going to do if something happens. Because if you do, then you're on your heels. So when I talk about planning for a crisis, it goes back to what you said and the advice you give these young people. Know the business. In order for you to really be a good communicator for any organization that you're communicating for, you gotta know what they do. You gotta understand the business. And if you know the business, then you can easily spot where there could be issues. You're in the oil industry. I mean, think about refineries and issues with operations or supply chain, you know, any malfunction that might go wrong. You knew where the problems could be. So that's what I mean by preparing for it. Understanding where the vulnerabilities are for your company. And then to your point, have spent time building your network so that you know who to call if one of those things did comes to life. And when I talk about best in class, I mean FedEx really is best in class. I would imagine any global transportation company that's flying airplanes 365 days a year and has large vehicles on the road, I mean, they're they're vulnerable to issues. If they aren't prepared for that, then shame on them. And they are prepared for that because they know that that is actually part of their standard operating procedures is to think through those contingencies for business continuity purposes, but then also from a crisis perspective. So a large amount of the time I spent in leading crisis communications was in tabletop drills or scenario planning, or we would get into a room and go, all right, give me some terrible situation you think could happen. And then we would take it five steps further. All right, what if this happens? What if that happens? What if this happens? And it's not that we were writing a plan for each of those specific instances. We were thinking. And we were learning to think on our feet. We were learning to go, okay, if something else comes our way, what's the next step? Because you don't want that crisis to be the first day you've ever thought, oh my gosh, what would we do? Because you're not going to make the best decisions, you're not going to have the right people to contact. You're going to be paralyzed when you really could just be in the action. Because that's what matters in a crisis. You don't have a you don't have time to plan. It's too late. You have to go.

Tom Mueller: 11:19

Well, one of the tenets of your book is that crisis communications is a muscle memory skill, right? To your point now about um practicing. And it doesn't take a lot to brainstorm with your team, right? You could do that in weekly team meetings or once-a-month team meetings and just take 30 minutes uh and set it aside and say, let's talk crisis for a minute. What what about this scenario? How would we manage that and talk through those kinds of things? Um the you and I have been talking uh offline about the recent crash of UPS aircraft in Louisville, Kentucky, which as we go to air on this podcast is is only 18 hours old or so. Um but uh you know that's kind of a horrific scenario that that company's dealing with now with an aircraft that you know crashes or people injured on the ground. In your time at FedEx, did you sort of contemplate those types of scenarios?

Michele Ehrhart: 12:24

Oh, did we? Yes, and I can guarantee UPS has done the same because you can you are not a responsible business of that global magnitude if you haven't done that, if you haven't thought through what's going to happen if we have an issue with our equipment. Uh, we went through things at FedEx, nothing to the magnitude of what we saw today while I worked there, uh, but very many scenarios. And we would test the scenario. Okay, what happens if a plane crashes? What happens if it crashes into a school? What happens if it crashes into a hospital? I mean, you don't want to have to think like that because that's the most terrible thing you could think of, but that's what you do when you prepare for a crisis. You think of the absolute worst thing that could happen and you work backwards from that. That's that muscle memory I'm talking about. And and I had a great, I have a story in the book, but I'll tell you a little bit about it. My son had a teacher in the fourth grade that taught math. Her name was Mrs. Love, and it was an all-boys school. And for the first time ever, my son came home and talked about how much he loved math. And I thought, what is happening? What I need to meet this woman because she has changed the trajectory of my household.

Tom Mueller: 13:44

Yeah.

Michele Ehrhart: 13:44

So parent teacher conference comes, she brings us all in and talks about what she does and how she teaches the boys. And she kept saying something over and over. Practice makes permanent. I'm not trying to teach these boys how to do perfect math. That's not the goal here. We're not striving for perfect. We are striving for permanence because the foundational skills they learn in about math in the fourth grade is what they will use to take the ACT when they are 17 and 18. I tutor people all the time, and it's the same skill. So if all their life they are practicing for permanence, it's going to be easier when they have to do those things that are hard when they get into calculus. Or and that resonated with me because she was talking about math, but it's true for life. Football players don't show up and play a game, they practice before they go. Ballet dancers don't just show up and do a show. They had to condition and practice and rehearse. And the same holds true for good crisis communications. I would imagine the UPS crisis communications team is uh hitting on all cylinders right now because this is not the first day they thought about this happening. It's a tragic day and it did happen, but they know what to do.

Tom Mueller: 15:04

Hey, in your planning, did you uh have resources lined up for uh to scale up your communications capability so you could pull in additional resources? Talk to us a little bit about how you sort of see that for a company.

Michele Ehrhart: 15:21

It's it's interesting because what when you have the resources to do it right, you certainly can spend those resources and do it. And we would have large-scale scenario planning drills where we would have mapped out, okay, now this has happened. And we would bring in somebody from that department to come in and go, okay, now we've had to call you in because this has happened. Um, even to the point we did one scenario planning drill where we had used an outside company to come in and kind of keep us on our toes and surprise us. And they had created videos of, oh, this has happened. And by the way, now the media has showed up, and here's your employee talking to the media unscripted and saying things you didn't want them to say. Now, what do you do? And they had actually gone out and staged our own employees doing these things, and it was helpful because it puts you in the moment and you go, Oh my goodness, oh, I did not want you to say that. Now what do I do? So you can go as elaborate as that, or to your point, it can be your leadership team sitting around at the end of one of your weekly staff meetings and going through it. But the key is to have created that kind of path in your brain that you've thought about this before the day it happens.

Tom Mueller: 16:46

And there's so much value in doing that uh and just getting your team coached up on it and just ready. If something happens and you get that call, you know, at 1:30 in the morning, hey, we've had an incident, we need you to mobilize. People are already thinking about okay, what's the scenario? What should our messaging be? What's our staffing levels going to be? All of those things.

Michele Ehrhart: 17:11

Who do we call in? Who's next? Who's got to be in the room? Uh you make a good point. And one of the original stories I tell in the book is probably the worst crisis I've ever worked on. And it was when I was the vice president, and it was in the midst of COVID, and we had an active workplace shooting in Indianapolis that happened while we were all working from our homes, right? So we'd kind of already been in that crisis mode of knowing COVID taught us every day, every minute is often different. And you had to kind of be on alert. But in the midst of even COVID and the longevity of it, we were doing scenario planning. And we had done a tabletop exercise two weeks prior to that awful incident that was a workplace shooting drill. And of course, it was completely different because you don't have any way of predicting what could happen in reality. But when I got the phone call at 11:30 at night saying it was happening right now, and by the way, it's playing out on social media, our security team hasn't even had a chance to call us yet. We knew what to do. We knew exactly what to do. And I talk about in the book, as terrible as it sounds, I mean it as a great compliment. It was the best crisis we've ever done because we were prepared and ready. And we knew what to do next. And it was still horrific and sad and and all of the things that you feel. But when you're in it, we knew what to do. And it allowed me as a leader to be the leader. It allowed me to lead the people, find a way to make sure they had space to rest, to eat, to see their kids, and to come back because it wasn't a 24-hour cycle crisis. It was a five-week crisis.

Tom Mueller: 19:05

Fascinating story. Again, the value of preparing and being ready and having to do it, you know, remotely just brings a whole nother layer of logistics. But I want to shift gears now and and talk to you a little bit uh about the messenger, because another tenet of your book is sort of control the messenger. As we know, not all of us, uh, not all executives are created equal in terms of their skill set for standing in front of cameras or fronting a press conference or being empathetic in front of a room of family members. So have you ever had to tell a senior executive, no, this role isn't for you?

Michele Ehrhart: 19:48

Yes, more than once. But I think the good news for a company like FedEx, it's a big company, and you have options and you have people who have been through training. And the person closest to the issue may not be the right person to be the spokesperson for it. And that goes back to the whole idea of being prepared for a crisis. You know, media coaching someone to walk into a press conference is too late. Right. That media training should have happened long before. And most executives have an opportunity to stand in front of large groups and practice this just naturally in the course of how they run their organizations. I think when you put a camera in someone's face, it brings a different level of anxiety and nervousness.

Tom Mueller: 20:35

It does.

Michele Ehrhart: 20:46

Of giving them the opportunity to sit in front of a camera and pretend it's real and then play it back for them. Right. And that's the hard part.

Tom Mueller: 20:55

It is. And there's so much value in doing that. But I want to share one quick story with you. Uh, this is uh back from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill response. This is back in 2010 now. Uh, but one of the sort of most impactful things we did communicating around that was created a series of technical videos, right? Because remember, things that were happening were happening 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean on the seafloor. There's equipment moving around, submarines manipulating things, equipment's being lowered. And it was hard to tell that story to people and to reporters. So we started producing a series of technical videos to update people and show them what was happening. And we had chosen one of the senior executives in the firm to present those videos. But interestingly, and this is a very competent executive who, as you said, had done town halls and other things. But when we put him in this position, it just didn't work.

Michele Ehrhart: 22:04

And quite a similar situation.

Tom Mueller: 22:12

And we had to sort of stand him aside, found another manager uh who was uh very, you know, again, equally competent, more a little more technical focused, and he was fabulous. And so he became our technical video spokesperson for the duration of the incident. And they produced, I don't know, maybe 15 different technical videos over the course of that, which were highly sought after by journalists and pretty much everybody watching. Brilliant, brilliant approach. Good job. But the point is, sometimes the person you think's gonna be the right spokesperson isn't, and you have to be able to shift gears. You know, and when egos get involved, sometimes that's not an easy thing to do.

Michele Ehrhart: 23:00

But if you think about what your job is, my job was to be honest and to tell them if you want to repair the brand and ensure the reputation doesn't seek out more damage, we have to change who the spokesperson is for this. And most people will not question that. Maybe I got taken off a Christmas card list or two, but I did my job. And we're not doing these jobs because they're easy. We do these jobs because we're doing what's right for the the organization, which every executive is there because I mean you would think they're there because they want that too. So they can be reasoned with. Uncomfortable conversations, yes, but they're still important.

Tom Mueller: 23:53

Hey, there's one other chapter in your book that really caught my attention, and it's chapter five on strategic silence, choosing not to communicate. That just sounds like trouble in the making, there, Michelle. What on earth are you talking about?

Michele Ehrhart: 24:10

I got your attention. Uh so what I mean by strategic silence, 90% of the time, I would never recommend you be silent. If it's a crisis that you own, you have to get out and talk about it. And you better do it as quickly as possible because it's your brand. What I'm talking about is when it is not your story and you are asked to weigh in on it, or you are asked to pontificate on something you don't even have all the facts for, you could cause more damage to your brand in doing so. There's a an example in the book that I used where there was a former employee of an organization who had been a very high-profile former employee. They went to a new organization and ended up getting into a lot of trouble. So then reporters started calling the previous employer saying, Hey, did this person work for you? What do you know about them? What can you tell us? You don't talk. It's not about you. You don't want it to be about you. If you say anything, then you become part of somebody else's bad story. So that's what I mean by strategic silence. And the immediacy of our world that we live in and social media, people want to weigh in, they want to comment, they want to have an opinion. I mean, look at anything related to Charlie Kirk, whether you said something nice or something not nice, nothing good came from it. Somebody was mad at you. So, as a company with a brand to protect, and maybe even a celebrity where you are your brand, you have to be very thoughtful about when you want to weigh in on something and when you don't. Is it your story? No, then be quiet. But if you're the mayor of LA and you have wildfires happening all around you, and you get off an airplane and the media is standing there waiting for you, and you don't have anything to say, shame on you. Because then what you did is you handed them the narrative. And I'm sure she had a lot to say, and probably very important what she planned to do at a press conference the next day. All she had to do was say, I'm gonna tell you all of this at a press conference. I just landed. I need to go meet with my team, and I appreciate you understanding. But she didn't say anything, and so they did. They said everything.

Tom Mueller: 26:27

Yeah, that was uh so unusual and unexpected for an elected official to sort of brush, you know, all these concerns off with this horrific wildfires. But it, you know, you it brings to mind another company example. That was the Volkswagen emissions scandal from some years ago. Um, and I did a case study on their communications around this. And what I've learned in that is that the company uh went silent for five days uh after the original story broke that they were, you know, being indicted for emissions, um, you know, malfeasance with their software programs and some of their vehicles. And, you know, they had numerous social media channels, some one, you know, that's sort of activations for their sports sponsorships for the F1 race and whatnot. And it just all went dark. And there was nothing from the company for five days, right? And you know what their first statement was when they finally came back online. Hey, we have a new CEO. And and it just floored me that the company would go dark like that, right? Now, my guess is they were trying to figure out what was happening, they didn't know you know what was happening, how much validity there might be. But what's your take on that as a as a silent?

Michele Ehrhart: 27:53

Actually, use that as an example in my book. I agree. You know, that's a bad time to go silent. Uh, a couple of things. I think that by being quiet in the midst of all of that, you're in the public's eye admitting guilt. And if the first statement that you make when you come back is we have a new CEO, you just put an exclamation point on the end of that guilt. Yeah, we did something wrong and we fired this guy, but everything's gonna be great. I think five days is a little too long to wait to say all of those things.

Tom Mueller: 28:29

Well, Michele, your book is a fascinating read, and I'd certainly recommend it. Uh, it should be on everybody's shelves for those of you who do crisis management, crisis communications. A lot of good information in here, and a terrific expert on the other end of the phone line if you need some help in a crisis as well. So, Michelle, thank you so much for taking time to join us on the podcast today. It's been a pleasure.

Michele Ehrhart: 28:55

My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

Tom Mueller: 28:58

And that's gonna do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. Thanks again for joining us. We appreciate you. Hey, if you like what you're hearing, please tell your friends about us as well. And if you want to drop me an email, it's at Tom at Leadinginacrisis.com. Cheers.