Welcome And Guest Introduction

Tom Mueller 0:06

Hey everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. On this podcast, we share stories from the front lines of crisis management through interviews, storytelling, and lessons learned this year from experienced crisis leaders. I'm Tom Mueller. If you'd like to email the show, drop me a line at Tom at LeadingInacrisis.com and we would love to hear from you. And I want to give a special shout out to our international listeners outside of America here. We've got a lot of listeners out there and want you to know we appreciate you. And thank you for being here with us. Hey, my guest today is Lee Carriher. And Lee is president of DoubleForte PR, which is a national PR firm here in the United States with principal offices in San Francisco, New York, and Wisconsin. So really covering the gamut of locations here across these United States. Lee, welcome to the show.

Lee Caraher 1:04

Thank you so much, Tom.

How A Leadership Book Happened

Tom Mueller 1:06

Hey, um Lee is also a published author. She has two management books to her credit. Um one is called Millennials and Management. The other is The Boomerang Principle. And um we'll talk about those here in a little bit, Lee. But uh how do you find time to write books while you're uh running a national PR firm?

Lee Caraher 1:31

Um well the first book is actually um came out of my experience of almost killing my company because I didn't understand millennials. And uh in the process of trying to figure it out so my company would survive, uh wrote a lot of stuff, not thinking about it was going to be a book at all. Uh this at the same time my clients were having the same issues. If you're this is back in uh 2015, 16 when it was all millennials or terrible. Now we here we are like 10, 15 years later, and now it's all Gen Z or terrible. It's the same story, just different generation. Uh anyway, we're started writing um things to help me understand. Um, and then when this this book, the first, my first book just sort of like fell in my publisher, just said, Well, you just published that book. And I said, What what book are you talking about? This one you have about millennials. I'm like, I don't have a book about millennials. He goes, Yeah, but you just talked about these four things. I'm sure you have it in you. Oh, okay. That's literally how it happened.

Tom Mueller 2:34

Let's do that.

Lee Caraher 2:35

Let's do that. So in the end, it's more of a um, it was more uh it's a book of how to uh reorient your team around intergenerational um team members because now we have four and five you know generations in the workplace. And what do you have to do to that uh to make that happen in a collaborative way? So I I actually don't have time to write a book, but I do have time to figure out how to lead my company through different to different eras and different models uh for the company. I started this company in 2002 before Twitter. Uh now easily half of our business is social media execution in some way, shape, or form. We've changed how we do things, you know, it seems like every single day. Our function hasn't changed, but how we do things changes. And as the leader of that company, I have to be ahead of what are all these communication changes mean, and that's really how I got the book stuff because I was uh running it, you know, changing things while the bus was running kind of thing.

Expectations Across Generations At Work

Tom Mueller 3:38

Well, yeah, and as uh, you know, I'm just thinking about the last, you know, 10 years, uh, 15 years of my working career uh being semi-retired today, but just thinking about all the changes that social media brought to us and the responsibility that we're putting on younger and younger people in the organization who have their you know fingers on the controls of these global communication channels. Um, and that is, you know, it takes a little bit of a management adjustment to think about that and to do that. But then, of course, you know, managing the expectations of this generation who have very different um, you know, work ethic than then probably well listen from I think work ethic is different.

Lee Caraher 4:27

I think uh in general, I think people work hard if they know what is expected out of them. I think working hard looks different for the different generations, and that's really where the breakdown comes in in the expectations around what it looks like is really the biggest issue we see in corporate America, is is around expectations and what that sounds like and what it looks like between the the groups.

Tom Mueller 4:53

And do you tackle that head on in the books?

Temperament And Judgment In A Crisis

Lee Caraher 4:56

Well, I mean, that is the target, and I try to hit the bullseye in eight chapters.

Tom Mueller 5:01

So well, you know, I talk to a lot of uh, you know, crisis professionals and I think about sort of younger people coming up and uh you know wanting to be impactful and knowledgeable and effective in the crisis management sphere or lane. You know, what uh any advice from your experience for those younger staff coming up? And I'm sure this translates beyond the crisis lane. But what do you what do you tell them? Hey, you want to build this expertise, you want to be good at this. Here's some things you need to think about.

Lee Caraher 5:39

Yeah. Well, if you want to be in crisis, man, you're probably uh adrenaline uh junkie, you're probably you gotta be really curious if you're in this business. You have to, you know, in that business specifically, because you want to uh and you gotta be a fast mover and a fast thinker. Uh at the same time, you have to have like a level of calm because the organization uh that you're in is gonna look to you like what do we do now, Lee? Is really when you're in that role, people are gonna ask you what to do to communicate. You're not you're just not like, hey Tom, what do you think we should do? No, no, no. Here's here's the situation, here's what we here's what we have to weigh left and right. Tom, I need to do this, I'm gonna do that. We'll be back in two 15 minutes. Because the comms leader is the if you think about the job, right? You're speaking for the company or the or whatever it is, the organization, and you're the mouthpiece of the company, and you are putting words into other people's mouths, and so you have to be really good when it excuse me, is hitting the fan. Sorry. Whoops, bleep, beep, beep. Um, and it's not you you you cannot be a yeller, you can't be, you know, there's only there's a time to yell, it is not during the situation, right?

Tom Mueller 7:00

Um Yeah, there's a certain temperament that goes.

Lee Caraher 7:03

You have to really be and keeping things in perspective, right? And and I, you know, I've done a lot of crises in my career, and if now, I mean I you know, people have died in crises that I've been in, not in in, but have managed. And you know, now it's the first lady on a crisis. My first question always, did somebody die? Yes or no? No. Could somebody die? Yes or no, no. It is we can do this on Monday, you know, kind of thing. Because some, you know, just because you didn't plan is not a crisis, but um, you also have to be able to discern what is a crisis and what could become a crisis, and that really means you need to know your um audience, you need to know what the situation is. So because a crisis could look very different in different things, right? Like something takes off on social media because you weren't sensitive to it or you didn't understand who the fan base was, you gotta know. So if you're if I'm talking to somebody who's like, I really like to do crisis management, although I can't think about someone who's ever said that to me, Tom.

unknown 8:11

I think about it.

Lee Caraher 8:13

What I want to do is I want to work overnight. That sounds good. But uh you gotta be willing to, you know, this is you know, if you're in crisis comms, uh, you know, one, you never go alone, you always have a partner because someone's gotta go to the bathroom. And um you gotta be willing to do that, you know, give it up halfway through and pick it up halfway through kind of stuff. So, but if you're not curious, if you don't have a level head, if you're not willing to take a breath and do an assessment of like what's the what are the potentials here, um and then what really is and what really isn't. You and part of that, uh Tom is just you just have to live next to people who are doing it to get that experience. You gotta be a sponge. You have to be a sponge for the first six, seven years of your career because you don't get that judgment coming out of the gate. It does not happen. And you don't get the gravitas where a CEO of a company who is going through the craft will believe you. Because you have to you need to be in that situation. So, yes, it's true that young people are, you know, got their hands on the um on the keyboard, but um that doesn't, and sometimes it's just because oh, let the young kid do it because you know they speak that language. Right. That is a throwaway, not a strategy. So I got you know, I have a lot of opinions on that.

Tom Mueller 9:36

And there are, you know, numerous stories out there where a brand did just that, handed the keys over to youngsters who thought it'd be really funny to be funny on social media at some celebrity or somebody who was having a uh an issue or a problem, and it just explodes, right?

Lee Caraher 9:56

Just explodes. Nuance is I mean, here's the thing nuance is a skill, and nuance is really where that funny part of social media, you know. I think about the fast food, um, the fast food chains who go after each other on social media, I think that's hysterical. It is hysterical. And that is nuanced. That is not a 19-year-old who doesn't know about improv. That is somebody who has done a lot of improv work who is nuanced, you know, they're experienced in that.

Pairing Juniors With Senior Pros

Tom Mueller 10:26

So, Lee, from your perspective running the agency, um, how do you prepare your staff, you know, to deal with uh crisis? And again, you know, most of us, depending on the industry you're in, you may not get that much exposure to dealing with real life crisis situations. But when you do, you got to show up, right? And I can cite numerous examples of people we deployed out to pretty intense crisis scenes somewhere who just didn't have the temperament, you know, to work in a chaotic environment to be self-motivating and drive yourself to get things done. And and they just sort of fizzled out after a couple of days, which is fine. You know, we send them on back home, keep doing your day job, and you know, we'll get somebody else in who can do this. But as you sort of think about your teams and how you're, you know, building capabilities, how do you, you know, sort of build that skill set?

Lee Caraher 11:29

Well, for us, we definitely have a whole um career building blocks um think way of thinking about things. Because it's true, you have a crisis, you can't plan. I mean, well, you shouldn't plan your own crises. So uh you have to be it's opportunistic. This sounds so terrible, but it's opportunistic if it's a crisis uh to be on. So we have a whole because um we're a pretty top-heavy agency, half of us are at least 10 years of experience or more, and half of us are less. That is a business choice, it's unusual. Um, so the one, we always are pairing up and down so that uh if something happens, you come along. You may just look at me, you may just watch me do this whole thing, or I may give you a clipboard and say, go over there, but just you're coming. So we never go alone. That's number one. Never go alone. Two, we have these building blocks and we um train on them. Uh, and sometimes it's uh if it it might be we haven't had it's sort of like you think about um doing an off-site and you do you throw something at people and they have to workshop it right there in front of you, and then you DNC it, right? You're looking at it and go, Detect and correct, detect and correct, detect and correct, so that you actually do that uh um that work. The third uh and then it when something does happen or when something is a critical, so there's a difference between critical and crisis, but there's a critical moments every day. Well, I wish well, that's not true. There's critical moments every month, right, for a client or a situation. And if the more you can bring your junior staff to so that they have eyes on it, so they have have exposure to it, and so they see your the people who are senior who've done this, um, go through it and how they react and how they, you know, really to take presence. Um so that they have what I want people to think is what would Lee do, or what would Matt do, or what would Liz do, or what would Maggie do? Because we've been through so many, the four the ones of us who are at the head of the agency. I mean, we get we're you know, that's what that's probably 160 years right there of work. Um, and we've all handled multiple serious crises. So I want them to be thinking, what would so you know, what would one of us do if they're by themselves? Um and that sounds like pretty egotistical, but it's not meant to be sound that way. It's meant to say, you know, just here, take my learning. You have to take it. Please take it. Yeah.

Social Media Crisis Planning Basics

Tom Mueller 14:02

Not unlike what we're doing on this podcast, right? Is mining that experience, that knowledge that you've developed over a career and sharing that with younger um staff coming up through the lines in that. So, so great. I appreciate that. I love that you're pairing kind of more experience with younger and giving them that one-on-one. You know, one of the things that a lot of companies find sort of vexing when dealing with crisis is just the whole social media aspect of it. And, you know, it's an evolving, it's an ever-evolving platform. Uh not even a platform, a series of channels, yeah, an ecosystem. And it can be pretty daunting, I think, for companies, especially smaller companies that don't have you know the big resources of a Fortune 500 firm, you know, to have a five-person social media team that's looking out and monitoring. So if you're counseling uh, you know, a company that might get hit with a crisis situation and you know, social media has to be a part of this. How do you get them ready and then execute when a crisis hits?

Lee Caraher 15:22

Well, I think for so well, any company could have a social media crisis, right? Depending on, you know, you think a restaurant, I mean, when they get a bad review, uh, that could become a crisis if it take takes on and then all of a sudden no one's going, right? Because that is a business crisis uh that happens all the time. So any company can have a crisis that erupts on social media. So first the first thing is we need to identify those kinds of issues that might come up, right? So there's a full gamut of them, and it's not hard to figure them out, right? There's a natural, there's a crisis, there's a natural disaster, there's a man-made disaster, so fire, um uh guns, you know, the whole, you know, there's a death, there's something that's on your premises, off your premises. It's your people are involved, your people got arrested. I mean, all the someone got sick, someone didn't, all those things.

Tom Mueller 16:14

A kiss cam at a conference somewhere or at a concert.

Lee Caraher 16:18

I mean, oh my god, note to self. Don't go to Coldplay.

Tom Mueller 16:22

Okay, so what are the odds of happening?

Lee Caraher 16:28

Jeez Louis.

Tom Mueller 16:29

And I just, you know, I think about that one, it's like, you know what? If they would have just sort of held still and well, you know, she just went on a media tour.

Lee Caraher 16:36

Do you know this? She did, yeah. And she's like, Well, you know, it was our first time out, you know, and I knew it wasn't appropriate and I knew it that I'm like, really? You just brought it all back up. Talk about the Streis and effect. Oh my gosh. Anyway, yes. So one of what are the things? What are the things? And are you a food company? I mean, all there's lots of different things, you have to figure out where where's your zone, right? Um, number one. Number two, just know that, right? So you're figuring out what are the things. Number two, the crisis is gonna arise before you can handle it. Because by definition, social media is something happen, you know, a crisis happens when you're not expecting it. It is a surprise. So um, it's a surprise. It could be uh knowable that it will happen eventually, but the timing is a surprise. So um then you need to have okay, so this is gonna happen. We're gonna get someone's gonna have a terrible video at my gas station or whatever. Um, I'm gonna have a new employee who doesn't know what to do, or you know, whatever the things are. Um, because in the end it's all people, right? It's all people. So, and then what is our what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? And then protocols, protocols that are respond with um let me reach out, DM me with your phone depending on what it is. What are the protocols? Like DM me please with your phone number, I'm gonna call you right away. Or not, or it's someone who's trolling, and how are you gonna handle that? Um, and then you know, some clients for we have a couple clients in general who in general are just so well loved, but they're not universally loved because there are trolls in the world who are you, you know, that's their they're just live. I don't know why they do this. It's I can't even imagine living this way. It's so like where does the energy come from? But they just live to bring some people down. So, but if you're you know, there's one company I have in my mind, you know, they have it's a food brand, and they universally loved, and they brought a new product, a new food to market. It was sort of uh funky flavor, and was funky because it was a sp from a specific uh cultural group, right? So it was funky to other people, but it not to that group. And the first five or six um comments were ew, that's so gross. I thought the company was gonna melt down. Melt down. They're like, oh my god, everybody hates it. And I'm like, how can that be? They haven't it's not even available yet. They don't they just hate the idea of it, and then when I looked at the numbers, I'm like, okay, so the first five people who saw this on your page said it was gross. You have 500,000 people who follow you. That's not even 0.100. What is that? 0.00000%. You have to keep this in perspective. Um, so don't react. Don't do anything. Don't do anything. We're gonna track it, we're gonna see how it moves, and then what what let's decide right now what is the what is the tip over point where we're gonna get involved? What's the tip over point? And I, you know, we put the tip for that situation, we put the tip over point at 50 people in five days. Um, and so by the time, you know, the first five people, and then you know, it moved along. And because the algorithms enjoy you getting crap done, it gets seen by more people. And then um, but then people who were also the brand lovers, but from this specific um demographic were like, oh my god, thank God they probably brought it. So literally within a day, it had turned around. Now, if we had gone right in and said, red alarm, red alarm, red alarm, it would have gotten bigger because when you bring attention to something, again, the algorithms like that, it would have brought attention to it, and then the trolls tell the trolls, yeah, you can get them. Literally, that's how it happens. So you have to have judgment around what are these things and help people understand it. Now, how do you train a junior staff on that? You have to, you know, what are the protocols? What makes sense? And then what how we like to do that, Tom, is to say, go, we're gonna do a research here. Go. I want you each to take a company who's had a bad reaction on social media, and we're gonna track it. We're gonna I want you each to be able to talk about what went well and what didn't, and what should we do instead? So we go out when we don't have crisis dealing on and out, we do this training, and it probably happens once a quarter, where you say, Okay, everyone's gonna take a company, you choose a company that's had a problem, you go out, come back, and we'll talk about it. And that way, at least people are doing their own case studies on other things and taking a look at everything to people to think about. Social listing though. So they're building they're building their own well, they have to build their own critical uh research, you know. So you really see it on the generation. So the older people go to Facebook and they figure it out. Young people right over to Reddit, right over to Reddit to see what Redditors are saying, right? Because that's where the genesis is over in Reddit. And if you when you say that to somebody who's you know 50, like, what? Yeah. Or, you know, Snapchat this. I'm like, I wouldn't worry about that yet.

Reddit Monitoring And Troll Discipline

Tom Mueller 22:02

So Lee, that's that's an interesting point though, because I'm one of those over 50 people who like Reddit seriously? Reddit seriously. But my 30-something kids are 30-year-old kids are all over Reddit. And it is fascinating. But has that become part of a normal monitoring structure then? Is Reddit is there? And do the tools get in and can they comb through Reddit?

Lee Caraher 22:31

Yeah. Well, the tool, what's great about Reddit is how they set up their search. So you can't, I mean, you'll see things pop out of Reddit onto Twitter, onto TikTok. Usually those are the first two that it pops out on. You'll think see things or into podcasts, like the really the deep, very narrow podcasts in culture. You know, things will pop out of there that are Reddit related. So you'll see them pop out into other places. But the Reddit tools on search are phenomenal. So you can if you don't have to have a social listening, you know, it'd be great if you did, but they're expensive. Um, but you can go into Reddit pretty quickly and you're gonna find it's it doesn't it doesn't look like anybody anything else, Reddit's own ecosystem, but the search tools are fantastic. So you can find sentiment, you can find the situation, and you can track it back pretty quickly on what's happening and put an assessment around it, right? Because uh feeding the trolls is never a good idea, yeah, ever.

Tom Mueller 23:37

Okay, and all it takes is one errant tweet um to sort of start a cascade of things happening. So I love your advice there. Chill on it, let's watch it for a little bit and see, you know, how does it grow if it grows? That um yeah, that takes some discipline.

Lee Caraher 23:57

It takes a lot of discipline, particularly when it's you. It's like, you know, brand managers who like for this one. This is a good example. There's one company, the brand manager on the specific product was just in agony for 24 hours, in agony. And I was just trying to touch my I was just talking them off the ledge like periodically throughout those 24 or 36 hours. It's like it's okay, this happens. Is this how you know you made it?

unknown 24:22

Right?

Lee Caraher 24:23

Uh, you know, just talking them off the ledge because it's you've put all your effort into it. You know it's gonna do well. This product killed, by the way. They actually were only gonna have it for six or seven months. It was gonna be seasonal and now it's in their, you know, their ever evergreen skews. So um, it's gonna pay off. It's okay. These aren't your people. You're looking you know, there's 300 million people in the United States. You're not gonna sell this to everybody, you just need to sell it to 20,000 people. We're just gonna go find them. It's gonna work. You know, but that comes from years and years and years of panicking.

High Expectations With High Caring

Tom Mueller 24:59

Right. Well, and now we have AI coming into play here, right? Which is an overlay on everything. That'll be another podcast episode, maybe, to talk about that. Uh super important. We're following that pretty closely over here just to see. But Lee, in the couple minutes we have left, I wanted to just circle back to the books. Yeah. And what's sort of your key takeaways now for uh folks who might be interested in you know in figuring out uh how to better manage and and you know make teams be more cohesive in that? What's your sort of key advice and takeaways from the few things?

Lee Caraher 25:39

One is good teams talk, good teams talk all the time. And you can tell a good team by how well they finish each other's sentences, and when they can't, you can I can predict to you that the performance will be low. So one is good team talks, two is high expectations, high caring, and the way you um marry those two things. So you have high expectations for people and you care about them a lot, and the way you demonstrate that caring is by you'll be shocked to hear this, talking with them, and then listening to what matters to them. So understanding who you have on your team. Uh at my company we do this uh appreciation, love the love language is appreciation uh in the workplace. So we understand like some people want to have a attaboy, other people don't ever do that to be in public. So those two things, you know, good teams talk, so we don't let things fester, which is a challenge. You have to get people ready to not let things fester. And two, high expectations, high expectations, high uh caring, and you can have only have high expectations that work if you're communicating them all the time. And the fourth thing is you're never done. One and done does not work in communication, you are never finished communicating, uh, which is a it sounds exhausting because we'll see for leaders, right? By the time we say something, we've already thought about it in our heads, right? We've thought about it for a while. We've done some reading, we've talked to some people. Here's the thought. And we want people we want our words to come out of our mouth and people to go, voila, uh-huh. No, but they have to get they have to catch up to you. So a lot of leaders will say something and they're on to the next thing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Again and again and again. And then a uh you add a team person and start again and again. And so it does, it can be relentless that way, but the more you can repeat yourself, the better it is. The more you can be in conversation, which means shutting your mouth and listening, the better it is. And the more you can demonstrate um high high expectations, high caring, the better performance you're gonna have over the long haul, and you're gonna have less um you're gonna have less retention problems, which is my second book on boomerang, and then you're gonna be able to bring them back.

Tom Mueller 27:57

Lee Carihur, thanks for that advice and thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience here on the podcast.

Lee Caraher 28:04

Thanks for having me, Tom. I really appreciate it.

Wrap Up And Contact Information

Tom Mueller 28:07

And that's gonna do it for this episode. Thanks again for joining us here. And if you'd like to email the show, drop me a line at Tom at LeadingInacrisis.com. And we'll catch you soon for another episode. Take care.