Doing It Better With Purpose
I’m Busy, What’s In It For Me? Being aware that crisis communication is hard isn’t enough. We need to have a coherent way to respond that helps us identify and respond to the whole array of interest groups and issues we face. Ensuring that our response is grounded in purpose is a powerful tool for addressing both the hearts and minds of our audiences.
Length: 1330 words (7-8 minutes)
In the two previous posts in this series, we’ve looked at examples of communicating under pressure drawn from the news. This time has been a good laboratory for communications beause the Covid-19 pandemic has created a universal sense of urgency.
To close, we’ll look too at a framework focusing on the power of purpose-driven communication during crisis and close with some general guidelines learned from the examples in Part 1 and Part 2.
An Expert Framework For Crisis Communication
We’ll start with a short crisis communications framework offered by consultants thinkParallax. Their framework is documented in a guide and an April 2020 webinar which I attended. Both are available to the public from their website.
The thinkParallax approach is written from the point of view of internal communications aimed at employees, specially for Covid-19. The principles are short and simple, and are easily adaptable to communicating with the press or public as well.
Universal Challenges
The presentation slide here lists some universal challenges, which we can see playing out in the examples in parts 1 and 2:
Speaking with humble authority in an environment of unfolding uncertainty:
Shake Shack’s statement on PPP tries to give an authoritative account of what they did and why, balanced with an element of humility about getting it wrong. Communication that is neither humble nor authoritative undermines even the best message.
Balancing empathy with information:
RHG buried potential signals of empathy deep in their 8Ks, out of public view. This left their narrative in unfriendly hands.
Acting thoughtfully yet with a strong sense of urgency:
The PPP reflected great urgency, but was not thoughtfully done.
Framing actions and commitments in a way to allows for change and unpredictability:
Potbelly’s statements to CNN and other media were flat statements, not taking shifting conditions into account.
Being nimble with communications as things may rapidly change:
Shake Shack’s quick pivot to returning PPP funds.
Giving the crisis due attention without losing sight of the big picture:
Again, Shake Shack did this better than the others, but not perfectly.
Six Steps
The heart of this approach to crisis communications breaks down to six steps. These are best understood as stages in a repeating cycle, not a one-and-done.
Identify key issues to communicate: Your key issues will vary depending on the audience you’re addressing. (Examples relevant to Covid-19 are displayed on the enclosed graphic.) The key is to quickly capture in writing the key ways the crisis has affected your organization.
Determine how your purpose and values can help address key issues: At first this may seem nonintuitive to mission-driven folk. We’ll address why purpose can work better than a transactional approach in the next section. If you’re not sure what your purpose or values are, thinkParallax suggests making a short list of words or phrases that embody the most important elements of your team’s culture.
Refine your purpose-driven messaging: Start by writing down an explicit statement of the possible emotional responses the crisis may bring up. Then draft a simple summary of what your organization is doing to respond to the crisis, add supporting information, and end by squaring the emotional circle by drawing on the facts you’ve mustered to show how your actions link to the audience’s concerns.
Adapt key messages for difference audiences: The presentation addresses “employee segments” but these can just as easily be any internal or external audience looking for specific information. The idea is to adapt key messages to the needs of each audience. Note: this does not mean “adapting” key facts to suit what you think people want to hear, which shades easily into manipulation and lying.
Identify potential channels and decide which are appropriate to use: This is not always obvious. The experiences of Captain Brett Crozier and the former acting secretary of the Navy illustrate why this is critical.
Creat a plan to ensure consistency: Here, the distinction between a crisis and an emergency comes into play. If communication is going to be ongoing, it needs to be disciplined. Unplanned changes or variations in critical messages will undermine your message.
Crisis and Purpose
Why bother addressing something like squishy like “purpose” when a crisis seems to require short, sharp and factual communications? Simply that most often in a crisis there is both space and need for some level of advocacy in communication--this is not a 911 call.
Crises affect most people at both the intellectual and emotional levels -- and the emotional response is frequently the strongest. The purpose-driven response seeks, in short, to address both the audience’s head and their hearts.
There may be situations where the balance of intellectual and emotionally-responsive content may be different. Compare RHG’s SEC filings with Shake Shack’s Linked In posting. This is why it’s critical to differentiate between audiences.
Why purpose? An organization’s purpose is a measure of success that goes beyond narrow definitions of a job like mission or profit, and links them to something deeper: values.
A first responder’s job is to preserve life and property.
Their purpose is to make people safe and protected.
Both aspects play a role in how the public sees them, and a wise organization emphasizes both.
WARNING: We project our purpose and values through our actions, even if we don’t explicitly address them. Introducing purpose into the equation assumes our purpose and values are worthwhile. Trying to project nobility retroactively onto deceptive or unethical behavior has a strong risk of backfiring.
Emotional Intelligence
The need to be aware of the emotional resonance of our acts and statements gets some independent support from a recent Harvard Business Review article about how organizations can respond to negative social media posts which threaten to go viral.
The authors find a quick but measured response may head off damage to their reputation, but it’s not enough. Managing your stake holders’ emotions are key here as well: “Posts containing intense emotions—especially “high-arousal” emotions such as anger, fear, anxiety, and disgust—were more likely than others to spread,” the study found.
If the fastest-speading messages about you or your actions are based on anger, fear, anxiety, or disgust, you need to counter those with messages that drive more positive emotions. We can see this dynamic rampaging across the public response to the PPP’s first round. Dry, factual responses were overwhelmed by emotionally-tinged mass media reports implying big companies were essentially cheating.
The wisdom of this approach is evident even if your organization is insulated from the lightning-quick world of social media. Reputation is precious, and mishandling threats to it can be expensive.
Guidelines for Communicating In A Crisis
Looking at the Carnival Cruise Lines and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) examples, we can see some general themes:
1. Have a Plan: You don’t want to be thinking for the first time about how to communicate in a crisis after it’s started. Make a plan before hand and practice it.
2. Stay on Message: Communicate what you need to, no more and no less. Undisciplined communication can swing opinion in directions you don’t want it going.
3. Understand the Situation and Audience: One size may not fit all. Your team may need a different message, themes or level of detail than your boss or other third parties do, for instance.
4. Be Humble: If everyone knows something has gone wrong, at least acknowledge it. This can be the difference between a good effort and a horrible one.
5. Recognize A Crisis Exists: Most of us are creatures of routine. There are times when a crisis or emergency is obvious, but it’s also easy to slip into one without recognizing it. Situational awareness is key.
6. Move Quickly, Not Hastily: It’s hard to be thoughtful in the midst of crisis, but the consequences of being too hasty are high. Take advantage of, or create, small pauses where you can regroup and check-in.
Not Just For Managers
A crisis can affect any of us. The implications of how we explain a health issue to a handful of immediate family members can be every bit as important as how the CEO of a huge corporation speaks to 100,000 or more employees.
Remember the definitions which started this series of posts. Any of us can be confronted by an emergency, but it takes preparation to make sure that emergency doesn’t spiral into a full-blown crisis. Good communication is a critical part of that, and all of us can use these tools.