Page 162 - Crisis Communication Practical PR Strategies

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How Senior Management Can Make the Crisis Worse 143
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Unless the top management in your company or organization have
also been trained in how they should respond in a crisis, there is a
strong likelihood that things will go wrong. The managing director (or
chief executive officer) and his or her fellow executive directors must
also be trained, although not in the same way as the rest of the team.
Their role is very different, but they need to understand this. The
worst thing that can happen is for them – and for everyone else – to
discover this during a full-blown crisis.
Getting senior people to accept they need training is not always
easy. Some will refuse to take part because they simply don’t believe
anything will ever happen that is sufficiently serious for them to
become involved; others because they believe it is beneath them; some
because they are terrified of being ‘exposed’ as ill-equipped with the
necessary skills; and there will be those who are simply too busy (or
make damn sure they appear to be).
These are understandable defence mechanisms. Successful execu-
tives would be less than human if they did not have more than the
average measure of intellectual arrogance, or suffer from the Edward
de Bono ‘intelligence trap’, whereby bright people habitually defend
their inherently superior opinions against all-comers.

Managing to make it worse

Here are some quick examples of what I mean.
The director of communications at a major UK utility who claimed
he had been involved in loads of crisis. He had all the T-shirts and
didn’t need any training. He was torn to pieces in his first live televi-
sion interview and never recovered.
Another director of communications at a UK utility who made sure
she was always away on important business whenever we turned up to
train the senior team. Needless to say she had still not completed one
coherent press release and was in tears when we shut down the subse-
quent ‘live’ exercise.
Then there were the representatives of all the government depart-
ments of a European state who admitted they doubted they would be
able to get quick agreement on a joint press statement because they
found it difficult sharing such information for ‘political’ reasons. The
exercise was a disaster but that didn’t prevent the minister in charge
from turning up and announcing to the expectant media that it had
been a great success.
There was a managing director of a huge conglomerate in the Far
East who was cocooned by his over-respectful staff and PR team. We