You may recall the scene in "Mission Impossible" when main
character Peter Graves flips through a folder of photos and selects
the ideal group for that week's mission. Most PR professionals
facing a crisis wish they had it so good: to be able to hand-select
the ideal team to battle their latest situation.
The good news is that it is indeed possible. A company structure
that's silo-averse and equipped with the right mindset at the top
are key weapons for your mission.
The same cast of characters will not work for every company in
crisis, and by the same token, the same group within your
organization may not be the right group to handle every crisis. You
may not need your security team for a foreign object discovered in
a food product, and you may not rely as heavily on the head of one
business line if a crisis is associated primarily with another.
Despite the fact that a crisis team may morph from one crisis to
the next, however, there are a few key guidelines that allow you to
plan for and assemble a key team long before a crisis strikes.
Get Management on Board
Obviously any crisis team should start with a high-ranking
member of senior management, preferably your company's CEO. But the
president, at least, should be considered a key figure in every
crisis team.
Len Biegel, EVP of Weber Shandwick's Crisis Management practice,
advises companies to define their crisis team with an eye to the
company's org chart. "The CEO is usually the one in charge, with
all the usual suspects - communications, marketing, security. Look
at the org chart, and choose the department heads."
The caveat: Be sure these folks are adept at handling crisis
situations. A top-notch executive whose talent comes through in
everything he does from a marketing communications standpoint or an
operational perspective may not have it in him to handle a serious
crisis. "Those people don't always make good crisis people," Biegel
says. Look for staffers who function well under extreme pressure
and in chaotic situations.
Also be sure your crisis team has the physical stamina to handle
a crisis situation. "If you have somebody who absolutely can't
function on less than eight hours of sleep, they're not going to be
a good crisis person," Biegel says. In the end, it all comes down
to finding lots of "solid, responsible, capable" people. They don't
all have to be experts in crisis management - just capable of
dealing with the realities of an emergency.
And have a redundancy plan, so that if one member of the team is
ill, missing or on a ski slope where her cell phone won't operate,
your team isn't crippled. Don Kirchoffner, VP of corporate
communications for Exelon, an energy company, does that by ensuring
that his communications team in particular knows how to do it all.
"I don't have a person who does just media or a person who does
just pubs. Even in my outlying business units [communications
staffers] team [up] so that everybody is qualified."
Get Support Players On Board
For that matter, not everyone on the crisis team should be a
senior level player. "My secret weapon in a crisis is executive
secretaries," F-H's Austin says. In any crisis response, there will
be seemingly mundane tasks that are really mission-critical. For
example, Austin says, you'll always need a TV in exactly the spot
where you don't have one.
The CEO or even the senior communications pros at a company may
not know whom to contact to get one hooked up in an expedient
manner. But odds are, executive secretaries who are accustomed to
working under pressure on simple but vital tasks and know the
company's infrastructure well will have the necessary contacts to
get you that television hook- up.
Be sure to include key players from support departments as well.
IT may have nothing to do with the crisis at hand, but you'll be
glad you have an IT team member when you need that crisis site up
and running.
Get all Departments On Board
Having all your departments represented on the crisis team won't
help to resolve a situation unless all employees understand that
they are part of the team, says Lee Duffey of Duffey Communications
in Atlanta.
Crisis communications is about what the crisis management team
puts out - but it's also about what they take in from business
units and locations throughout the organization.
"In most crisis situations, it's not that a corporation decided,
'Let's be evil.' There's a breakdown in systems, there's a lack of
communications." Duffey outlines a scenario: A consumer discovers
product tampering and calls a company 800 number. The customer
service rep doesn't know the key contact to whom to relay the
message, and the consumer becomes frustrated and calls a local
media outlet. "It's a chain of events that goes undetected."
Although the tendency during a crisis is for departments to
become even more siloed and territorial, the communications team
should work in advance of a crisis to break those silos by showing,
not telling, other departments what could happen in the event of a
crisis if communications break down.
(Editor's Note: To learn just how to show your team the
ramifications of communications breakdown, see cover story on
"Crisis Drills.")
The Team Roster
The Business Roundtable's recommendation: Have key employees
from the following teams on your primary crisis response team:
- Communications
- Legal
- Marketing
- Security
- IT
- Operations/Manufacturing
- HR
- Government Relations
- Public Affairs
- Financial
Also assemble crisis response teams at all your geographic
locations, which can then report in to the headquarters team.
Finally, have a clearly-defined "first response" team that all
employees know to notify in the event of a crisis.
For more on this subject, check out the Business Roundtable's
Web site, http://www.brtable.org, and click on
the link to "Security." Under "Security," you'll find a "Post 9/11
Toolkit." Page 33 of this rich document details the latest trends
in building and outfitting your team.
(Contacts: Austin, 612/573-3192; Biegel, [email protected];
Kirchoffner, 312/394-3001; Duffey, [email protected]; Davis, [email protected])