Chapter

2

The Chief Crisis Officer and the Team

The premise underlying this book is that putting together a proper system for public response in the face of crisis events requires not only the right tools and crisis communications team, but also the right leader for the task: the Chief Crisis Officer.

Who should serve in the role, and what are the ideal qualifications? Is this person a member of the internal public relations team, a lawyer, or someone else? Is the Chief Crisis Officer the same person every time?

Well, here’s the bad news: It depends. Each organization is structured differently, has a different culture, and is home to many types of professionals with differing skills, experience, and temperament. The Chief Crisis Officer may not always be the head of PR or assistant General Counsel … but it could be. Therefore, one of the key challenges lies in identifying the right person within your organization for the role and giving that person the tools and authority to act. The good news? In this chapter, we’re will discuss precisely how you should evaluate your team to decide who might be the ideal candidate for Chief Crisis Officer in your organization and who, despite outward appearances, is ill-suited for the role.

 

The client, a major manufacturer in Phoenix, was in big trouble. The company’s crisis communications response was floundering in the face of a particularly sensitive product issue. Despite the skills and qualifications of its team, the company was having an enormously difficult time responding effectively; indeed, it appeared that the company’s response was making the situation worse. Time was of the essence, so I caught the last flight out of New York on a Tuesday and arrived at their offices Wednesday morning.

From the time I entered the company’s cavernous boardroom to a meeting already in progress, I could see what was wrong.

First, I couldn’t find a seat. (You’ll understand why that’s important in a moment.) As a general premise, let me point out that, as a consultant, I’ve been amazed over the years by how you much you learn about an organization and its problems not from the facts and issues, but from the client itself—how the company is organized, how executives interact, the decision-making process, and the lines of authority. It’s these little things that tell the story—particularly during a high-pressure event like a crisis—and if you are perceptive, these vignettes can show you exactly what’s wrong with the organizational response and what to do about it.

This was one of those learning experiences.

As I entered the conference room—and a junior staffer scrambled to find me a chair—I noticed the following: The company had a large group assembled, a large room to work in, and a big white board to write stuff on. They were engaged in a wide-ranging discussion, with a host of divergent views on how to handle the issue, and had come up with a series of whiteboard “take-aways.” But 90 minutes into the meeting, they still had no plan of action.

We didn’t have a crisis communications team. We had a seminar. More than this, what I heard over and over during the meeting was:

“Well, we’ll need 17’s buy-in on this.”

“I don’t think 17 is going to go for that.”

“Tom and his team on 17 will need to think about this carefully …”

“17” meant the seventeenth floor, where the CEO and senior executives had their offices. It became apparent that no one with decision-making authority was actually in the room.

At the end of the meeting, the assistant General Counsel, who was more or less chairing the proceedings, stood up and said: “Okay, so we’re going to need to get someone to write this up, to see if we have approval from 17 before proceeding.”

All the while, the clock kept ticking.

Leadership and the Authority to Act Bring Good Results

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You can see the problem. My new client didn’t have a crisis communications team capable of action, nor a strong leader with the ability to execute.

This company did not need better messages, better training for its spokespeople, or advanced social media strategies; it needed a Chief Crisis Officer.

Throughout this chapter, we will examine the need for the skills of the Chief Crisis Officer, how you can identify these skills, and how you can put the structure in place to ensure success. We’ll look at the various elements and characteristics that are important in the selection and development of the Chief Crisis Officer, as well as the types of people, characteristics and skills to avoid.

But let’s begin with our thesis, one that answers the following questions: Who is this leader, the Chief Crisis Officer? What qualities does he or she need? What is the reporting structure and team needed? Who should have the authority to act when responding?

I summarize the principles I will discuss in this chapter as follows:

Your Chief Crisis Officer should be highly flexible and ready to respond at a moment’s notice. He or she must be a decisive individual who can work across organizational lines and have the authority—and willingness—to act. This person must be an experienced communicator, with skills adaptable to communicating with sensitivity and nuance before a variety of audiences.

This sounds simple, right? But it is remarkable to me how often organizations go astray in both the selection of the core crisis communications team and its leader.

Lines of Communication

Let’s start with lines of communications. Your Chief Crisis Officer and his or her team should have the ability to communicate with key decision makers throughout the organization. In most cases, this will include the CEO, Chief Operating Officer (COO), the General Counsel, and other members of the so-called C-Suite.

The team needs to be small enough to make decisions rapidly and communicate with each other directly and decisively. In other words, you should aim for a small action team rather than (as in the example above) a large debating society. The problem with a large team is obvious: With large groups, you often have too many opinions coming at you from too many angles—some of which are very good, but some of which were voiced so that the attendee could show he or she was listening and contributing. I’m all for input, of course, but without a tight, well-oiled team at the top, you often wind up with an unwieldy hodge-podge of ideas and competing agendas, with no roadmap for an actual response.

Hence the need for a limited group of team members—the “core crisis communications team”—headed by a clearly identified leader who can turn analysis into action.

The Chief Crisis Officer

We will look more closely at the core crisis communications team toward the end of this chapter. Let’s turn now, though, to the person who should lead them: the Chief Crisis Officer. At its most elemental, your organization will want a Chief Crisis Officer with the:

  1. Authority to act;
  2. Willingness to act; and
  3. Background, experience, and communications skills to act effectively.

By examining each of these criteria, we can further flesh out the Chief Crisis Officer concept and the unique blend of skills, experience, and perspective needed to make such a leader a success.

The Authority to Act

An interesting aspect of the example that opened this chapter is that no one in the crisis “War Room” actually had the ability to make decisions on behalf of the corporation. All they could do was lay out the problem, discuss the various options for response (sometimes ad nauseam, given the size of the group), and “paper it up” for review by the CEO and her executive team. The higher-ups would have to review the summary prepared by the group, maybe ask a few of their own questions (which would need to be routed to the right person on the extended crisis team for response in some cases), then either approve or reject the proposed action, or send the summary back for further refinement. If the ideas were rejected, that big, unwieldy crisis team would have to reassemble, tailor their ideas to better meet the new parameters established by the C-suite (or come up with new ideas entirely), then run them up the flagpole again.

This sort of system may work in other areas of operations and organizational management—when planning new product strategy, for example, or a marketing or advertising campaign—but it can be deadly when responding in a crisis situation.

Why? Time is a big reason. In most crisis communications environments, you must act now to ensure that the crisis doesn’t accelerate to the point that it is spinning out of control. Once a crisis is unfolding exponentially before you, it can be very hard to catch up. So if you are waiting for word from the CEO’s office before executing each step in your response, you’re almost guaranteeing failure. You don’t have the time, and you can’t get it back once the events have overtaken you.

More than just the time element, though, a flaw in this system is that the party with the ultimate authority to act isn’t even in the room to fully consider the various options—and no two-page summary will accurately convey all the nuances and strategic thinking behind the development of an action plan. If a crisis team works in one part of the building, but approval for the response lies somewhere else (e.g., floors away or even in a headquarters location in another city), the situation ends up like a big game of “telephone,” where one person whispers a message to another, which is then passed through a line of players until the last announces his or her version of the message to the entire group. Inevitably, the final message bears little resemblance to the original. In the context of crisis communications response, if an actual decision maker is not in the room when the crisis response team is meeting, the final strategy laid out in the two-page summary may be a mere shadow of the actual plan the team discussed.

Again, in operational decision making in other areas of corporate life—where there is at least some luxury of time—this may not be a problem, since summaries can be longer and more detailed, accompanied by in-person meetings to explain the thinking behind the plan, or sent back (as described above) for further delineation several times before a final course of action is determined. In most crisis communications response, the luxury of time just doesn’t exist. This tends to be true whether the crisis is exploding or unfolding (as we’ve learned in Chapter 1). Although an unfolding crisis like an investigation or legal proceeding may happen over time, events along the way tend to be sudden, immediate, and often unexpected. Thus, they often require immediate response, even if the current issue is only a small element of broader crisis (e.g., a new legal filing in a court case, an unannounced visit to one of your local offices from SEC investigators, or a new series of protests from animal rights advocates over a certain issue). Certainly, “long-tail” crises occur in the life of every organization, to be sure, but each “event” in the unfolding drama is usually time-sensitive in its own right. Hence, the need for speed exists in all manner of crisis communications response.

Consequently, this is why having the authority to act is so important. It comes down to efficiency and effectiveness: Your decision-making processes during a crisis must be efficient so you can respond during the time allotted, and effective to have the desired impact.

Authority at the Right Level

Consider the concept of “command and control” in military parlance. While we tend to think of the military as the ultimate “top-down” organization, over time military science has engendered a highly developed system for ensuring that decision-making authority during military operations is as close to the battlefield as possible. This process developed historically to minimize time delays, limit misinformation and erroneous reporting, and otherwise mitigate the effect of the “fog of war” in the midst of contentious battles. This need to provide decision-making authority to the commanders actually on the field was particularly acute in the days before advance technologies, networked communications, real-time images of battlefields—a time when generals miles away from the action could only guess what was happening on the front lines. Within clearly established guidelines, military leaders delegated authority for leading the battle to the battlefield commanders who were on the front lines and could execute based on complete information.*

In crisis communications response, authority to act is key, just as it is in the military context. Thus authority is something your organization’s Chief Crisis Officer desperately needs.

My CEO Won’t Cede This Authority!

At this point, you may be thinking one of two things. First: “There’s no way my CEO could be a participant in every crisis communications War Room meeting.” Congratulations—you are correct. Second (and this is the more dangerous alternative): “There’s no way my CEO would be willing to give up involvement in decisions that might have a huge impact on the company and its future.”

This latter mindset is the one we’re going to work on. The solution lies in proper buy-in beforehand of the well-constructed crisis plan and the execution of that plan from the “front lines” during the heat of the battle.

This is not to suggest that your CEO and other top leaders have no input or role in crisis communications response, but rather that an agreement should exist during the planning process as to the proper role of the CEO and the authority he or she is delegating to the Chief Crisis Officer.

Work the Plan

For as you’ll see in our next chapter, every organization should have a crisis plan in place well before the crisis hits. This plan, in broad strokes, lays out exactly who has the authority to act in various circumstances and what authority that person has in those situations. In other words, when a crisis occurs, you shouldn’t have to think about what the plan is, and who should be in what meetings to make which decisions, after the battle has started. No one should be making the plan up out of whole cloth as the crisis is unfolding—that’s like a football team making up the plays after they’ve taken the field! If you put together the right plan initially, there’s less reason for the CEO or other senior executives to insert themselves right into the center of the action while the play is in progress.

In addition, in a well thought-out plan, the right person with authority to make individual decisions during a crisis will be in constant communications with the CEO and/or other senior leaders on “big picture” issues as appropriate. I’ve done this many times in crisis situations, where I am the person with the direct line to the CEO. If anything comes up that needs his or her direct input, I quickly hail the CEO via phone or email and get clarification—usually immediately and in real time while the crisis communications team is deliberating. If the Chief Crisis Officer or a member of the team has the proper relationship and lines of communication with the leader of the organization, a streamlined process for “command and control” can be maintained. As long as there is a clear understanding as to the authority of the Chief Crisis Officer—which decisions can be made at the crisis team level and which require input from the higher ups—the system tends to work pretty well. (Again, technology can greatly help with real-time communication and collaboration.)

One final point regarding the authority to act, serving as a word of caution to CEOs in particular: You must restrain from abandoning a well-conceived crisis communications plan and jumping into the battle as a “field general” the moment the going gets tough. Everyone on the team—from the CEO down—must understand that crises bring bad news. A crisis is an inherently negative situation. As we learned in the Introduction, it’s a mess—the only question is: “How big?” So, my dear CEO, don’t charge into the midst of a properly conceived crisis response after the first few bad stories or social media posts are written, thinking that you must take over the team to make things right—that is a recipe for disaster. There is no better way to undermine your Chief Crisis Officer and ensure chaos reigns as the crisis unfolds. I give you this advice from the heart, based on many years of experience: Stay the course, remain in communication with your crisis team, but don’t try to take over if you’ve got a qualified leader executing a good plan. Instead, as the saying goes: Work the plan.

Willingness to Act

“I was going to get involved in this, but quite frankly it’s not the type of thing I see any value in sticking my neck out for.”

—Corporate lawyer with a media background, when asked why he didn’t volunteer for the crisis communications “rapid response” team.

The Chief Crisis Officer, once imbued with the authority to make certain decisions in the heat of a smoldering (or raging) crisis, must be willing to put that authority to work. Sometimes, that’s easier said than done.

Once you have the authority to act, you must be willing to use it. This sounds obvious, but often during a crisis, an individual with the authority to act won’t—for reasons of temperament, culture, or simple self-preservation. If you don’t act when you should during a crisis event, you can usually expect the situation to get worse.

Consider the quote that opens this section: A well-qualified company lawyer in the sports industry, during a particularly sensitive matter, was not willing to step up and be the lead in crisis communications response, because—let’s face it—there was nothing in it for him. He had nothing to gain, from a career perspective by taking such a bold, difficult assignment and everything to lose. It is a cold, hard fact that in many corporate environments, it is not the person who sticks out his or her neck that gets ahead, but rather the person who keeps his or her head down. In my own cynical view, this type of career playbook looks like this:

  • Reinforce the beliefs of the higher-ups at every turn;
  • Echo conventional wisdom;
  • Minimize personal and professional risk in the actions you take; and
  • Don’t suggest bold steps if there might be blowback.

Let me put it to you simply: This mindset is deadly when confronting a crisis. The right Chief Crisis Officer is never reckless or foolhardy. He or she doesn’t make moves for the sake of making them. A good Chief Crisis Officer doesn’t take action for action’s sake. In most circumstances, the ideal Chief Crisis Officer works to mitigate the negative ramifications of a reputational crisis rather than throwing the ball downfield in a reckless hope for victory. But the right Chief Crisis Officer acts when it’s important, whether it involves sticking his or her neck out on an issue or not.

Because here’s the reality: Anyone who has been tasked to respond in a crisis situation is facing an inherently negative event where the best outcome is minimizing the damage. In other areas of corporate communication, this is often not the case. Engaged in a product launch or acquisition? That’s an inherently positive event. Managing a crisis? In most cases, there’s no way the organization is coming out of this well. This leaves anyone in that role open to criticism regardless of his or her efforts and the ultimate result. Your Chief Crisis Officer needs a thick skin, a confidence that what they are doing works, and a willingness to act in the face of second-guessing.*

The Impact of Training and Experience on Perspective

Beyond this, there are other reasons that particular executives, though qualified in their areas of expertise, might be ill-suited for the role of Chief Crisis Officer. For example, educational training and experience can often make an otherwise highly competent candidate exactly the wrong person for the role.

A lawyer’s education is the most obvious example. Part of the mission of law schools is to teach students how to “think like a lawyer.” Although there are enormous benefits to this training, negatives abound. A “lawyer-like” response can often cause more harm than good during crisis situations.

We’ll come back to the legal profession in a moment, but I want to emphasize that educational and experiential biases are by no means limited to the legal profession. By examining other professions, you can see how the particular mindset of these professionals influences their approach to problem-solving and, as a result, crisis communications.

For example, when I was a young father, my son had a medical problem and was referred to a surgeon for consultation. I thought this was great until I mentioned it to a doctor friend of mine. He said: “Jim, when you are a surgeon, every solution involves surgery.” In this case, it did: The surgeon recommended a complicated and, as it turned out, unnecessary procedure. Thankfully, we were prepared, sought other opinions, and decided against such an invasive solution. The problem went away.

Or this example, more specifically related to the field of crisis communications: A few years back, a medical device company we were working with was in the midst of a crisis involving—believe it or not—allegations of ties to organized crime. My team met with the institution’s head of communications and the CEO. The CEO was a very prominent doctor who still maintained an active medical practice. He was every inch the doctor, right down to conducting our meeting in the cold, detached manner that is all too familiar in the doctor-patient relationship.

In this particular meeting, I laid out a plan of response. My team knew this company was very conservative, so our advice was on the conservative side. We did not recommend anything too aggressive: no full-page ads, one-on-one interviews with the local newspaper, or heartfelt videos of the CEO on YouTube. Rather, we presented a measured, very basic plan that avoided escalating the crisis, avoided the “he said, she said” of a debate, and mitigated the risk of drawing more attention to the issues than was necessary.

We presented this outline to the doctor/CEO and his PR director. When we were finished, CEO asked: “But why treat this problem at all? Isn’t it true that the more you engage, the more you’re going to feed the disease? We don’t want to overprescribe it if it’s not necessary.”

I pointed out that although you may not convince the company’s detractors, they are a minority—a vocal minority, to be sure, but a minority nonetheless. That, I argued, is not who we’re after.

“There is a vast middle of reasonable people,” I said, “who haven’t yet heard of your issue. Some won’t care, but some will—and they’ll make a decision either to believe you or not based upon the messages you are sending.”

“You know how it is, Phil,” I continued, gesturing toward the PR director, “if you don’t frame these issues in the minds of the reasonable middle early on, they’re going to believe the other side.”

After a moment or two of silence, the CEO got up and said: “Thanks Jim, we’ll take it under advisement,” then quickly walked out the room. The consultation was over.

Later that afternoon, I got an email from the PR director:

Hi Jim,

We’ve decided to do nothing at the moment. Dr. Jones wants us to monitor the situation, and if spreads we’ll consider taking a more aggressive route.

That was that … or so I thought.

Three months later, the crisis had spread, with several major media articles attacking the company. Moreover, the attacks seemed to be spreading to other areas, including the regulatory and political arenas. Metastasizing, I believe, is the medical term for it.

I was called back into the CEO’s office and joined the PR director in a conference room. We waited there for a few moments, just the PR Director and me, making small talk. The then CEO burst in from a door in the rear of the room with a pad of paper and sat down. It was as if he’d grabbed the patient chart from outside the door and entered an examination room.

“Ok,” he said, “We tried it my way, now let’s try the Jim Haggerty course of treatment.”

By this point, unfortunately, the patient was nearly gone.

Training and Temperament in Crisis Communications Response

As you can see from his example, the fact that the leader was a doctor had everything to do with the way he approached the issue and ultimately his decision not to respond. It wasn’t that the doctor was not bright; in fact, he was brilliant. The issue is that the manner in which he trained for years to approach problems was not conducive for this particular type of crisis. If he’d been a lawyer, he would have taken another approach. An advertising executive? You can be sure advertising would be part of the solution.

That’s my point: The way an individual responds during a crisis stems in large part from that individual’s training and experience. We tend to think that people act and behave the same way in analyzing problems and coming up with solutions, but that is not the case, which greatly affects how they approach and react to problems.

More about Lawyers

At first glance, lawyers might be considered the ideal Chief Crisis Officers, and lawyers often have many positive attributes in crisis situations. They know how to state their case. They think well on their feet. Most lawyers have the ability to put positive window dressing on all manner of negative fact patterns or scenarios.

Unfortunately, lawyers look at problems … well, like lawyers (as a lawyer, this is something I know quite a bit about). Books have been written about the way lawyers approach problems, but I’ll give you a few examples:

So while lawyers can make excellent Chief Crisis Officers, the ones who succeed in this role tend to “see the whole playing field,” and—while taking the best elements of their legal training with them—have learned to discard, or at least rise above, some of the rough edges you find in the legal profession.

And let me not just pick on lawyers (although I’ve been able to sell more than a few books that way over the years).* Other professions have their own ways of viewing the world and responding accordingly.

Take real estate executives and developers, for example. They’ve learned through the years that if opposition exists to an individual project, many times the solution is to just ignore it. They work behind the scenes, get the proper approvals, then build. When the project is completed and everyone is enjoying the building and its amenities, they’ll forget all about the small minority (or, perhaps, majority) that were against the deal. Throw in a park, or a playground, maybe a library—just get the damn thing built.

This strategy works most of the time … when it’s a real estate deal.

When it’s not, however, such as when a developer has a labor dispute or lawsuit, a divorce, or has gone into other businesses where there is no beautiful new office building or senior community at the end of the road. You need a different set of skills when dealing with these sorts of crises.

You could also look at business executives who are trained as engineers. Engineers have their own mindset, their own way of looking at particular situations. Engineers tend to divorce the human element from the process of problem-solving altogether. It’s all about process and finding the flaw in the mechanism that is causing the problem.

Consider the analysis by Malcom Gladwell in a 2015 New Yorker article on the problem with engineers in responding to the Toyota sudden acceleration crisis of 2009. The empirical evidence gathered by the engineers at Toyota seemed to indicate that the problem was not widespread and was often caused by the driver accidently depressing the gas pedal rather than the brake:

“The Toyota guy explained this to the [safety] panel,” Martin went on. “He said, ‘Here’s our process.’ So I said to him, ‘What do you imagine the people are thinking? They’re shaking like a leaf at the side of the road and after that whole experience they are told, “The car’s fine. Chill out. Don’t make mistakes anymore.” Of course they are not going to be happy. These people are scared. What if instead you sent people out who could be genuinely empathetic? What if you said, “We’re sorry this happened. What we’re worried about is your comfort and your confidence and your safety. We’re going to check your car. If you’re just scared of this car, we’ll take it back and give you another, because your feeling of confidence matters more than anything else.”’ It was a sort of revelation. He wasn’t a dumb guy. He was an engineer. He only thought about doing things from an engineer’s standpoint. They changed what those teams did, and they started getting love letters from people.”1

What about Political Consultants?

For many people, perceptions related to crisis communications are often intertwined with the field of political and campaign communications. Consider the 2015 Sandra Bullock movie, Our Brand Is Crisis, which tells the story of mercenary political consultants running a political campaign in South America, or an article from the Washington Post, published around the same time that described “How Washington became the nation’s busiest training ground for scandal PR.”2 To say nothing of the popular TV series Scandal, in which the crisis communications consultant, Olivia Pope, is in bed with the political world … quite literally.

It is true that some who tread the political minefield are well suited to crisis communications—including my good friend and colleague, Eric Rose, who will give you his opinions on the topic toward the end of this book. Indeed, many of the top professionals in crisis communications have backgrounds in politics, but it is important for organizations and their advisers to realize that a crisis is not the same as political campaign. The skills and tactics of the political consultant, therefore, do not necessarily transfer well to crisis or litigation communication.

True, political campaigns experience crises every day—the mud is constantly being slung—and many, both inside and outside the field, might think: “What better training could there be for crisis response? Who better to know how to deal with make-or-break situations than a political person?” Consider the following:

  • The audiences in a crisis are more targeted and segmented—customers, employees, vendors, neighbors, the investment community, and so forth—and therefore have specific, often differing, individual needs. And while the goal of campaign communications may be to win 51 percent of the vote, this is not so in crisis communications, where the goals are far more nuanced and there is no election-day “finish line.”
  • Although many politicos believe that every attack requires a response, this is often not true with crises. Decisions must be made about how serious the situation is and what level of response, if any, to make. Moreover, political and government communications often involve having a “message of the day.” Demanding a constant flow of messaging in response to a crisis can often make things worse—you may attract more attention to an issue that, with the proper management, can be put behind you quietly. It is important to remember as well that while most political campaigns have a dedicated press corps that must report on something related to the campaign on a daily basis, the same is likely not true on the crisis communications front. If you respond to every attack or spin a “message of the day” related to the matter, you may be fanning the flames of a crisis that would otherwise die of its own accord.
  • As mentioned above, while political campaigns build momentum to an end point (the election), crises can be much shorter-lived or can ebb and flow with outside events and with little real sense as to when the issue will ultimately simmer down.

All of this is not to say that an adept government or political professional can make the proper adjustments to go from political to crisis work, but this takes work and an understanding that the two disciplines are, in many ways, quite different.

Danger occurs when the political consultant approaches crisis communications as another political campaign—like the surgeon we discussed earlier who views every health issue as a problem to which surgery is the solution. (As the old saying goes: When you own a hammer, everything is a nail!) Executed improperly, campaign techniques are often exactly the type of “in your face” tactics that ensure a crisis gains momentum or receives more attention than it should.

There are many experienced political consultants who do an excellent job transitioning to the crisis communications field from the political realm. However, just like with the good lawyers, it takes the ability of the individual to step back and understand the particular intricacies of responding publicly to a crisis and how the response differs from that of a political campaign. This is something that organizations must be careful of when considering both the consultants involved in their crisis communications effort and the tactics undertaken when a negative event threatens the reputation and ultimately the business of your organization.

So Who, Jim … Who?

Now that I’ve described who the Chief Crisis Officer isn’t … who is it? Is he or she a lawyer? A PR practitioner? Someone else within the organization—perhaps at the executive level or on the CEO’s staff? There must be some generally accepted definition we can use.

If only it were that simple. The take-away is that the perfect Chief Crisis Officer is less evidenced by title than by style—the way the individual deals with others in the organization, the facts and issues, and a flurry of unexpected events.

True, in most cases the Chief Crisis Officer might be in the PR or public affairs department. These professionals are natural communicators after all (it is hoped, anyway); therefore, they are ideally suited for such a role. In other cases, the Chief Crisis Officer might be a lawyer—not usually the General Counsel, but rather an assistant General Counsel with experience in dealing with these types of public-facing issues, or a lawyer with a background in media, writing, communications, or some other relevant discipline. In still other cases, the Chief Crisis Officer might emerge from the executive offices of a corporate or nonprofit organization, such as a White House Chief of Staff. The selection of a Chief Crisis Officer often depends on the organization and structure with which you are dealing.

Let me give you a few examples.

Imagine you are a member of a three-person PR staff in a half-billion-dollar company in the real estate industry. Your PR department’s days are spent dealing with issues related to real estate development openings, leases, amenities, and other announcements that might be of interest to potential tenants, development partners, or owners. You may spend some time writing speeches for the CEO, directing the development of website offerings, or managing social media. You spend your day handling public relations activities related to these areas. You are extremely good at a very sophisticated job, but it is a totally different set of skills than those needed for crisis communications.

Now imagine you are in the public affairs department of a government agency or working as a senior aide to a political figure. Each day brings a new issue that must be confronted. Many of these issues, or perhaps most, cannot be anticipated. They spring up when you least expect them. For example, a leading civic advocate hosts a press conference decrying some public action that your boss has taken, or a local rival is on the attack.

You deal with these issues, day in and day out, on behalf of your boss. It’s about 50 percent of your job, in addition to writing speeches, announcing good news, and arranging media coverage of meetings in the community. Are you a good candidate for Chief Crisis Officer? More than likely, yes.

Let’s go back to that real estate firm. You may not find the right candidate for Chief Crisis Officer in the three-person PR department that deals with events, the announcement of development milestones and the preparation of brochures and website copy. But let’s now walk across the hall to the legal department. Who are your lawyers? Is there a lawyer on your team with a background in media or PR? Do your lawyers deal with complex and suddenly erupting permitting and regulatory issues? Adversaries filing lawsuits to fight the development of certain projects? Rival developers, making quick announcements that threaten a project or other business interests?

Or perhaps the ideal candidate is in the CEO’s office. Let’s check out the Chief of Staff for the head of the company. Is he or she the one who handles the tough stuff—the difficult and complex issues that need to be handled? Like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, is he or she the person in the organization that handles “every dirty job that comes along”? If so, this person may be the right candidate at this particular company.

In sum: The person in your organization who is ideal for the role of Chief Crisis Officer should depend not on that person’s title, but on a particular set of abilities, temperament, and experience.

Writing and Communication Skills

Let’s now talk about writing and similar communications skills needed by your Chief Crisis Officer, particularly the skills of your PR people, who are naturally considered your front-row candidates for Chief Crisis Officer. Yes, they’re communicators, but does your PR candidate only write in one style? Can she or he only do product announcements and events, or the arrangement of the latest satellite media tour? Is this the type of person who sees everything as a 6- to 12-month PR program rather than a distinct series of events requiring a rapid or nuanced response? Can this PR person work only with good news?

In other words, no matter how good a writer the individual is, you need to ask this question: What is this person’s ability to deal with unexpected, complex, and explosive issues? Is her or she able to handle the curveball or—to torture a different sports metaphor—the situation that changes the playing field and requires a shift in the way the defense is laid out?

In many organizations, you find workers in fields that include public relations, legal, and even the executive ranks who just don’t handle unexpected events well. They struggle. They start each day with a list of what they’re going to accomplish, and, by God, they stick to it. There’s no room for sudden improvisation, no room for change. I have a friend, for example, who is an extremely talented marketing executive, a great worker. Supremely organized. We joke that he has a binder for everything. Binders at work. Binders at home. Buying a new car? Binder. Outdoor grill? Binder. Family vacation? Big binder. He is the most diligent researcher you never want to meet, but if the problem doesn’t fit into one of those binders, he doesn’t want to hear it. Uncertainty can create a lot of problems in an otherwise superior professional such as this.

So despite his obvious skills, not a great candidate for the crisis communications field. A company’s Chief Crisis Officer must be able to deal with the unexpected, because no matter the crisis—whether it is an event-driven crisis or a more drawn-out crisis like high-profile litigation or a government investigation—the unexpected has to be expected.

If your Chief Crisis Officer doesn’t have the right set of skills, he or she may not be the right person regardless of their otherwise excellent traits.

Letting the World Know Who’s in Charge

Having read the above, you may already know a person in your organization who fits the role of Chief Crisis Officer. In fact, perhaps there’s already someone who, de facto, assumes the role of Chief Crisis Officer when issues arise, because he or she is so darn good at it. They are your go-to person. They have the skill set; they just haven’t been given the title. Is this your Chief Crisis Officer? Yes.

But the fact is this: Unless the Chief Crisis Officer is clearly identified in an organization, he or she won’t develop the skills, and the team, to be effective. An ad hoc system where one individual is identified … sometimes … maybe … in certain situations … well, that’s just not going to work. Situations where there are two, three, or more crisis leaders who a CEO or other senior executives turn to when a crisis hits can also be problematic—sometimes it’s the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), other times the General Counsel, and other times the head of public relations. In each of these cases, no one person develops the skills and expertise, the authority, and team to do the job successfully. This is why clearly identifying a single Chief Crisis Officer for an organization is so important.

More Specific Skills

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

—Michael Jordan

Getting even more specific, let’s look at a few other characteristics that are vital in your Chief Crisis Officer. The ideal Chief Crisis Officer:

Here’s my point: for better or worse, the Chief Crisis Officer is often the McDonald’s fry cook of the PR world. You’re working under extremely tight time frames, and the customers are watching you all time. You’ve got your frozen patties, your timers, your procedures manual, and your training to help you to do things faster and more efficiently—and when the rush is on, you must deliver.

Chief Crisis Officer as “Point Guard”

Having opened this section with a quote from Michael Jordan, let’s develop the basketball analogy a little further. In the context of the Chief Crisis Officer, you’ll often hear people refer to having someone in place to “quarterback” the response effort when a crisis event or other sensitive issue confronts an organization, but I think the most apt analogy is that of a “point guard” in basketball. The skills that make a basketball player a good point guard are particularly applicable to those needed in the role of Chief Crisis Officer.

First, for those of you who have never played basketball or followed the sport closely, let me describe the role of a point guard. Simply, a point guard is the player who directs the offense on the court. The point guard’s job is to know the playbook by heart, assess the situation before him or her, and look for opportunities. At times, this means taking the ball to the hoop themselves, and at other times, it means passing off to another player in the best position to score. Sometimes called the “on-court general,” the point guard—while usually the smallest player on the court—is often the most important to success.

Point guards dictate the tempo of the game by how they bring the ball up the court and what they do with it when they get into the action. They have one eye on the defense, another on the shot clock. They are thinking about where they are in the game, how many time-outs both teams have, and the matchups in front of them. Point guards need shooting skills certainly, but more importantly, they need passing skills, ball-handling skills, decision-making ability under pressure, and what is known as “court vision”—the ability to see the entire situation unfolding before making a decision on which play to run.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In many ways, the perfect Chief Crisis Officer is like a point guard. Consider the following:

A high-profile crisis will usually be a negative experience for everyone involved. You are going to take your hits. The only question is how hard, how long, and to what effect? Media coverage can ebb and flow over weeks and months—sometimes years for those crises with a “long tail.” In more drawn-out crises like investigations and litigation, facts and evidence develop over time, and today’s devastating news coverage can be overcome if the Chief Crisis Officer and his or her team remain steadfast in their messages, themes, and commitment to ensure that the public understands their side of the story. Organizations that give up after one bad story are playing for a single game and not for a winning season.

Groupthink Immunity

Let’s throw in one final qualification that I feel is important to an effective Chief Crisis Officer: He or she must be attuned to, and push back against, any knee-jerk reliance on groupthink and “going through the motion” responses when confronting a crisis or other negative reputational situations. This is a theme we will come back to when discussing crisis communication messaging, but when considering who should be your Chief Crisis Officer, it’s advice worth reinforcing.

So be wary of conventional wisdom, as it is often wrong. Test common suppositions you and your company have about the ways in which you operate in a crisis, including the planning and the execution. I’ve worked with organizations of all sizes for nearly 25 years, and I can tell you that one of the most common mistakes I see involves executives, in-house lawyers, and outside counsel who fall back on clichés, easy answers, and rote responses when confronting complex crisis matters. This road is easier in the short-term, but it is often not the road to success. I’ve seen too many smart people at too many large organizations go with what they think is the safe choice—the way things have always been done—without really thinking through the ramifications of this decision on this particular situation, and whether things can be done better. Learn from the past, of course, and replicate what has worked where you find it, but a knee-jerk, “because that’s the way we’ve always done it …” is not a strategy.

The Core Crisis Communications Team

Okay. So now that we’ve identified the key qualifications for your Chief Crisis Officer, we will examine the experience and skills needed by the core crisis communications team that will work with the Chief Crisis Officer to ensure the best possible crisis response protocol for your organization.

You learned earlier in this chapter that this team should be small, but how small?

In my estimation, for most crises, the core crisis communications team should consist of a maximum of six to eight members from various disciplines throughout the company, all with the ability to reach across organizational barriers as needed to get the job done. In other words, the members of your core crisis team shouldn’t be those who are beholden to a single division, department, function, or stakeholder group. In their role on the core crisis communications team, they are working for the team, not their own departmental interests.

Who are these people? Again, every organization is different.

Many members will have individual qualifications similar to those of the Chief Crisis Officer, particularly when it comes to character and temperament. Team members should not be afraid to take bold action, but they should be sensitive enough to know when and when not to take action. They should believe in the power of communication to alter the course of events during a crisis. They should also be willing to take the heat from others in the organization who may second-guess them at every step.

Like the Chief Crisis Officer, members of the core crisis communications team must understand how to play chess on a three-dimensional chessboard, across several different levels at the same time, while keeping their eyes on reaction to the crisis from media, employees, the investment community, customers, and more. As with the Chief Crisis Officer, it’s a tall order.

Let’s assume six to eight members. Depending on the particular type of company, I would lay out something similar to the following:

That’s it. This is your core team. This is the team who should work together on both the creation of the crisis plan and on coordinating execution when a crisis occurs.

This doesn’t mean they are the only people who will be involved during a crisis. Depending on the crisis, you will likely add ancillary members to this core team—this should be delineated in your crisis plan. For example, if it involves a product of the company, an adjunct member of the crisis communications team could be someone from that particular product division (but only one person, not six!). Similarly, if the crisis involves an employment lawsuit, someone from the human resources department and/or an internal or external employment lawyer might be added to the team.

In all instances, the core team remains the same. This is your SWAT team, your strike force, your Seal Team 6: the core six to eight people tasked with maintaining crisis response readiness in good times and bad.

And to maintain that readiness, you team should be meeting regularly—on a monthly basis, at least—to assess the crisis communications plan and various scenarios that may be on the horizon. They should also coordinate training for the entire organization once or twice a year. They should review the latest intelligence, examples, and best practices in crisis communications response, both in their industry and in others (because it’s amazing how many examples you can find from other industries that apply to your own).

In addition, the team should continually update contacts and crisis response materials, as well as evaluate and update website assets and coordinate the social media team as needed.

It’s a lot of work. Hence, the core team must meet on a regular basis, not just once a year or when the budget allows for an updated crisis communications plan—to ensure these things are not forgotten. It’s just smart risk management.

And it’s the Chief Crisis Officer’s role to ensure that the team does meet on a regular basis, does stay abreast of the latest trends in crisis response, and does update the crisis plan regularly to ensure it’s a living, usable document and not a stuffy binder sitting on a shelf. (We’ll learn more about this particular problem in the next chapter.)

“But Jim,” you say, “we have enough to do right now, and—let me tell you—budgets are already tight! Now you want to create a new team solely for the purpose of responding to crises that maybe will never occur? Seems like a luxury, and quite frankly, given all the changes in our industry and the economy, it sounds like a luxury my organization can’t afford!”

Fair enough, but in the words of the old AAMCO transmission television commercial I grew up on: You can pay me now, or pay me later. (Beep, beep!)

On to the Plan!

Now that we have this great team together, we must get them to work. In the next chapter, we will look at crisis communications planning—the first task your Chief Crisis Officer and core crisis communications team should undertake—and how to perform this planning to ensure it adds value when the inevitable crisis occurs.

Action Points

* Interestingly, however, as in all areas, technological changes on the battlefield are not without their own challenges. Consider: New technologies certainly enabled a powerful revolution to occur in military capabilities, allowing senior commanders to see the battlefield up close though miles—or even continents—away. But these new technologies have also enabled old trends of command interference, even taking them to new extremes of micromanagement. Too frequently, apparently, generals at a distance use technology to insert themselves into matters formerly handled by those on the scene and at ranks several layers of command below them. “It’s like crack [cocaine] for generals,” says Chuck Kamps, a professor of joint warfare at the Air Command and Staff College speaking of battlefield-viewing technology. “It gives them an unprecedented ability to meddle in mission commanders’ jobs.” Peter Singer, “Tactical Generals: Leaders, Technology, and the Perils,” Air & Space Power Journal, Summer 2009.

* I speak from experience: Even as I write these words, I’m sure there are a dozen or so executives, colleagues, and competitors second-guessing every decision I’ve made this week. C’est la vie!

* For a deeper look at the difference between lawyers and PR people, two obvious pools where candidates for the role of Chief Crisis Officer might be found, check out Chapter 6 of my book, In the Court of Public Opinion.