In this episode, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, along with Senior Consultant Jen Otremba, discuss the makeup of a corporate crisis management team and how important selecting the right talent and skills can be to the overall success of your program.
Topics covered include forming a corporate crisis management team, emotional intelligence, procuring the right skill sets for the team, and the need for a unified approach involving all different types of disruptions that your organization could face.
Episode Transcript:
| Bryan Strawser: | [inaudible 00:00:22] the first podcast, which you had not, I don’t think, you weren’t a part of the first one. But I talked about this idea of having a crisis framework. The background there was that everybody always would call. Clients would always call and say, “I need to have crisis plans. I need to have plans because of active shooter, for a power outage,” and for whatever. I would always steer them to, plans are fine but that’s not really what you need. If you’ve never thought through this, you need a framework. How do you make decisions? How do you communicate the results of those decisions? How do you get the stakeholders …
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Right.
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| Bryan Strawser: | … at the table?
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Who’s responsible for the final say in something?
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| Bryan Strawser: | Who’s gonna make the decision? How do you escalate a decision? So, we wanna talk a little more about that idea today because we were having some discussions with some clients recently and partners, around, who should be at the table? I mean, who needs to be there?
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| Jennifer Otremba: | And if they’re there, what is their role?
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| Bryan Strawser: | What’s their role?
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| Jennifer Otremba: | What’s expected of them.
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| Bryan Strawser: | I think, one of the really difficult things to think about as you’re building a crisis management process in a company, in a non-profit or a private sector organization is, you’re gonna have this crisis management team and in a crisis, however you decide to define it, somebody’s gonna be in charge, so to speak, of managing that process. But they’re not necessarily in charge of the crisis. Right? Or are they?
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Well they could be. I guess it would depend on how it was set up. In our previous experiences I’ve seen it done a few ways but you could have Incident Manager for instance, that would be responsible for bringing all the appropriate parties together. They would need to know enough about the incident. To know who to call and who to talk to and who to bring to the table. Then once they’re to the table, it’s that group to sort of make the decisions as to what happens next.
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| Bryan Strawser: | In our world, what we typically bring our clients to is, look at everything that could be a major disruption to your company at that enterprise level. It should filter into one crisis management process, right? We think about financial crises, reputational crises, executive misconduct or serious HR issue. Then we have all the things that we typically think of as a big crises. Data breach information, security event.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | A hurricane.
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| Bryan Strawser: | National disasters.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | … nor’easter storm.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Active shooter. A physical security.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | A bomb.
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| Bryan Strawser: | And, at that enterprise level, we coach our clients through … We’re gonna deal with this in the same consistent way every time, regardless of what the underlying cause is. You may have slightly different people at the table sometimes, but, we’re gonna deal with it. We’re gonna make the decisions through the same process. We’re gonna escalate things to executives and to the board in the same manner.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | When it reaches a certain threshold …
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | … certain decisions will need to be made.
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| Bryan Strawser: | I think we have a number of folks who have really struggled with that. I know at our former employer, when we worked together, we had a lot of struggles around reputational crisis versus everything else. How do you put all of that into one kind of process? Where your executives are used to seeing the same communication, the same collaborative decision making process, it’s all done together. But, the folks running the crisis, your crisis manager may not own the situation. If it’s reputational it’s probably your COMS-PR team. If it’s a misconduct problem it’s probably your general counsel and your HR team. If it’s a data breach, it’s probably your IT org, your C-cell and your general counsel.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Right. And there’s things like natural disaster which may encompass a bunch of things.
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| Bryan Strawser: | But we always encourage these to be done in a collaborative way. In a typical company, who needs to be in the room for this kind of crisis management team? Who needs to be there? What have you seen that’s been effective?
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| Jennifer Otremba: | I would say there’s usually the usual … Usually the usual.
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| Bryan Strawser: | The usual suspects.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | There’s the usual suspects, right? You’re always gonna have someone that’s going to represent the human factor, the HR …
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| Bryan Strawser: | HR.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | … partners. You’re usually gonna have, maybe a facilities person, depending on what kind of situation it is.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Facilities, property management. What ever you call it.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Right. You might have travel partners involved, in the event that you have this happening somewhere where you have business but the company’s not there and you have to get people home from there. So there may be a whole slew of people but, like you said it earlier with crisis [col-ms 00:05:05] they typically will come to the table as well.
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| Bryan Strawser: | You need lawyers.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | You need lawyers.
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| Bryan Strawser: | You’re going to need legal advice.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | You are.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Even in a routine situation.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | You potentially will need physical security folks.
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| Bryan Strawser: | You’re gonna need physical security. You’re gonna need your technology team. Maybe technology’s affected, maybe it’s not but they need to be there as a part of this.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Yeah and maybe they don’t need to be there for everything but that can be predetermined. When certain situations happen, we’re gonna call these specific people.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right. We’ve seen crisis teams, crisis management teams for companies up to 25, 30 people. Because you’re dealing with a fortune, 25 organization and there’s lots of moving parts and you need this representation. Although, we do encourage, as you’re putting teams together to figure out where in the organization should you draw the line on, this is the type of person, the level of person that we want to have engaged in this.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Right. What specific skill-sets …
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | … we’re gonna need? So it wouldn’t be every HR partner, person that would maybe be valuable but, a crisis HR person, would be more likely the person that you’d wanna take …
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| Bryan Strawser: | If you have such a thing.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | … If you have such a thing.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Many companies don’t.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Or at least someone that has schooled themselves on those types of scenarios and what they can do in those situations.
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| Bryan Strawser: | HR’s a good example. I mean, your HR organization could be made up of labor relations, employee relations, HR generalist, HR operations, pay and benefits. So you have all these different HR disciplines and you’re gonna pick somebody, corporately to represent the whole HR org …
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Right.
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| Bryan Strawser: | … and be a part of that process.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Yep. Or, for instance facilities. You’re gonna have somebody who’s able to make decisions for the facilities folks. Somebody who can actually make those decisions and make things happen. So, for instance, if you’re asking for generators to be moved to a location because you know a big storm is coming. You need someone at the table that can make that happen.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Which actually brings to an interesting point that, the folks that are a part of this need to have certain authorities delegated to them by their most senior executive in their organization, in their pyramid, right? Those authorities should be documented, like what is the scope of decision making authority that they have and what do we do when we need to exceed whatever that authority is?
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Yeah. What’s the process?
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| Bryan Strawser: | What’s the process? By doing that we also advise that you have pre-approvals for certain strategies that might cost money. You mentioned generators. We came from a retail environment where sending generators to retail locations was part of what we did, all the time in advance of a storm or disruption that we saw coming and in response to something that had happened that was more of a no-notice event. But we didn’t have to call and ask permission because that was all documented that if these triggers are hit and the facilities leader has blessed this, then we’re gonna deploy that equipment and it was done in the course of, the normal course of business.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Right. Or, another example would be technology. If you have to go to another data center, who has the authority to do that? Make that decision?
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| Bryan Strawser: | If you have to fail over or make a decision like that.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Right. So those are some of the big examples just off the top of my head of who maybe could be at the table and what kinds of skill-sets they should bring with them.
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| Bryan Strawser: | I think we were probably thinking maybe a little corporately with this but you also wanna have whatever your business lines are. We came from, as I mentioned, we come from a retail environment so stores and distribution were big parts of the crisis management process at our former employer. But your business lines might be different and so you would bring those operations teams in as a component of that.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | You could make the same parallel at education centers for instance. Or, hospitals, or any other organization that’s gonna be dealing with some kind of disaster, if you will.
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| Bryan Strawser: | One great example, we’re building the crisis management process right now for a major university that has multiple campuses. The campus operations team that is responsible for running the campuses. They’re not teaching the classes but they’re running the administrative side of managing buildings and students and faculty and all of that. They’re the driver, right? It’s their world that is going to recover those campuses in a disruption. The faculty just use the campuses to deliver the education to students in that situation.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Right.
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| Bryan Strawser: | So the operations teams are critical.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | In their world, what would you say some of the challenges they have with bringing teams together to get things done?
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| Bryan Strawser: | One of the challenges there is that they just never had this process, right? So this whole idea of, “I should back up” … The way that they were thinking about crisis is it’s got to be the worst case scenario, right? Like, their entire impetus originally for their crisis management process was, “Look we’re a regulated academic environment, where we have to give notice to students of really bad stuff and we have to do it in real-time. An active shooter is as bad as it’s going to get for us.” Their whole process was around, “I’ve gotta be able to lock-down. I’ve gotta be able to do run-hide-fight as a strategy. And I’ve gotta be able to send the emergency notification so that the federal government doesn’t fine me.” Those were all admirable and important things, except that that’s a really rare event.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | It’s extremely rare.
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| Bryan Strawser: | It’s a very rare event, and, so they found themselves … Where this took them was they found themselves in the following situation. Last year Hurricane Matthew comes ashore in North Carolina and there were, let’s say there were eight to nine campus locations that were impacted by this. None of which were huge but it’s a pretty significant portion of their student population. And, there was no process to deal with a crisis on that scale. The impact here was entering campuses closed for 48 hours, not that big of a deal but you have to prepare for it and you have to account for your team and account for your student population. Then, you need to be able to put a process in place to recover the facilities and get them back up and running in the post storm environment.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Right. So, just because they closed doesn’t mean the job is done, right? What happens to all of those people that maybe were on campus at the time of this happening?
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| Bryan Strawser: | Building the process of, who needs to be at the table? How do you get them together? How do you facilitate this? We went through the same struggles as we do every time this situation comes up in that we had to help them think about, “Okay, look the crisis management people on our team are the ones who are going to drive this and you’re gonna be there and you’re gonna be at the table and you’re gonna be a part of the decision making process. But, we’re gonna drive it because that’s how we’re gonna manage every crisis situation.”
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| Jennifer Otremba: | But we’re gonna need your help.
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| Bryan Strawser: | But we’re gonna need your help.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | We’re gonna need your participation.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right. Fortunately, everybody was really open to doing that but it had to be made up on the fly during Hurricane Matthew ’cause it simply didn’t exist. These are things that you have to do. You have to have them in place and you have to practice them as you go along.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Must have turned it in to a much more stressful situation than needed be.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right. The other challenge with … So you think about getting the right people together and you’re putting this crisis management team together. The other challenge is, not just having the right organizations at the table but having the right people together. Emotional intelligence and the ability to deal with rapidly changing stressful situation is a really important set of skills for somebody to have to work on a crisis management team. Even, if this is just something they do in an activation of your plan.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | That’s right. Not everyone has that skill-set, and that’s okay. But that’s really important in that situation so that you don’t have these leaders that are expected to make decisions at the table that choke. They can’t make the decision under that much pressure.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Or they just can’t handle the situation at all.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | That much change that’s happening very quickly.
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| Bryan Strawser: | Right. There’s a story that, one of my friends who was involved in a public sector emergency management, in law enforcement had told me about an individual that they were grooming in their agency to be kind of the major incident commander and lead through these situations. When they found themselves in the city’s greatest disaster, in their history, a few years ago, where there were fatalities and it was a major natural disaster situation. There were fatalities and lots of other things going on, part of this, that the guy just simply could not handle the stress and was actually creating more disruption in the command center than he was solving and driving. They had to basically boot him and then send him on to a different career path within the agency because running an emergency was not in his skill-set. Was not in his wheelhouse.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | I think we both have run into situations where we’ve dealt with people like that. That maybe were incapable, at least at the time, to deal with the stress associated with what’s going on in an [e-mer-g-ent 00:14:25] situation.
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| Bryan Strawser: | So it calls for the need for good selection processes, that’s a part of this and good partnership in the event that there’s a mismatch with people. Then, it also calls into question the need to have good realistic exercises with your crisis team but that’s a conversation for another episode.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | That’s right.
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| Bryan Strawser: | We’ll wrap up here. Thanks everybody for listening. We look forward to our next episode.
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| Jennifer Otremba: | Thank you.
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