January 21, 2025 • 48 mins
In our latest episode of Your Work Friends, we dive into the art and science of crisis communications with expert Anne-Marie Squeo. From understanding what qualifies as a crisis to mastering the first 24 hours, this conversation is packed with actionable insights for leaders, teams, and anyone navigating turbulent times.
What you’ll learn:
✅ How to recognize and define a crisis
✅ Why the first 24 hours are critical—and what to do during them
✅ The role of transparency and trust in managing stakeholders
✅ How company culture shapes crisis responses
✅ Real-life scenarios of effective crisis management
✅ The power of courageous leadership in the toughest moments
Anne-Marie brings decades of experience to help you stay calm under pressure, communicate effectively, and come out stronger on the other side. Plus, she shares a wild story about a blimp, a beaver and avoiding I-95.
Whether you’re a leader, communicator, or just curious about navigating high-stakes moments, this episode is for you.
About Anne Marie:
Anne Marie is the CEO of Proof Point Communications. Her career has taken her to the top of the corporate communications and marketing world, as well as business journalism. While at the Wall Street Journal, she earned the Pulitzer Prize and the Gerald R. Loeb Award, two of journalism’s highest honors. She later became the Chief Brand and Communications Officer of a Fortune 500 company and was named to the Forbes CMO Next list and PRWeek’s Hall of Femme in 2021. She successfully led Netflix’s secret launch of 130 countries in 2016; managed communications for IBM’s technology portfolio including AI, blockchain and cloud; and launched the brand-defining “Make Now Work” campaign for Xerox. She’s served on executive leadership teams, directly supported CEOs and other C-suite executives, successfully managed major crises, executed winning strategies and built high-performing teams from the ground up.
Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
But it wasn't three hours later, when I was getting
my car to drive to work, that Igot an urgent phone call that
the blimp was about to crash andit was rush hour.
It was Pennsylvania I-95 was inits path.
I was like, oh, jesus Christgoing on mel what's up?
Speaker 3 (00:32):
what's up?
Um, I have good news, you havegood news, I like it.
You know, I do starting uh,next week the sun sets at 5 pm
oh.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Oh, my gosh, I'm telling you during the winter
nuts, nuts, winter nuts.
What, what is on my mind Duringthe winter nuts?
With my sweaty balls, duringthe winter months, I become a
bear.
I am just like oh, it's 7o'clock, I'm going to get my
jams.
It is not good, listen same.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
It has been getting dark at like around, like
November-ish December.
It starts getting dark at 3 pm.
It's unacceptable.
Is it 11?
I have my slippers on, oh mygosh.
Well, we were incredibly luckyto sit down with Anne-Marie
(01:25):
Sgueo today, who is an expert incrisis communications.
She is the CEO and founder ofProofpoint Communications.
She's a strategic brandingcommunications and crisis PR
maven.
She's also a Pulitzer winningbusiness journalist, and two
words to describe her battleproven.
(01:46):
What did you take away fromthis conversation?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
I love crisis communications.
I think it's just a fascinatingtopic about how companies and
how people respond to crisis,and there was a lot that
Anne-Marie shared that lookedreally under the hood around how
this all works withinorganizations, how decisions are
made and, honestly, what goodlooks like.
(02:12):
That I did not know and I thinkis really, really eye-opening
for anybody listening.
What did you think, mel?
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Absolutely agree.
If you're a leader in anorganization, you're going to
find this episode extremelyuseful and helpful.
She gave some pretty clear tipson.
This is how you show up andthis is how you pull through and
come together.
So with that, here's Anne-Mariewe are so excited to have you
(02:54):
join us today on your WorkFriends, and I'm going to jump
right in with a headline thatcame out from Axios and I want
to get your thoughts.
They said CEOs are enjoying ahot speech.
Winter, when we're speaking outin outrageous ways, carries no
cost and we know recently we sawthe UnitedHealthcare CEO not
(03:15):
really dealing well withcritical crisis and Mark
Zuckerberg's comments on the JoeRogan podcast on how that's
impacting meta.
What are your thoughts on thatstatement?
Speaker 1 (03:24):
podcast on how that's impacting meta.
What are your thoughts on thatstatement?
There's always a cost.
The question is how you'remeasuring it.
We'll go back to UnitedHealthcare.
I think Zuck's comments are,frankly, just bizarre and I keep
wondering what his wife thinks.
But a lot of my friends havegone off threads.
They've gone off Instagram andclosed their Facebook accounts.
(03:46):
There's a critical piece tothis in terms of has no cost,
right.
One of the things that I've beenthinking a lot about is, you
know, when Jeff Bezos pisses usall off and you know, we're like
I'm not using Amazon anymore.
I'm just I'm not, and I triedthis.
Actually I tried this for acouple of months last year and
it's really hard.
(04:06):
So if you're addicted to theproduct or service and you have
been for the last five yearsthen it's probably unlikely
you're going to get unaddicted.
But if it's more marginal inyour existence, so the
Washington Post subscription,that is like the eighth thing I
read any day.
(04:27):
I can live without that Right.
So I mean, I think that it'sgoing to be hard for CEOs to say
there's no cost, because forsome it might appear that way
because their product or serviceis so essential to our lives
that most of us can't imaginewe'd be punishing ourselves if
we cut it off.
But if you don't fall in thatcategory and most people don't
(04:53):
then there are going to berepercussions for doing things
that piss off 50% or more ofyour customers, subscribers,
whatever.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Yeah, I think Francesca and I were talking
about this before the sessionand one of the things we both
agreed on was there's maybe fivepeople, I think Francesca you
said, who have a few money to beable to not have a cost to
their statements.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, I mean again, most CEOs, I think, measure the
cost financially.
But bad reputations have badfinancial implications and they
might not happen immediately.
But one thing that I think thatis a mid-term kind of outcome
of, say, meta's CEO's commentsis you're already seeing blue
(05:41):
sky and all these competitorscome up and they're going to get
better.
Just like threads stepped in topick up where Twitter X left
off, someone's going to step inand pick up where both of those
guys left off and run away withit.
And the eyeballs and theadvertising money Don't count
too soon.
I wouldn't count my chickensbefore they're hatched, because
(06:04):
it might not be that the nextthree months are impacted, but
the next 12 months may well beas alternatives come to bear.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
It's so fun to watch.
There's, I imagine, in yourarea, someone's always in crisis
and, to your very good point,you started this by saying going
through the Trumpadministration, every
organization is going to be incrisis because of all the change
that's going on.
And I'm curious about how doyou define either like a PR
crisis or crisis communications?
For those that don't know aboutthis topic, what is it?
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Oh, this is a great question because, you know, I've
definitely worked places wherethe CEO or senior leaders
thought everything was a crisis,you know.
So if we're not included in astory, it's a crisis, and if we
are included in a negative story, it's a crisis, and you know, I
(06:59):
think that all of us in theindustry have to kind of set a
barometer for what actuallyrequires a crisis response, and
that's an important conversationand level setting that needs to
happen in every organization,because if you, the
communications team, are notaligned or at least educating
your leaders about what makesthe cut for when we're going
(07:20):
into crisis mode, you will spendyour entire day and night and
weekends fighting fires that arenot important and you'll never
get to the good stuff and theimportant stuff.
So I think, if it's a realcrisis, francesca, I think it's
got real reputational andfinancial implications for a
(07:42):
company and businessimplications.
So you are a railroad companyand your railroad went off the
tracks in Ohio and potentiallypoisoned an entire community
with toxic things that came outof the cars.
You've got a crisis and it'sgoing to potentially result in
regulatory repercussions,punitive government, punitive
(08:06):
repercussions, lawsuits,environmental related issues.
That is a legitimate crisis.
I would say things that noone's going to be talking about
in 24 or 48 hours, not a crisis.
So I think, by definition, acrisis is going to be longer
than 48 hours.
You may feel like it's a crisisin the moment, but if it's
(08:27):
going away and no one's going toremember it in a year, it
wasn't a crisis.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
I'm curious about that timing right, I mean within
48 hours.
If no one's going to be talkingabout it, it's not a crisis.
I'm curious on the other aspectof that because, especially
with social media, the first 24hours of a crisis, or that after
something happens, the trainderails and spills chemicals,
the LA wildfires are happening,UnitedHealthcare CEO gets shot,
(08:55):
the BP oil spill that first 24hours seems like it's so
critical.
And then, especially withsocial media, the speed of which
information gets put out intothe ether.
How important is the first 24hours If you've identified that
this is in fact a crisis?
How important is that first 24hours as an organization?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
It's very important to establish trust and
confidence in whatever comesnext.
I think the challenge of thefirst 24 hours in some of these
situations is you don't reallyknow a lot in that first 24
hours, right, whether it's anoil spill, a plane crash, a
(09:37):
derailment, a cyber attack, Imean there's some stuff you know
, but there's so very much thatyou do not know and you won't
know for a while.
But you have to establish thekind of connected tissue that
you're going to need in thissituation and whether you're
going to be viewed as someonewho's withholding information or
(10:01):
going to be forthcoming whenyou can be information or going
to be forthcoming when you canbe.
And the challenge, of course,in social media things tend to
move much more quickly.
You know, like years ago, right, like you know, we didn't know
when there was a crisis untilthe news came out the next day.
So I mean, you guys might betoo young to remember that, but
I mean now everything's likepeople might know about it on
(10:22):
social media before even thecompany is aware that something
happened.
So it creates both benefits anddetriments in any crisis
situation because on the proside, you can use social media
to find out, so you can belistening all the time, and so
if people start talking aboutsomething, you know about it
(10:44):
before it becomes a wildfire andyou can disseminate information
more broadly more quicklybecause of it.
But so can dis andmisinformation get disseminated
more quickly, and now you don'tjust have a crisis of the
underlying event, you have acrisis that you're trying to
(11:05):
contain information that'sactually inaccurate about the
underlying event, and so it hasdefinitely made the job of a
communications team, a crisis PRteam and a leadership team
exponentially harder, becauseyou've got all these moving
pieces and you can't afford towait.
(11:25):
And yet you can't afford to betoo detailed either, because you
might be issuing a detail inthe first to make it up 10 hours
turns out not to be true, andnow you've got to go back and
correct.
Now you've started to breaktrust right, and we started with
first.
We want to establish that weare going to be a trustworthy
(11:47):
communicator in this situation.
You know, the wildfires aresort of an interesting example
where I've got a lot of friendswho live in LA.
Many have been evacuated.
Luckily nobody's lost theirhome yet that I know of.
But every single one of themsaid the communications have
been God awful and you saw it insome of these press interviews
(12:09):
that they were doing where firechief was dissing the mayor and
the mayor didn't know and she'ssmiling.
Meanwhile, people's homes areburning down and I'm thinking I
wouldn't trust this crowd at all, especially if my life and my
family's life was in danger.
So that's really that first 24hours.
I think we all recognize youmight not know enough, but
(12:31):
you've got to establish that I'mgoing to be a trusted partner
with you in this endeavor.
That feeling is somethingthat's either going to help
long-term in managing thiscrisis or it's going to hurt you
long-term in attempting tomanage the crisis.
So that getting the rightspokesperson out there, having a
(12:51):
transparent and trustworthydemeanor, not hiding facts that
are easily known from multiplesources but you're not willing
to confirm it there's so manylittle things that end up adding
up to that.
How do people feel about usright now?
And I think that's one of thekey thing in the first day of
(13:13):
any major crisis.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
So much of this comes out to planning you had
mentioned too earlier on.
One of the things you want todo is establish what is a crisis
, which I think is superimportant.
So you're not chasing down thefact that you didn't get into
Fast Company this month, right,like that's not a crisis.
Dora, flying out of a BoeingMax right, that's a crisis.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
I'm not sure Apple, in which case it was like great
sales point because the phonedropped miles and still was
working.
That's hilarious.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
It's so funny.
I live in Portland, Oregon.
The door of the Boeing Maxlanded in one of my neighbor's
yards over yonder, so it waslike a big like oh, he found the
door.
I'm like that is not what youwant as a company.
I'd love to open up the hood alittle bit on who's behind these
organizations.
What's the command center looklike for crisis communications?
(14:04):
Who is determining what's acrisis?
Who is determining at theseorganizations how to even
respond, or who's going to bethe spokesperson?
What does that typically looklike?
Speaker 1 (14:15):
And it varies, right, it varies depending on the
crisis, the company and thepeople.
So if you've got, let's say,you're a big company and you
have a crisis, then you know youundoubtedly have a senior comms
person, a chief communicationsofficer, a VP of communications,
who's going to be point intheory on that if you let them
(14:37):
and they often want to put theirvoice and their reaction into
the situation and it can make itmuch harder to get to where you
might need to be if that's thecase.
But your command center it'sgoing to change depending on
what the crisis is.
(14:57):
So the two constants that Ihave seen in every crisis is
comms and legal.
We're always there.
Now, if it's a product thing,right, like if it's an airplane
crash, the head of the Boeingcommercial airplanes business is
going to be involved.
Probably the engineering folksand manufacturing folks are
(15:19):
going to be involved.
Legal is definitely involved.
Comms is involved, Leadershipis involved, but comms and legal
are almost in every singlecrisis.
If it's an employee eventsomebody was killed in the
workplace and it's because ofwhatever reason, you know, hr is
going to be involved.
Right, it's a cyber attack Thenyour information security and
(15:41):
your technology officer aregoing to be involved.
So it's going to changedepending on the crisis, but
always should havecommunications and legal at the
table.
Looking at that working inlockstep and it's wonderful when
that happens.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah, especially because your comms people.
That is their craft, that istheir skill, and especially when
you're the CEO or even ifyou're head of product or head
of engineering.
I think sometimes there mightbe too much of an emotional bias
on some of those things.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
If you're coming in I don't know if you've seen that,
or- not, because, well, let'sface it, a crisis is only a
crisis because something didn'twork right, something went wrong
, someone was killed, a railroadwent off the tracks, we were
breached in a cyber attack, or acustomer was breached in a
(16:36):
cyber attack, so somethingdidn't work right.
It's never a crisis wheneverything's going well, so
that's just going to ratchet upeverybody's emotions.
From a communication standpoint, it's important to understand
that, because we're not actuallygoing to be able to
appropriately address thiscrisis if we don't understand
(16:57):
where everyone's coming from, sothat we can get them where we
need to go.
And so it could take a littlewhile and that's the challenge,
of course is that in most crises, time is of the essence, and
yet you've got to somehow getpeople on this path with you so
you could do the right thinginstead of doing nothing, which
(17:20):
is often most people's defaultposition, which is let's just
say nothing, or let's just saythe bare minimum and leave it at
that right.
One of the things that I thoughtwas interesting Boeing had two
plane crashes within a year anda half or so, and their
statements were overly lawyeredand ice cold.
I mean, everybody uniformlylooked at those statements and
(17:45):
were like really, 346 people aredead in these two plane crashes
and you're like basicallythoughts and prayers, and yet
you know there's a lot.
You don't know when you have toput that statement out, you
know could it have been piloterror.
Maybe it's not the airplane'sfault.
You don't want to overdo it,but you can't come across as
(18:08):
being almost uncaring whenpeople's lives were ended and
many families globally wereimpacted by those two events.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
It's interesting when you can feel where it's overly
lawyered or sometimes it'soverly emotional.
The one I always remember fromgrad school is during the BP oil
spill and the CEO made it allabout himself, like, well, no
one's suffering as much as I amand everyone's like you need to
go away.
This is not about you, but it.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Didn't his weekend plans get ruined or something?
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yes, and you're like I'm sorry, the Gulf of Mexico is
completely under crude oilright now, but it seems like
comms really is that, for lackof a better term almost like the
adult in the room that'shelping you strike the right
balance for whatever thesituation calls for.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
You have to be the truth sayer in the room Like you
have got to be the one whowalks in the room and just says
it, and it doesn't always makeyou very popular to do that.
When I was at Xerox and I wasthe chief brand and comms
officer, the pandemic hit.
And you know, the week beforeeveryone was told to send their
employees home we had alreadysent our employees in Italy home
(19:21):
Because, remember, italy was areally hot spot I went to the
CEO and said we need to sendeverybody home and he was like
are you nuts?
And I was like no, I mean, haveyou not paid attention to the
news?
So we had a whole meeting andnobody else agreed with me.
And the next day I had to goback to him and I was like so
can we talk about sendingeverybody home?
(19:42):
And he's like I thought we hada meeting about it yesterday.
And I'm like, well, we did, butwe came to the wrong answer, so
we're going to let's have thatconversation again.
And so he said, okay, you gotfive minutes to go.
And I did, and he sent everybodyhome and he told employees in
an all employee phone call, likeyou guys have Ann Marie to
thank for me actually gettingahead of this issue.
(20:03):
And the way he got ahead of theissue was me saying, like
here's the thing.
We don't even know what thedeal is with this thing.
All we know is it's verytransmissible from human to
human.
You are going to send everybodyhome.
So the question is do you wantto send them home today and get
ahead of being ordered to sendeverybody home and be perceived
as a good leader, or do you wantto wait until the government
(20:25):
tells you to send everybody homeand just do it then?
Either way, you're doing it, soyou just have to decide when
you want to do it and wanted todo it ahead of time.
So we sent everybody home andthen the order came 48, 72 hours
later.
He got a lot of credit from ouremployees.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
That's goodwill.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
That of credit from our employees.
That's goodwill.
That's goodwill man.
This guy cares about his people.
You should have just taken thecredit.
That's my job is to give youcredit and he was like no people
should know how that went down.
So for communicators, itrequires a level of courage for
any leader, but especially for acommunicator, because there's
we're probably the only ones inthe room with no direct
relationship to the cause of theevent.
We are probably the mostobjective person in the room.
(21:07):
In a crisis, we have to standstrong and ask the questions and
be unemotional and super calmand not accusatory, and just try
to get people moving in theright direction.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
When you think of essential elements, that
communications teams or even ifyou're a leader right, what's a
playbook to have in place tohelp you contain the crisis,
when stuff pops up?
Speaker 1 (21:53):
What are the key elements you would include in
that?
Yeah, it's funny.
Playbooks are a thing.
There are whole firms that willcome in and build you a crisis
playbook.
I always think that's ahilarious notion.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Seems like it would be situation to situation.
Right, it depends.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Right.
You can't possibly be preparedfor every possible.
I mean, now listen, if you runa rail company, you can be
prepared for a derailment, right.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yeah, you got that the same thing with an airplane
crash but for the most part,there's going to be stuff that
happens that you never thoughtyou were going to be involved
with.
So I'm not a big believer inplaybooks.
In fact, at one company I workedat, I arrived my first week
somebody came over and handed melike this three quarters of an
(22:39):
inch thick crisis playbook and Iwas like really, and I put it
in the drawer and I never, everlooked at it, and this was a
company that had many crisesduring my tenure there but we
never once related to the book,and I'll tell you, no CEO has
ever asked me what does thepolice playbook say about how to
(23:01):
handle this crisis?
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Let's go through our manual.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
It says, if an employee dies.
So I am just a big believer inall the pre-work that makes it
possible to successfully managea crisis, a crisis.
(23:27):
So hire really good people withdiverse experiences, who may
have handled various crises indifferent companies or at
agencies or whatnot, and thenlet them tackle the problems
when they start happening.
Establish authority and trustwith the leadership team,
because it actually doesn'tmatter if you're in charge and
you have a playbook.
(23:47):
If the CEO doesn't trust you,you are not going to be able to
influence the outcome of thiscrisis.
Define what a crisis is.
Who needs to sign off on theactions related to that crisis.
I'm just a really big believerin hire people with good
judgment, great experience,different experience, and make
sure that everything that you'redoing up to the point of the
(24:09):
crisis ensures that you have theauthority and the trust and the
seat at the table to influenceand drive that discussion and
that outcome, because otherwiseyou're just you're.
You're just going to take italong for the ride.
Don't be a passenger on thisbus.
Drive this bus.
We're really the only ones, as Isaid, that are sort of
(24:29):
objective in this situation andhave that external sensibility
to understand what's happeningoutside the business so that we
can bring that to whateversolution and communication
strategy we're developing.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
I think you make the best point is that the
communications team is probablythe most neutral party in any
room when they're dealing withsomething like this.
You just bring a differentpoint of view, that and it takes
out the emotions completelyfrom it, which is needed.
How do you manage thoseemotions up front if you're a
comms person?
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Listen and empathize with that person, because often
all that person really needs isto emote.
They need to get all thatthey're feeling out there and
they're probably going to get tothe right place.
But if they don't have thespace to do that, you're going
to be bouncing up against itwhen you're trying to get them
(25:23):
someplace else.
So I do think that despite thefact that we are communicators
because we are, in theory,better at communicating I think
this is one of those veryimportant situations where it's
better to just listen to peopleand let them go through it If
it's 20 minutes an hour whateverbecause they're probably going
to talk themselves to exactlywhere you need them to be, or
(25:47):
close to it, and then understandthat those emotions are real.
If you're a CEO and say, likeyou're in a precarious position.
Your company's not financiallyperforming that well.
There have been, you know,major recalls or something on
your product and other things,and now a crisis hits.
You're scared.
That's your number one responseis, even if you're not
(26:10):
articulating it, there's like aknot in your stomach Like is
this the thing that's going topush me out the door?
What you need is a comms personwho understands that.
That that's your starting point, but here's where we need to go
and actually, if we manage thiscrisis really well, it will
elevate your standing instead ofbeing the nail in your coffin.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
That makes sense.
One of the things that we talkabout often is transparency and
how transparent you can be,because we're always up against
general counsel and theirfeedback as well around what you
can and can't say.
How do you balance transparencywith the legal constraints that
come up during a crisis?
Speaker 1 (26:51):
I mean.
The thing is, you don't want tobuild trust between the comms
and legal team in the middle ofa crisis, right?
Because if it's not there,trust me it's not coming that
week.
So that's a relationship thatis so absolutely essential.
That comms legal relationship.
I have never had a generalcounsel.
Well, actually, once, once Ihad a general counsel and it was
(27:13):
painful not to have thattrusted relationship.
But in every other role we werelike attached to the hip
because we understood there wasgoing to be so many touch points
where we were going to have tocome to mutually agreeable
decisions that we had to be onthe same wavelength.
And who can build therelationships that are going to
allow you to influence thesolutions, move quickly and do
(27:46):
it with trust, because you can'tbuild it in the middle of a
crisis.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
So say someone's day one on a new job.
They were the new comms leader.
How do they quickly because youhave to get that buy-in between
multiple departments as soon asa crisis comes up how do they
quickly gain that trust frombusiness leadership, from those
department leads?
What's the best way for them tobuild trust quickly?
Speaker 1 (28:12):
I guess not screw it up, but I actually had this
happen to me.
I did have this happen to me.
It was my first week atLockheed Martin and a major
military program.
So I was on like day two orthree a major military program.
The Pentagon had changed theacquisition strategy and thrown
(28:33):
everything into flux and Iremember standing in the middle
of my office thinking, jesus,what are we doing now?
And I just like gathered allthe people who needed to be in
the room on this.
Even though I was the new person, I was like, okay, we have a
crisis, we need to come up witha media statement, a media plan,
at least for 24 hours, then wecan regroup tomorrow, cause this
(28:53):
was at like four o'clock in theafternoon, I pulled everybody
together, we figured it out, wemoved out the statement and it
worked fine.
And then the next day we got towork as a larger group on a
plan.
If you're new, like you'regoing to need to pull in the
people who are there and useyour best judgment.
This is where the judgmentpiece comes in, because judgment
(29:13):
isn't something that likeappears.
You can't go to Walmart, pickit up off a store shelf.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
Yeah, agreed, well, I think it's one kudos to you,
because, holy cow, day three,that's a big, that's a big thing
to do.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
In fact my email.
They had misspelled my email,so my actual email at the
company still wasn't working.
So I was having to call peopleand be like can you just come to
my office Because I can't emailyou, and we just had to move
quickly, email you and we justhad to move quickly.
I actually love those.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
What do you think?
They're fun.
I can see you easily doing fineunder pressure.
What do you?
What do you think was yoursecret sauce in that moment,
though?
How did you get everyone to goalong with what you?
Speaker 1 (29:55):
staying calm.
You know I had I'd writtenabout the defense industry as a
reporter, I had worked at adifferent defense company, I
understood the subject, Iunderstood what we were dealing
with and so I could move reallyquickly If I hadn't.
I think, at the end of the day,most of us know what the right
thing is to do in the moment,and the harder part, as we've
(30:18):
been talking about, is gettingother people there, and so in
this case I guess I got morelatitude than somebody who was
totally green would have gotten,because I was a known entity
and people trusted me Right.
Otherwise that trust would haveto be developed over time.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
Yeah, Like so.
Trust truly is the secret saucefor it to be effective.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
I think it is.
I think it is.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yeah, I'm very curious about one of the most
unexpected crisis scenarios thatyou managed through.
You don't have to name names,but is there any that comes to
mind where you're like that wasunexpected.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Yeah, actually A blimp, a blimp.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Like the Goodyear blimp, like the Goodyear blip.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
When I was at Lockheed we had this prototype
airship it's called the HailDeep and we all got up at 3.30
am to watch this massive,massive it was like, I think,
five football fields longairship takeoff from a dock in
akron, ohio.
It was beautiful dawn, lovely,but it wasn't three hours later,
(31:29):
when I was getting my car todrive to work, that I got an
urgent phone call that the blimpwas was about to crash and it
was rush hour.
It was pennsylvania i-95 was inits path.
I was like, oh, jesus Christ,so that was definitely a crisis.
I mean, again, we had a planfor what would happen if we had
issues with it, but it reallylooked like it was going to be a
(31:51):
flawless test and it did not.
It was not a flawless test andit ended up coming down in a
wooded area very close to abeaver dam in Pennsylvania.
The good news was weimmediately dispatched a
communicator to the beaver damto answer all the local news
press questions.
(32:11):
So we basically it wasn't likea national news story, but
certainly in the Philadelphia,ohio, pennsylvania area you know
it was a couple of days ofcoverage of this massive airship
that went down and, you know,working again by the before.
It took 10 minutes to get to theoffice.
(32:33):
By the time I got into theoffice, we had all the necessary
people on the phone.
I'm like where's the airship?
Like it was just like drillingthe questions.
Like, okay, I've dispatchedthis person, let's get this
information written up, get itinto that person's hands.
They need to be on site.
Reporters are going to come tothe location.
Blah, blah, blah.
Work with the local authorities.
We were seamless.
(32:54):
I had everybody on an open linein my office for three hours.
I was like, just come back andtalk on the squawk box, I'm
leaving the line open and sothat's you know.
I mean, this is the stuff thathappens in the middle of a
crisis, you just have to stopdoing everything else and just
do this.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Well, which begs the point of not having a playbook,
because I don't know if you'reworking at Lockheed Martin, you
probably don't think you'regoing to have to deal with the
National Beaver Society becausethe blip crashed in their dam.
Do you know what I'm sayingLike?
But now here you are.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
The ASPCA has got you on a speed dial.
Yeah, I can't imagine.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Right, Like you cannot plan for every possible
crisis trying to hurt thebeavers no no beaver was killed.
No beaver was hurt in thetesting of the singer ship.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
What do you know?
If a crisis response wassuccessful, what do you measure?
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Nowadays, with social media, there are all kinds of
tools that you can listen to howpeople are talking.
So there's the qualitative andthen the quantitative.
On the qualitative side, youknow if people are pissed off.
You mentioned UnitedHealthcareearlier and I actually would
love to go back to that, but itwas pretty remarkable that a man
(34:39):
was murdered and people weretalking about how hot the
assassin was and how people arefeeling about your company when
they're cheering for themurderer instead of being
completely outraged about whathappened.
And I would just say one thing Iactually think that
UnitedHealthcare is doing a verygood job with this.
So you know, yesterday wastheir earnings and their CEO of
the parent company, UnitedHealth, talked about what's
(35:02):
wrong with the healthcare system, and he also had an editorial
in the New York Times a week ortwo after the murder happened
that addressed it.
Now it does beg the question asthe nation's largest insurance
company, what are you doing tosolve the problem?
So great that you're nowacknowledging that there is a
(35:24):
problem, but what are you doingto solve it, which I hope is the
next piece for that?
But I've seen them lean intothis in a manner that I think is
better than some companies doin these situations.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
I have a quick question follow up for that,
because with UnitedHealthcare,what I found interesting, just
as an observer and someoneconsuming, they're getting out
at front about acknowledgingtheir role but then their
actions seem to not align withtheir acknowledgement.
So, for example, like anarticle came out yesterday about
how they're one of the fewinsurance companies who are
(36:01):
increasing I think it was cancermedication by over 1000%
compared to other insurers,making it more expensive for
their customers.
So when you see like you seethe CEO coming out and they're
acknowledging it, partlyresponsible for the state of the
healthcare system, but theyhaven't taken it to what should
(36:40):
be the next level, you know asthe nation's largest insurer.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Here are the things we're going to do differently,
right, boom, boom, boom, boom,right, and and hopefully,
fingers crossed that's theirnext piece, because otherwise,
in a couple of months, this yes,it's broken and we're really
sorry and we have to all dobetter is not going to play well
with the vast majority of thepublic, because they're going to
(37:06):
be like yeah, we heard thatfrom you for six months now and
you haven't done anythingdifferent.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
It's the new thoughts and prayers.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Right.
So I do think that that isalways the challenge right, Even
if your crisis communicationsresponse is great.
Boeing had the same issue.
Their issue was the problemwith the manufacturing of these
planes.
That has come out and nowgotten a lot of media coverage
and government intervention andother things right.
(37:32):
I often would say it's comms'job to like prepare the garden,
fertilize the soil, make surethat it's an environment in
which things can grow, but ifthings don't grow here, that's
not my fault, that's your fault.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Can you tell a lot about a company's culture by how
they respond in a crisis?
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean because that responseisn't coming out of nowhere.
And if it does come out ofnowhere, then it probably won't
be trusted.
Think about the insuranceindustry right now and these
fires, I mean.
It's not a good scene and theyhad already cut off people's
insurance policies, and I livedin California.
(38:16):
Insurance was extraordinarilyexpensive to get and that was
when you could even get it.
Now you can't even get it inmany places, and I wasn't in a
fire zone, but at this point youdon't really know what a fire
zone is.
It could be anywhere.
So I think that the way inwhich these companies have
approached their business willmake them inherently trustworthy
in this situation because ofeverything that led up to it.
(38:40):
Now maybe somebody will stepout and do the right thing.
Do the right thing has multipleimplications because at the end
of the day, many of these arepublicly traded companies and
they're mining their portfoliofor risk and they only want to
have a risk exposure of make itup 30%, 40%.
(39:04):
So that means we can't coverany of these folks unless they
pay this much more money, andthat makes it prohibitively
expensive and most people can'tafford that.
And so again, we get down tosort of a situation where, okay,
if you're part of the problem,you're also part of the solution
.
So are you going to lead onthis and try to figure out how
we might be able to at leastaddress this?
So I saw on the news last night.
(39:25):
People are hanging signs withQR codes to their GoFundMe pages
in the front of their burnthouses in Pacific Palisades so
that people driving by can justget to their QR card and give
them money.
That's terrible In this country, with the kind of money this
country has, that anyone shouldhave to have a GoFundMe page,
(39:47):
especially if they had insurance.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Agreed.
You mentioned that almost everycompany is going to be in
crisis this year.
I feel like the insurancecompanies are like they're in
the hot seat.
Buckle up.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
That kid is going on trial, that man is going on
trial for shooting theUnitedHealthcare CEO, and so
will the healthcare industry,insurance industry, be on trial,
because that is going to bepart of that entire trial.
There's two trials right nowand if they got combined, you
know, or maybe even three, ifthey bring federal charges
they'll get combined into onetrial.
(40:22):
But make no mistake, he will beon trial, and so will the
healthcare insurance industry.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
I'd love to talk about advice that you personally
might give to folks who are ina crisis, dealing with crisis,
just based on your ownexperience.
What's your go-to stressreliever?
What do you do when you're inan active crisis situation?
Speaker 1 (40:55):
when you're in an active crisis situation.
Well, after the work, I woulddefinitely have a glass of red
wine During it.
I mean, I think it's reallyimportant to just try to stay
calm and clear and whatever youneed to do, that is important
Exercise or meditate or whateverit is for you.
Exercise or meditate orwhatever it is for you like.
(41:20):
Being very calm and almostimpersonal about the situation
is really important wheneveryone else is flipping out.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
So that's from a communication standpoint.
If you're a leader, in one word, what's the most important
quality a leader needs?
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Judgment no question Judgment.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
What is the best piece of crisis management
advice that you've ever beengiven?
Don't be afraid to ask the hardquestions.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Often what happens in a crisis is not only are people
afraid to ask the hard question, they're afraid to ask the
follow-up to the hard question.
Up to the hard question.
But if you don't knoweverything that you need to know
, your crisis is going tomushroom right, and you could
(42:05):
have gotten ahead of it if youhad just kept going down that
line of questioning to get whatelse do?
I need to know that we're notdoing right so I can respond,
because there's going to be areporter calling me about this
in less than 36 hours.
So tell me everything now so Ican get ready for it.
So I think, ask the hardquestions and ask the hard
follow-up questions.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
Almost like an attorney.
Like I don't want any surpriseshere.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Yeah, I mean, that's the worst thing that any
business can have is a surprise.
Speaker 3 (42:33):
Okay, what are some or what's one crisis
communication myth that youwould like to debunk?
Speaker 1 (42:41):
You don't need a playbook.
You need courage, commitmentand clarity, but you do not need
a playbook.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
All right, anne-marie , we like to get to know our
guests on a more personal level,so I'm going to ask you some
rapid round questions that arejust light and easy.
We just want to get to know you.
Are you down?
Okay, let's do it.
All right, it's 2030.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
What do you think work is going to look like?
Well, I'm really hoping thatthe AI is doing all the mundane
things and that we're down to athree day work week.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Yeah, I like the world.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
We're here for it.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Painting.
Yes, yes.
What music are you listening toright now?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
You know, I listen to such a bizarre blend of music.
What was playing in my car justtoday?
I was listening to a littleJohn Legend a little while ago,
nice, nice.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
All right, all right.
Do you know he started as amanagement consultant?
I read that Isn't that wildyeah.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Listen, bain, or I think Bain or BCG.
Yeah, it was one of the.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
It was one of the MBBs, I thought.
I know, mel and I come fromDeloitte and everyone's always
trying to oh no, it was Deloitte.
I'm like it was not Deloitte.
We like to claim everything.
What are you reading?
Speaker 1 (43:57):
I am reading Mel Robbins' Let them Theory.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
What do?
Speaker 2 (44:02):
you think it is a great way to start the year.
Nice, that's a tough one, likethat whole idea.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
I think that would be .
It's tough, right, and I wasactually having a little mini
meltdown about something lastweek and I was complaining to my
husband and he was like, well,honey, what about?
Let them, let them.
I was like, oh my God, yes,right, perfect.
Was it free yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah, yeah.
Who do you really admire?
I?
Speaker 1 (44:33):
really admire Michelle Obama.
I think that she is authentic,I think she has demonstrated
really good judgment and I thinkshe lives her values.
You know, she's not afraid tolive them, and I think that's
like one of the most importantthings we can do, especially as
women, and stop trying tocontort ourselves into what
(44:53):
everyone wants us to be and bewho we want to be.
Speaker 3 (44:57):
I recently someone on social media said that they're
going to RSVP as Michelle Obamagoing forward when they say no
to things and she's not showingup to anything anymore.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
There's been all these great memes of her just
like no, no, thank you, yeah, no, and I also love the fact that
I don't need to give you areason.
Speaker 3 (45:16):
No explanation needed .
Speaker 1 (45:18):
That actually is something that I have been over
the last couple of years, tryingto break the habit of right.
Like I always feel like well,what are you going to tell them
about why you're not going?
And I'm like why do I have totell them anything?
Why does anyone need to knowwhy I'm not doing something?
Speaker 3 (45:33):
No is a full explanation.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
Yeah, Right, but I wasn't raised like that and for
most of my life I always waslike I can't do that because I
have these other and I'm likeyou know, nobody cares, Nobody.
I'm making a bigger deal out ofthis than anyone else.
No, I can't do it, Sorry, Nexttime.
So I think that it's just.
It is something that we have topractice in order to get
comfortable with it.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
Yeah, and it's definitely a muscle.
I'm always like worried abouteverybody else's feelings and
it's like no one gives a shit.
You can either come or youcan't, it's fine.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
And also, at the end of the day, like it doesn't make
you nice or not nice to do that, right, it's just, it just is.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Yeah, last one, a piece of advice you'd want
everyone to know a piece ofadvice you'd want everyone to
know.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
I think it's important to understand who you
are and then be the best versionof that person.
We all spend so much timetrying to fit in to different
scenarios and situations that wesometimes get so lost and then
we're not the best version ofanything.
So no, we're not perfect.
Figure out like what's where doyou get your joy, what, what
(46:45):
makes you unhappy?
And then try to be the bestversion of the person.
That is that, and don't worryabout what everyone else thinks.
You know, frankly, they'regoing to talk about you anyway.
So you know like there's justreally no point worrying about
it.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
Yeah, let them yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
I mean, we all have to get inspiration from places.
I'm hoping that you know, as Ikeep reading this book, that it
is very inspiring to remindmyself that I have no control
over what other people think.
I only have control over what Ithink.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
Yeah, yeah.
And how you live your life andhow you take your energy, you
know or channel your energy Ithink that's such sage advice is
to figure out who you are andthen just try to be the best
version of that, and that's it.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
No one's asking for any more than that.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
Love it, love it.
Speaker 3 (47:35):
Thanks guys.
This episode was produced,edited and all things by us
myself, mel Plett and FrancescaRanieri.
Our music is by Pink Zebra andif you loved this conversation
and you want to contribute yourthoughts with us, please do.
You can visit us atyourworkfriendscom, but you can
(47:58):
also join us over on LinkedIn.
We have a LinkedIn communitypage and we have the TikToks and
Instagram.
So please, please, join us inthe socials.
And if you like this and you'vebenefited from this episode and
you think someone else canbenefit from this episode,
please like, rate and subscribe.
(48:19):
We'd really appreciate it.
That helps keep us going.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:23):
All right, Take care, friends.
Bye friends, Bye friends.
But it wasn't three hours later, when I was getting
my car to drive to work, that Igot an urgent phone call that
the blimp was about to crash andit was rush hour.
It was Pennsylvania I-95 was inits path.
I was like, oh, jesus Christgoing on mel what's up?
Speaker 3 (00:32):
what's up?
Um, I have good news, you havegood news, I like it.
You know, I do starting uh,next week the sun sets at 5 pm
oh.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Oh, my gosh, I'm telling you during the winter
nuts, nuts, winter nuts.
What, what is on my mind Duringthe winter nuts?
With my sweaty balls, duringthe winter months, I become a
bear.
I am just like oh, it's 7o'clock, I'm going to get my
jams.
It is not good, listen same.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
It has been getting dark at like around, like
November-ish December.
It starts getting dark at 3 pm.
It's unacceptable.
Is it 11?
I have my slippers on, oh mygosh.
Well, we were incredibly luckyto sit down with Anne-Marie
(01:25):
Sgueo today, who is an expert incrisis communications.
She is the CEO and founder ofProofpoint Communications.
She's a strategic brandingcommunications and crisis PR
maven.
She's also a Pulitzer winningbusiness journalist, and two
words to describe her battleproven.
(01:46):
What did you take away fromthis conversation?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
I love crisis communications.
I think it's just a fascinatingtopic about how companies and
how people respond to crisis,and there was a lot that
Anne-Marie shared that lookedreally under the hood around how
this all works withinorganizations, how decisions are
made and, honestly, what goodlooks like.
(02:12):
That I did not know and I thinkis really, really eye-opening
for anybody listening.
What did you think, mel?
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Absolutely agree.
If you're a leader in anorganization, you're going to
find this episode extremelyuseful and helpful.
She gave some pretty clear tipson.
This is how you show up andthis is how you pull through and
come together.
So with that, here's Anne-Mariewe are so excited to have you
(02:54):
join us today on your WorkFriends, and I'm going to jump
right in with a headline thatcame out from Axios and I want
to get your thoughts.
They said CEOs are enjoying ahot speech.
Winter, when we're speaking outin outrageous ways, carries no
cost and we know recently we sawthe UnitedHealthcare CEO not
(03:15):
really dealing well withcritical crisis and Mark
Zuckerberg's comments on the JoeRogan podcast on how that's
impacting meta.
What are your thoughts on thatstatement?
Speaker 1 (03:24):
podcast on how that's impacting meta.
What are your thoughts on thatstatement?
There's always a cost.
The question is how you'remeasuring it.
We'll go back to UnitedHealthcare.
I think Zuck's comments are,frankly, just bizarre and I keep
wondering what his wife thinks.
But a lot of my friends havegone off threads.
They've gone off Instagram andclosed their Facebook accounts.
(03:46):
There's a critical piece tothis in terms of has no cost,
right.
One of the things that I've beenthinking a lot about is, you
know, when Jeff Bezos pisses usall off and you know, we're like
I'm not using Amazon anymore.
I'm just I'm not, and I triedthis.
Actually I tried this for acouple of months last year and
it's really hard.
(04:06):
So if you're addicted to theproduct or service and you have
been for the last five yearsthen it's probably unlikely
you're going to get unaddicted.
But if it's more marginal inyour existence, so the
Washington Post subscription,that is like the eighth thing I
read any day.
(04:27):
I can live without that Right.
So I mean, I think that it'sgoing to be hard for CEOs to say
there's no cost, because forsome it might appear that way
because their product or serviceis so essential to our lives
that most of us can't imaginewe'd be punishing ourselves if
we cut it off.
But if you don't fall in thatcategory and most people don't
(04:53):
then there are going to berepercussions for doing things
that piss off 50% or more ofyour customers, subscribers,
whatever.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Yeah, I think Francesca and I were talking
about this before the sessionand one of the things we both
agreed on was there's maybe fivepeople, I think Francesca you
said, who have a few money to beable to not have a cost to
their statements.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, I mean again, most CEOs, I think, measure the
cost financially.
But bad reputations have badfinancial implications and they
might not happen immediately.
But one thing that I think thatis a mid-term kind of outcome
of, say, meta's CEO's commentsis you're already seeing blue
(05:41):
sky and all these competitorscome up and they're going to get
better.
Just like threads stepped in topick up where Twitter X left
off, someone's going to step inand pick up where both of those
guys left off and run away withit.
And the eyeballs and theadvertising money Don't count
too soon.
I wouldn't count my chickensbefore they're hatched, because
(06:04):
it might not be that the nextthree months are impacted, but
the next 12 months may well beas alternatives come to bear.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
It's so fun to watch.
There's, I imagine, in yourarea, someone's always in crisis
and, to your very good point,you started this by saying going
through the Trumpadministration, every
organization is going to be incrisis because of all the change
that's going on.
And I'm curious about how doyou define either like a PR
crisis or crisis communications?
For those that don't know aboutthis topic, what is it?
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Oh, this is a great question because, you know, I've
definitely worked places wherethe CEO or senior leaders
thought everything was a crisis,you know.
So if we're not included in astory, it's a crisis, and if we
are included in a negative story, it's a crisis, and you know, I
(06:59):
think that all of us in theindustry have to kind of set a
barometer for what actuallyrequires a crisis response, and
that's an important conversationand level setting that needs to
happen in every organization,because if you, the
communications team, are notaligned or at least educating
your leaders about what makesthe cut for when we're going
(07:20):
into crisis mode, you will spendyour entire day and night and
weekends fighting fires that arenot important and you'll never
get to the good stuff and theimportant stuff.
So I think, if it's a realcrisis, francesca, I think it's
got real reputational andfinancial implications for a
(07:42):
company and businessimplications.
So you are a railroad companyand your railroad went off the
tracks in Ohio and potentiallypoisoned an entire community
with toxic things that came outof the cars.
You've got a crisis and it'sgoing to potentially result in
regulatory repercussions,punitive government, punitive
(08:06):
repercussions, lawsuits,environmental related issues.
That is a legitimate crisis.
I would say things that noone's going to be talking about
in 24 or 48 hours, not a crisis.
So I think, by definition, acrisis is going to be longer
than 48 hours.
You may feel like it's a crisisin the moment, but if it's
(08:27):
going away and no one's going toremember it in a year, it
wasn't a crisis.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
I'm curious about that timing right, I mean within
48 hours.
If no one's going to be talkingabout it, it's not a crisis.
I'm curious on the other aspectof that because, especially
with social media, the first 24hours of a crisis, or that after
something happens, the trainderails and spills chemicals,
the LA wildfires are happening,UnitedHealthcare CEO gets shot,
(08:55):
the BP oil spill that first 24hours seems like it's so
critical.
And then, especially withsocial media, the speed of which
information gets put out intothe ether.
How important is the first 24hours If you've identified that
this is in fact a crisis?
How important is that first 24hours as an organization?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
It's very important to establish trust and
confidence in whatever comesnext.
I think the challenge of thefirst 24 hours in some of these
situations is you don't reallyknow a lot in that first 24
hours, right, whether it's anoil spill, a plane crash, a
(09:37):
derailment, a cyber attack, Imean there's some stuff you know
, but there's so very much thatyou do not know and you won't
know for a while.
But you have to establish thekind of connected tissue that
you're going to need in thissituation and whether you're
going to be viewed as someonewho's withholding information or
(10:01):
going to be forthcoming whenyou can be information or going
to be forthcoming when you canbe.
And the challenge, of course,in social media things tend to
move much more quickly.
You know, like years ago, right, like you know, we didn't know
when there was a crisis untilthe news came out the next day.
So I mean, you guys might betoo young to remember that, but
I mean now everything's likepeople might know about it on
(10:22):
social media before even thecompany is aware that something
happened.
So it creates both benefits anddetriments in any crisis
situation because on the proside, you can use social media
to find out, so you can belistening all the time, and so
if people start talking aboutsomething, you know about it
(10:44):
before it becomes a wildfire andyou can disseminate information
more broadly more quicklybecause of it.
But so can dis andmisinformation get disseminated
more quickly, and now you don'tjust have a crisis of the
underlying event, you have acrisis that you're trying to
(11:05):
contain information that'sactually inaccurate about the
underlying event, and so it hasdefinitely made the job of a
communications team, a crisis PRteam and a leadership team
exponentially harder, becauseyou've got all these moving
pieces and you can't afford towait.
(11:25):
And yet you can't afford to betoo detailed either, because you
might be issuing a detail inthe first to make it up 10 hours
turns out not to be true, andnow you've got to go back and
correct.
Now you've started to breaktrust right, and we started with
first.
We want to establish that weare going to be a trustworthy
(11:47):
communicator in this situation.
You know, the wildfires aresort of an interesting example
where I've got a lot of friendswho live in LA.
Many have been evacuated.
Luckily nobody's lost theirhome yet that I know of.
But every single one of themsaid the communications have
been God awful and you saw it insome of these press interviews
(12:09):
that they were doing where firechief was dissing the mayor and
the mayor didn't know and she'ssmiling.
Meanwhile, people's homes areburning down and I'm thinking I
wouldn't trust this crowd at all, especially if my life and my
family's life was in danger.
So that's really that first 24hours.
I think we all recognize youmight not know enough, but
(12:31):
you've got to establish that I'mgoing to be a trusted partner
with you in this endeavor.
That feeling is somethingthat's either going to help
long-term in managing thiscrisis or it's going to hurt you
long-term in attempting tomanage the crisis.
So that getting the rightspokesperson out there, having a
(12:51):
transparent and trustworthydemeanor, not hiding facts that
are easily known from multiplesources but you're not willing
to confirm it there's so manylittle things that end up adding
up to that.
How do people feel about usright now?
And I think that's one of thekey thing in the first day of
(13:13):
any major crisis.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
So much of this comes out to planning you had
mentioned too earlier on.
One of the things you want todo is establish what is a crisis
, which I think is superimportant.
So you're not chasing down thefact that you didn't get into
Fast Company this month, right,like that's not a crisis.
Dora, flying out of a BoeingMax right, that's a crisis.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
I'm not sure Apple, in which case it was like great
sales point because the phonedropped miles and still was
working.
That's hilarious.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
It's so funny.
I live in Portland, Oregon.
The door of the Boeing Maxlanded in one of my neighbor's
yards over yonder, so it waslike a big like oh, he found the
door.
I'm like that is not what youwant as a company.
I'd love to open up the hood alittle bit on who's behind these
organizations.
What's the command center looklike for crisis communications?
(14:04):
Who is determining what's acrisis?
Who is determining at theseorganizations how to even
respond, or who's going to bethe spokesperson?
What does that typically looklike?
Speaker 1 (14:15):
And it varies, right, it varies depending on the
crisis, the company and thepeople.
So if you've got, let's say,you're a big company and you
have a crisis, then you know youundoubtedly have a senior comms
person, a chief communicationsofficer, a VP of communications,
who's going to be point intheory on that if you let them
(14:37):
and they often want to put theirvoice and their reaction into
the situation and it can make itmuch harder to get to where you
might need to be if that's thecase.
But your command center it'sgoing to change depending on
what the crisis is.
(14:57):
So the two constants that Ihave seen in every crisis is
comms and legal.
We're always there.
Now, if it's a product thing,right, like if it's an airplane
crash, the head of the Boeingcommercial airplanes business is
going to be involved.
Probably the engineering folksand manufacturing folks are
(15:19):
going to be involved.
Legal is definitely involved.
Comms is involved, Leadershipis involved, but comms and legal
are almost in every singlecrisis.
If it's an employee eventsomebody was killed in the
workplace and it's because ofwhatever reason, you know, hr is
going to be involved.
Right, it's a cyber attack Thenyour information security and
(15:41):
your technology officer aregoing to be involved.
So it's going to changedepending on the crisis, but
always should havecommunications and legal at the
table.
Looking at that working inlockstep and it's wonderful when
that happens.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah, especially because your comms people.
That is their craft, that istheir skill, and especially when
you're the CEO or even ifyou're head of product or head
of engineering.
I think sometimes there mightbe too much of an emotional bias
on some of those things.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
If you're coming in I don't know if you've seen that,
or- not, because, well, let'sface it, a crisis is only a
crisis because something didn'twork right, something went wrong
, someone was killed, a railroadwent off the tracks, we were
breached in a cyber attack, or acustomer was breached in a
(16:36):
cyber attack, so somethingdidn't work right.
It's never a crisis wheneverything's going well, so
that's just going to ratchet upeverybody's emotions.
From a communication standpoint, it's important to understand
that, because we're not actuallygoing to be able to
appropriately address thiscrisis if we don't understand
(16:57):
where everyone's coming from, sothat we can get them where we
need to go.
And so it could take a littlewhile and that's the challenge,
of course is that in most crises, time is of the essence, and
yet you've got to somehow getpeople on this path with you so
you could do the right thinginstead of doing nothing, which
(17:20):
is often most people's defaultposition, which is let's just
say nothing, or let's just saythe bare minimum and leave it at
that right.
One of the things that I thoughtwas interesting Boeing had two
plane crashes within a year anda half or so, and their
statements were overly lawyeredand ice cold.
I mean, everybody uniformlylooked at those statements and
(17:45):
were like really, 346 people aredead in these two plane crashes
and you're like basicallythoughts and prayers, and yet
you know there's a lot.
You don't know when you have toput that statement out, you
know could it have been piloterror.
Maybe it's not the airplane'sfault.
You don't want to overdo it,but you can't come across as
(18:08):
being almost uncaring whenpeople's lives were ended and
many families globally wereimpacted by those two events.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
It's interesting when you can feel where it's overly
lawyered or sometimes it'soverly emotional.
The one I always remember fromgrad school is during the BP oil
spill and the CEO made it allabout himself, like, well, no
one's suffering as much as I amand everyone's like you need to
go away.
This is not about you, but it.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Didn't his weekend plans get ruined or something?
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yes, and you're like I'm sorry, the Gulf of Mexico is
completely under crude oilright now, but it seems like
comms really is that, for lackof a better term almost like the
adult in the room that'shelping you strike the right
balance for whatever thesituation calls for.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
You have to be the truth sayer in the room Like you
have got to be the one whowalks in the room and just says
it, and it doesn't always makeyou very popular to do that.
When I was at Xerox and I wasthe chief brand and comms
officer, the pandemic hit.
And you know, the week beforeeveryone was told to send their
employees home we had alreadysent our employees in Italy home
(19:21):
Because, remember, italy was areally hot spot I went to the
CEO and said we need to sendeverybody home and he was like
are you nuts?
And I was like no, I mean, haveyou not paid attention to the
news?
So we had a whole meeting andnobody else agreed with me.
And the next day I had to goback to him and I was like so
can we talk about sendingeverybody home?
(19:42):
And he's like I thought we hada meeting about it yesterday.
And I'm like, well, we did, butwe came to the wrong answer, so
we're going to let's have thatconversation again.
And so he said, okay, you gotfive minutes to go.
And I did, and he sent everybodyhome and he told employees in
an all employee phone call, likeyou guys have Ann Marie to
thank for me actually gettingahead of this issue.
(20:03):
And the way he got ahead of theissue was me saying, like
here's the thing.
We don't even know what thedeal is with this thing.
All we know is it's verytransmissible from human to
human.
You are going to send everybodyhome.
So the question is do you wantto send them home today and get
ahead of being ordered to sendeverybody home and be perceived
as a good leader, or do you wantto wait until the government
(20:25):
tells you to send everybody homeand just do it then?
Either way, you're doing it, soyou just have to decide when
you want to do it and wanted todo it ahead of time.
So we sent everybody home andthen the order came 48, 72 hours
later.
He got a lot of credit from ouremployees.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
That's goodwill.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
That of credit from our employees.
That's goodwill.
That's goodwill man.
This guy cares about his people.
You should have just taken thecredit.
That's my job is to give youcredit and he was like no people
should know how that went down.
So for communicators, itrequires a level of courage for
any leader, but especially for acommunicator, because there's
we're probably the only ones inthe room with no direct
relationship to the cause of theevent.
We are probably the mostobjective person in the room.
(21:07):
In a crisis, we have to standstrong and ask the questions and
be unemotional and super calmand not accusatory, and just try
to get people moving in theright direction.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
When you think of essential elements, that
communications teams or even ifyou're a leader right, what's a
playbook to have in place tohelp you contain the crisis,
when stuff pops up?
Speaker 1 (21:53):
What are the key elements you would include in
that?
Yeah, it's funny.
Playbooks are a thing.
There are whole firms that willcome in and build you a crisis
playbook.
I always think that's ahilarious notion.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
Seems like it would be situation to situation.
Right, it depends.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Right.
You can't possibly be preparedfor every possible.
I mean, now listen, if you runa rail company, you can be
prepared for a derailment, right.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Yeah, you got that the same thing with an airplane
crash but for the most part,there's going to be stuff that
happens that you never thoughtyou were going to be involved
with.
So I'm not a big believer inplaybooks.
In fact, at one company I workedat, I arrived my first week
somebody came over and handed melike this three quarters of an
(22:39):
inch thick crisis playbook and Iwas like really, and I put it
in the drawer and I never, everlooked at it, and this was a
company that had many crisesduring my tenure there but we
never once related to the book,and I'll tell you, no CEO has
ever asked me what does thepolice playbook say about how to
(23:01):
handle this crisis?
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Let's go through our manual.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
It says, if an employee dies.
So I am just a big believer inall the pre-work that makes it
possible to successfully managea crisis, a crisis.
(23:27):
So hire really good people withdiverse experiences, who may
have handled various crises indifferent companies or at
agencies or whatnot, and thenlet them tackle the problems
when they start happening.
Establish authority and trustwith the leadership team,
because it actually doesn'tmatter if you're in charge and
you have a playbook.
(23:47):
If the CEO doesn't trust you,you are not going to be able to
influence the outcome of thiscrisis.
Define what a crisis is.
Who needs to sign off on theactions related to that crisis.
I'm just a really big believerin hire people with good
judgment, great experience,different experience, and make
sure that everything that you'redoing up to the point of the
(24:09):
crisis ensures that you have theauthority and the trust and the
seat at the table to influenceand drive that discussion and
that outcome, because otherwiseyou're just you're.
You're just going to take italong for the ride.
Don't be a passenger on thisbus.
Drive this bus.
We're really the only ones, as Isaid, that are sort of
(24:29):
objective in this situation andhave that external sensibility
to understand what's happeningoutside the business so that we
can bring that to whateversolution and communication
strategy we're developing.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
I think you make the best point is that the
communications team is probablythe most neutral party in any
room when they're dealing withsomething like this.
You just bring a differentpoint of view, that and it takes
out the emotions completelyfrom it, which is needed.
How do you manage thoseemotions up front if you're a
comms person?
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Listen and empathize with that person, because often
all that person really needs isto emote.
They need to get all thatthey're feeling out there and
they're probably going to get tothe right place.
But if they don't have thespace to do that, you're going
to be bouncing up against itwhen you're trying to get them
(25:23):
someplace else.
So I do think that despite thefact that we are communicators
because we are, in theory,better at communicating I think
this is one of those veryimportant situations where it's
better to just listen to peopleand let them go through it If
it's 20 minutes an hour whateverbecause they're probably going
to talk themselves to exactlywhere you need them to be, or
(25:47):
close to it, and then understandthat those emotions are real.
If you're a CEO and say, likeyou're in a precarious position.
Your company's not financiallyperforming that well.
There have been, you know,major recalls or something on
your product and other things,and now a crisis hits.
You're scared.
That's your number one responseis, even if you're not
(26:10):
articulating it, there's like aknot in your stomach Like is
this the thing that's going topush me out the door?
What you need is a comms personwho understands that.
That that's your starting point, but here's where we need to go
and actually, if we manage thiscrisis really well, it will
elevate your standing instead ofbeing the nail in your coffin.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
That makes sense.
One of the things that we talkabout often is transparency and
how transparent you can be,because we're always up against
general counsel and theirfeedback as well around what you
can and can't say.
How do you balance transparencywith the legal constraints that
come up during a crisis?
Speaker 1 (26:51):
I mean.
The thing is, you don't want tobuild trust between the comms
and legal team in the middle ofa crisis, right?
Because if it's not there,trust me it's not coming that
week.
So that's a relationship thatis so absolutely essential.
That comms legal relationship.
I have never had a generalcounsel.
Well, actually, once, once Ihad a general counsel and it was
(27:13):
painful not to have thattrusted relationship.
But in every other role we werelike attached to the hip
because we understood there wasgoing to be so many touch points
where we were going to have tocome to mutually agreeable
decisions that we had to be onthe same wavelength.
And who can build therelationships that are going to
allow you to influence thesolutions, move quickly and do
(27:46):
it with trust, because you can'tbuild it in the middle of a
crisis.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
So say someone's day one on a new job.
They were the new comms leader.
How do they quickly because youhave to get that buy-in between
multiple departments as soon asa crisis comes up how do they
quickly gain that trust frombusiness leadership, from those
department leads?
What's the best way for them tobuild trust quickly?
Speaker 1 (28:12):
I guess not screw it up, but I actually had this
happen to me.
I did have this happen to me.
It was my first week atLockheed Martin and a major
military program.
So I was on like day two orthree a major military program.
The Pentagon had changed theacquisition strategy and thrown
(28:33):
everything into flux and Iremember standing in the middle
of my office thinking, jesus,what are we doing now?
And I just like gathered allthe people who needed to be in
the room on this.
Even though I was the new person, I was like, okay, we have a
crisis, we need to come up witha media statement, a media plan,
at least for 24 hours, then wecan regroup tomorrow, cause this
(28:53):
was at like four o'clock in theafternoon, I pulled everybody
together, we figured it out, wemoved out the statement and it
worked fine.
And then the next day we got towork as a larger group on a
plan.
If you're new, like you'regoing to need to pull in the
people who are there and useyour best judgment.
This is where the judgmentpiece comes in, because judgment
(29:13):
isn't something that likeappears.
You can't go to Walmart, pickit up off a store shelf.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
Yeah, agreed, well, I think it's one kudos to you,
because, holy cow, day three,that's a big, that's a big thing
to do.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
In fact my email.
They had misspelled my email,so my actual email at the
company still wasn't working.
So I was having to call peopleand be like can you just come to
my office Because I can't emailyou, and we just had to move
quickly, email you and we justhad to move quickly.
I actually love those.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
What do you think?
They're fun.
I can see you easily doing fineunder pressure.
What do you?
What do you think was yoursecret sauce in that moment,
though?
How did you get everyone to goalong with what you?
Speaker 1 (29:55):
staying calm.
You know I had I'd writtenabout the defense industry as a
reporter, I had worked at adifferent defense company, I
understood the subject, Iunderstood what we were dealing
with and so I could move reallyquickly If I hadn't.
I think, at the end of the day,most of us know what the right
thing is to do in the moment,and the harder part, as we've
(30:18):
been talking about, is gettingother people there, and so in
this case I guess I got morelatitude than somebody who was
totally green would have gotten,because I was a known entity
and people trusted me Right.
Otherwise that trust would haveto be developed over time.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
Yeah, Like so.
Trust truly is the secret saucefor it to be effective.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
I think it is.
I think it is.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yeah, I'm very curious about one of the most
unexpected crisis scenarios thatyou managed through.
You don't have to name names,but is there any that comes to
mind where you're like that wasunexpected.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Yeah, actually A blimp, a blimp.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Like the Goodyear blimp, like the Goodyear blip.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
When I was at Lockheed we had this prototype
airship it's called the HailDeep and we all got up at 3.30
am to watch this massive,massive it was like, I think,
five football fields longairship takeoff from a dock in
akron, ohio.
It was beautiful dawn, lovely,but it wasn't three hours later,
(31:29):
when I was getting my car todrive to work, that I got an
urgent phone call that the blimpwas was about to crash and it
was rush hour.
It was pennsylvania i-95 was inits path.
I was like, oh, jesus Christ,so that was definitely a crisis.
I mean, again, we had a planfor what would happen if we had
issues with it, but it reallylooked like it was going to be a
(31:51):
flawless test and it did not.
It was not a flawless test andit ended up coming down in a
wooded area very close to abeaver dam in Pennsylvania.
The good news was weimmediately dispatched a
communicator to the beaver damto answer all the local news
press questions.
(32:11):
So we basically it wasn't likea national news story, but
certainly in the Philadelphia,ohio, pennsylvania area you know
it was a couple of days ofcoverage of this massive airship
that went down and, you know,working again by the before.
It took 10 minutes to get to theoffice.
(32:33):
By the time I got into theoffice, we had all the necessary
people on the phone.
I'm like where's the airship?
Like it was just like drillingthe questions.
Like, okay, I've dispatchedthis person, let's get this
information written up, get itinto that person's hands.
They need to be on site.
Reporters are going to come tothe location.
Blah, blah, blah.
Work with the local authorities.
We were seamless.
(32:54):
I had everybody on an open linein my office for three hours.
I was like, just come back andtalk on the squawk box, I'm
leaving the line open and sothat's you know.
I mean, this is the stuff thathappens in the middle of a
crisis, you just have to stopdoing everything else and just
do this.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Well, which begs the point of not having a playbook,
because I don't know if you'reworking at Lockheed Martin, you
probably don't think you'regoing to have to deal with the
National Beaver Society becausethe blip crashed in their dam.
Do you know what I'm sayingLike?
But now here you are.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
The ASPCA has got you on a speed dial.
Yeah, I can't imagine.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Right, Like you cannot plan for every possible
crisis trying to hurt thebeavers no no beaver was killed.
No beaver was hurt in thetesting of the singer ship.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
What do you know?
If a crisis response wassuccessful, what do you measure?
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Nowadays, with social media, there are all kinds of
tools that you can listen to howpeople are talking.
So there's the qualitative andthen the quantitative.
On the qualitative side, youknow if people are pissed off.
You mentioned UnitedHealthcareearlier and I actually would
love to go back to that, but itwas pretty remarkable that a man
(34:39):
was murdered and people weretalking about how hot the
assassin was and how people arefeeling about your company when
they're cheering for themurderer instead of being
completely outraged about whathappened.
And I would just say one thing Iactually think that
UnitedHealthcare is doing a verygood job with this.
So you know, yesterday wastheir earnings and their CEO of
the parent company, UnitedHealth, talked about what's
(35:02):
wrong with the healthcare system, and he also had an editorial
in the New York Times a week ortwo after the murder happened
that addressed it.
Now it does beg the question asthe nation's largest insurance
company, what are you doing tosolve the problem?
So great that you're nowacknowledging that there is a
(35:24):
problem, but what are you doingto solve it, which I hope is the
next piece for that?
But I've seen them lean intothis in a manner that I think is
better than some companies doin these situations.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
I have a quick question follow up for that,
because with UnitedHealthcare,what I found interesting, just
as an observer and someoneconsuming, they're getting out
at front about acknowledgingtheir role but then their
actions seem to not align withtheir acknowledgement.
So, for example, like anarticle came out yesterday about
how they're one of the fewinsurance companies who are
(36:01):
increasing I think it was cancermedication by over 1000%
compared to other insurers,making it more expensive for
their customers.
So when you see like you seethe CEO coming out and they're
acknowledging it, partlyresponsible for the state of the
healthcare system, but theyhaven't taken it to what should
(36:40):
be the next level, you know asthe nation's largest insurer.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Here are the things we're going to do differently,
right, boom, boom, boom, boom,right, and and hopefully,
fingers crossed that's theirnext piece, because otherwise,
in a couple of months, this yes,it's broken and we're really
sorry and we have to all dobetter is not going to play well
with the vast majority of thepublic, because they're going to
(37:06):
be like yeah, we heard thatfrom you for six months now and
you haven't done anythingdifferent.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
It's the new thoughts and prayers.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Right.
So I do think that that isalways the challenge right, Even
if your crisis communicationsresponse is great.
Boeing had the same issue.
Their issue was the problemwith the manufacturing of these
planes.
That has come out and nowgotten a lot of media coverage
and government intervention andother things right.
(37:32):
I often would say it's comms'job to like prepare the garden,
fertilize the soil, make surethat it's an environment in
which things can grow, but ifthings don't grow here, that's
not my fault, that's your fault.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Can you tell a lot about a company's culture by how
they respond in a crisis?
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean because that responseisn't coming out of nowhere.
And if it does come out ofnowhere, then it probably won't
be trusted.
Think about the insuranceindustry right now and these
fires, I mean.
It's not a good scene and theyhad already cut off people's
insurance policies, and I livedin California.
(38:16):
Insurance was extraordinarilyexpensive to get and that was
when you could even get it.
Now you can't even get it inmany places, and I wasn't in a
fire zone, but at this point youdon't really know what a fire
zone is.
It could be anywhere.
So I think that the way inwhich these companies have
approached their business willmake them inherently trustworthy
in this situation because ofeverything that led up to it.
(38:40):
Now maybe somebody will stepout and do the right thing.
Do the right thing has multipleimplications because at the end
of the day, many of these arepublicly traded companies and
they're mining their portfoliofor risk and they only want to
have a risk exposure of make itup 30%, 40%.
(39:04):
So that means we can't coverany of these folks unless they
pay this much more money, andthat makes it prohibitively
expensive and most people can'tafford that.
And so again, we get down tosort of a situation where, okay,
if you're part of the problem,you're also part of the solution
.
So are you going to lead onthis and try to figure out how
we might be able to at leastaddress this?
So I saw on the news last night.
(39:25):
People are hanging signs withQR codes to their GoFundMe pages
in the front of their burnthouses in Pacific Palisades so
that people driving by can justget to their QR card and give
them money.
That's terrible In this country, with the kind of money this
country has, that anyone shouldhave to have a GoFundMe page,
(39:47):
especially if they had insurance.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Agreed.
You mentioned that almost everycompany is going to be in
crisis this year.
I feel like the insurancecompanies are like they're in
the hot seat.
Buckle up.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
That kid is going on trial, that man is going on
trial for shooting theUnitedHealthcare CEO, and so
will the healthcare industry,insurance industry, be on trial,
because that is going to bepart of that entire trial.
There's two trials right nowand if they got combined, you
know, or maybe even three, ifthey bring federal charges
they'll get combined into onetrial.
(40:22):
But make no mistake, he will beon trial, and so will the
healthcare insurance industry.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
I'd love to talk about advice that you personally
might give to folks who are ina crisis, dealing with crisis,
just based on your ownexperience.
What's your go-to stressreliever?
What do you do when you're inan active crisis situation?
Speaker 1 (40:55):
when you're in an active crisis situation.
Well, after the work, I woulddefinitely have a glass of red
wine During it.
I mean, I think it's reallyimportant to just try to stay
calm and clear and whatever youneed to do, that is important
Exercise or meditate or whateverit is for you.
Exercise or meditate orwhatever it is for you like.
(41:20):
Being very calm and almostimpersonal about the situation
is really important wheneveryone else is flipping out.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
So that's from a communication standpoint.
If you're a leader, in one word, what's the most important
quality a leader needs?
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Judgment no question Judgment.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
What is the best piece of crisis management
advice that you've ever beengiven?
Don't be afraid to ask the hardquestions.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Often what happens in a crisis is not only are people
afraid to ask the hard question, they're afraid to ask the
follow-up to the hard question.
Up to the hard question.
But if you don't knoweverything that you need to know
, your crisis is going tomushroom right, and you could
(42:05):
have gotten ahead of it if youhad just kept going down that
line of questioning to get whatelse do?
I need to know that we're notdoing right so I can respond,
because there's going to be areporter calling me about this
in less than 36 hours.
So tell me everything now so Ican get ready for it.
So I think, ask the hardquestions and ask the hard
follow-up questions.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
Almost like an attorney.
Like I don't want any surpriseshere.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Yeah, I mean, that's the worst thing that any
business can have is a surprise.
Speaker 3 (42:33):
Okay, what are some or what's one crisis
communication myth that youwould like to debunk?
Speaker 1 (42:41):
You don't need a playbook.
You need courage, commitmentand clarity, but you do not need
a playbook.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
All right, anne-marie , we like to get to know our
guests on a more personal level,so I'm going to ask you some
rapid round questions that arejust light and easy.
We just want to get to know you.
Are you down?
Okay, let's do it.
All right, it's 2030.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
What do you think work is going to look like?
Well, I'm really hoping thatthe AI is doing all the mundane
things and that we're down to athree day work week.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Yeah, I like the world.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
We're here for it.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Painting.
Yes, yes.
What music are you listening toright now?
Speaker 1 (43:21):
You know, I listen to such a bizarre blend of music.
What was playing in my car justtoday?
I was listening to a littleJohn Legend a little while ago,
nice, nice.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
All right, all right.
Do you know he started as amanagement consultant?
I read that Isn't that wildyeah.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Listen, bain, or I think Bain or BCG.
Yeah, it was one of the.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
It was one of the MBBs, I thought.
I know, mel and I come fromDeloitte and everyone's always
trying to oh no, it was Deloitte.
I'm like it was not Deloitte.
We like to claim everything.
What are you reading?
Speaker 1 (43:57):
I am reading Mel Robbins' Let them Theory.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
What do?
Speaker 2 (44:02):
you think it is a great way to start the year.
Nice, that's a tough one, likethat whole idea.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
I think that would be .
It's tough, right, and I wasactually having a little mini
meltdown about something lastweek and I was complaining to my
husband and he was like, well,honey, what about?
Let them, let them.
I was like, oh my God, yes,right, perfect.
Was it free yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah, yeah.
Who do you really admire?
I?
Speaker 1 (44:33):
really admire Michelle Obama.
I think that she is authentic,I think she has demonstrated
really good judgment and I thinkshe lives her values.
You know, she's not afraid tolive them, and I think that's
like one of the most importantthings we can do, especially as
women, and stop trying tocontort ourselves into what
(44:53):
everyone wants us to be and bewho we want to be.
Speaker 3 (44:57):
I recently someone on social media said that they're
going to RSVP as Michelle Obamagoing forward when they say no
to things and she's not showingup to anything anymore.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
There's been all these great memes of her just
like no, no, thank you, yeah, no, and I also love the fact that
I don't need to give you areason.
Speaker 3 (45:16):
No explanation needed .
Speaker 1 (45:18):
That actually is something that I have been over
the last couple of years, tryingto break the habit of right.
Like I always feel like well,what are you going to tell them
about why you're not going?
And I'm like why do I have totell them anything?
Why does anyone need to knowwhy I'm not doing something?
Speaker 3 (45:33):
No is a full explanation.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
Yeah, Right, but I wasn't raised like that and for
most of my life I always waslike I can't do that because I
have these other and I'm likeyou know, nobody cares, Nobody.
I'm making a bigger deal out ofthis than anyone else.
No, I can't do it, Sorry, Nexttime.
So I think that it's just.
It is something that we have topractice in order to get
comfortable with it.
Speaker 2 (45:56):
Yeah, and it's definitely a muscle.
I'm always like worried abouteverybody else's feelings and
it's like no one gives a shit.
You can either come or youcan't, it's fine.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
And also, at the end of the day, like it doesn't make
you nice or not nice to do that, right, it's just, it just is.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Yeah, last one, a piece of advice you'd want
everyone to know a piece ofadvice you'd want everyone to
know.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
I think it's important to understand who you
are and then be the best versionof that person.
We all spend so much timetrying to fit in to different
scenarios and situations that wesometimes get so lost and then
we're not the best version ofanything.
So no, we're not perfect.
Figure out like what's where doyou get your joy, what, what
(46:45):
makes you unhappy?
And then try to be the bestversion of the person.
That is that, and don't worryabout what everyone else thinks.
You know, frankly, they'regoing to talk about you anyway.
So you know like there's justreally no point worrying about
it.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
Yeah, let them yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
I mean, we all have to get inspiration from places.
I'm hoping that you know, as Ikeep reading this book, that it
is very inspiring to remindmyself that I have no control
over what other people think.
I only have control over what Ithink.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
Yeah, yeah.
And how you live your life andhow you take your energy, you
know or channel your energy Ithink that's such sage advice is
to figure out who you are andthen just try to be the best
version of that, and that's it.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
No one's asking for any more than that.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
Love it, love it.
Speaker 3 (47:35):
Thanks guys.
This episode was produced,edited and all things by us
myself, mel Plett and FrancescaRanieri.
Our music is by Pink Zebra andif you loved this conversation
and you want to contribute yourthoughts with us, please do.
You can visit us atyourworkfriendscom, but you can
(47:58):
also join us over on LinkedIn.
We have a LinkedIn communitypage and we have the TikToks and
Instagram.
So please, please, join us inthe socials.
And if you like this and you'vebenefited from this episode and
you think someone else canbenefit from this episode,
please like, rate and subscribe.
(48:19):
We'd really appreciate it.
That helps keep us going.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:23):
All right, Take care, friends.
Bye friends, Bye friends.
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