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Your Work Friends
When Everything Hits the Fan: Crisis Communication 101 w/ Anne Marie Squeo
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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But it wasn't three hours later, when I was getting my car to drive to work, that I got an urgent phone call that the blimp was about to crash and it was rush hour. It was Pennsylvania I-95 was in its path. I was like, oh, jesus Christ going on mel what's up?
Speaker 3:what's up? Um, I have good news, you have good news, I like it. You know, I do starting uh, next week the sun sets at 5 pm oh.
Speaker 2:Oh, my gosh, I'm telling you during the winter nuts, nuts, winter nuts. What, what is on my mind During the winter nuts? With my sweaty balls, during the winter months, I become a bear. I am just like oh, it's 7 o'clock, I'm going to get my jams. It is not good, listen same.
Speaker 3: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 my gosh. Well, we were incredibly lucky to sit down with Anne-Marie Sgueo today, who is an expert in crisis communications. She is the CEO and founder of Proofpoint Communications. She's a strategic branding communications and crisis PR maven. She's also a Pulitzer winning business journalist, and two words to describe her battle proven. What did you take away from this conversation?
Speaker 2:I love crisis communications. I think it's just a fascinating topic about how companies and how people respond to crisis, and there was a lot that Anne-Marie shared that looked really under the hood around how this all works within organizations, how decisions are made and, honestly, what good looks like. That I did not know and I think is really, really eye-opening for anybody listening. What did you think, mel?
Speaker 3:Absolutely agree. If you're a leader in an organization, you're going to find this episode extremely useful and helpful. She gave some pretty clear tips on. This is how you show up and this is how you pull through and come together. So with that, here's Anne-Marie we are so excited to have you join us today on your Work Friends, and I'm going to jump right in with a headline that came out from Axios and I want to get your thoughts. They said CEOs are enjoying a hot speech. Winter, when we're speaking out in outrageous ways, carries no cost and we know recently we saw the UnitedHealthcare CEO not really dealing well with critical crisis and Mark Zuckerberg's comments on the Joe Rogan podcast on how that's impacting meta. What are your thoughts on that statement?
Speaker 1:podcast on how that's impacting meta. What are your thoughts on that statement? There's always a cost. The question is how you're measuring it. We'll go back to United Healthcare.
Speaker 1:I think Zuck's comments are, frankly, just bizarre and I keep wondering what his wife thinks. But a lot of my friends have gone off threads. They've gone off Instagram and closed their Facebook accounts. There's a critical piece to this in terms of has no cost, right.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is, you know, when Jeff Bezos pisses us all off and you know, we're like I'm not using Amazon anymore. I'm just I'm not, and I tried this. Actually I tried this for a couple of months last year and it's really hard. So if you're addicted to the product or service and you have been for the last five years then it's probably unlikely you're going to get unaddicted. But if it's more marginal in your existence, so the Washington Post subscription, that is like the eighth thing I read any day. I can live without that Right. So I mean, I think that it's going to be hard for CEOs to say there's no cost, because for some it might appear that way because their product or service is so essential to our lives that most of us can't imagine we'd be punishing ourselves if we cut it off. But if you don't fall in that category and most people don't then there are going to be repercussions for doing things that piss off 50% or more of your customers, subscribers, whatever.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think Francesca and I were talking about this before the session and one of the things we both agreed on was there's maybe five people, I think Francesca you said, who have a few money to be able to not have a cost to their statements.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean again, most CEOs, I think, measure the cost financially. But bad reputations have bad financial implications and they might not happen immediately. But one thing that I think that is a mid-term kind of outcome of, say, meta's CEO's comments is you're already seeing blue sky and all these competitors come up and they're going to get better. Just like threads stepped in to pick up where Twitter X left off, someone's going to step in and pick up where both of those guys left off and run away with it. And the eyeballs and the advertising money Don't count too soon. I wouldn't count my chickens before they're hatched, because it might not be that the next three months are impacted, but the next 12 months may well be as alternatives come to bear.
Speaker 2:It's so fun to watch. There's, I imagine, in your area, someone's always in crisis and, to your very good point, you started this by saying going through the Trump administration, every organization is going to be in crisis because of all the change that's going on. And I'm curious about how do you define either like a PR crisis or crisis communications? For those that don't know about this topic, what is it?
Speaker 1:Oh, this is a great question because, you know, I've definitely worked places where the CEO or senior leaders thought everything was a crisis, you know.
Speaker 1:So if we're not included in a story, it's a crisis, and if we are included in a negative story, it's a crisis, and you know, I think that all of us in the industry have to kind of set a barometer for what actually requires a crisis response, and that's an important conversation and level setting that needs to happen in every organization, because if you, the communications team, are not aligned or at least educating your leaders about what makes the cut for when we're going into crisis mode, you will spend your entire day and night and weekends fighting fires that are not important and you'll never get to the good stuff and the important stuff.
Speaker 1:So I think, if it's a real crisis, francesca, I think it's got real reputational and financial implications for a company and business implications. So you are a railroad company and your railroad went off the tracks in Ohio and potentially poisoned an entire community with toxic things that came out of the cars. You've got a crisis and it's going to potentially result in regulatory repercussions, punitive government, punitive repercussions, lawsuits, environmental related issues. That is a legitimate crisis. I would say things that no one's going to be talking about in 24 or 48 hours, not a crisis. So I think, by definition, a crisis is going to be longer than 48 hours. You may feel like it's a crisis in the moment, but if it's going away and no one's going to remember it in a year, it wasn't a crisis.
Speaker 2:I'm curious about that timing right, I mean within 48 hours. If no one's going to be talking about it, it's not a crisis. I'm curious on the other aspect of that because, especially with social media, the first 24 hours of a crisis, or that after something happens, the train derails and spills chemicals, the LA wildfires are happening, UnitedHealthcare CEO gets shot, the BP oil spill that first 24 hours seems like it's so critical. And then, especially with social media, the speed of which information gets put out into the ether. How important is the first 24 hours If you've identified that this is in fact a crisis? How important is that first 24 hours as an organization?
Speaker 1:It's very important to establish trust and confidence in whatever comes next. I think the challenge of the first 24 hours in some of these situations is you don't really know a lot in that first 24 hours, right, whether it's an oil spill, a plane crash, a derailment, a cyber attack, I mean there's some stuff you know, but there's so very much that you do not know and you won't know for a while. But you have to establish the kind of connected tissue that you're going to need in this situation and whether you're going to be viewed as someone who's withholding information or going to be forthcoming when you can be information or going to be forthcoming when you can be. 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 until the news came out the next day. So I mean, you guys might be too young to remember that, but I mean now everything's like people might know about it on social media before even the company is aware that something happened. So it creates both benefits and detriments in any crisis situation because on the pro side, you can use social media to find out, so you can be listening all the time, and so if people start talking about something, you know about it before it becomes a wildfire and you can disseminate information more broadly more quickly because of it. But so can dis and misinformation get disseminated more quickly, and now you don't just have a crisis of the underlying event, you have a crisis that you're trying to contain information that's actually inaccurate about the underlying event, and so it has definitely made the job of a communications team, a crisis PR team and a leadership team exponentially harder, because you've got all these moving pieces and you can't afford to wait. And yet you can't afford to be too detailed either, because you might be issuing a detail in the first to make it up 10 hours turns out not to be true, and now you've got to go back and correct.
Speaker 1:Now you've started to break trust right, and we started with first. We want to establish that we are going to be a trustworthy communicator in this situation. You know, the wildfires are sort of an interesting example where I've got a lot of friends who live in LA. Many have been evacuated. Luckily nobody's lost their home yet that I know of. But every single one of them said the communications have been God awful and you saw it in some of these press interviews that they were doing where fire chief was dissing the mayor and the mayor didn't know and she's smiling. Meanwhile, people's homes are burning 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.
Speaker 1:So that's really that first 24 hours. I think we all recognize you might not know enough, but you've got to establish that I'm going to be a trusted partner with you in this endeavor. That feeling is something that's either going to help long-term in managing this crisis or it's going to hurt you long-term in attempting to manage the crisis. So that getting the right spokesperson out there, having a transparent and trustworthy demeanor, not hiding facts that are easily known from multiple sources but you're not willing to confirm it there's so many little things that end up adding up to that. How do people feel about us right now? And I think that's one of the key thing in the first day of any major crisis.
Speaker 2:So much of this comes out to planning you had mentioned too earlier on. One of the things you want to do is establish what is a crisis, which I think is super important. So you're not chasing down the fact that you didn't get into Fast Company this month, right, like that's not a crisis. Dora, flying out of a Boeing Max right, that's a crisis.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure Apple, in which case it was like great sales point because the phone dropped miles and still was working. That's hilarious.
Speaker 2:It's so funny. I live in Portland, Oregon. The door of the Boeing Max landed in one of my neighbor's yards over yonder, so it was like a big like oh, he found the door. I'm like that is not what you want as a company. I'd love to open up the hood a little bit on who's behind these organizations. What's the command center look like for crisis communications? Who is determining what's a crisis? Who is determining at these organizations how to even respond, or who's going to be the spokesperson? What does that typically look like?
Speaker 1:And it varies, right, it varies depending on the crisis, the company and the people. So if you've got, let's say, you're a big company and you have a crisis, then you know you undoubtedly have a senior comms person, a chief communications officer, a VP of communications, who's going to be point in theory on that if you let them and they often want to put their voice and their reaction into the situation and it can make it much harder to get to where you might need to be if that's the case. But your command center it's going to change depending on what the crisis is. So the two constants that I have seen in every crisis is comms and legal. We're always there.
Speaker 1:Now, if it's a product thing, right, like if it's an airplane crash, the head of the Boeing commercial airplanes business is going to be involved. Probably the engineering folks and manufacturing folks are going to be involved. Legal is definitely involved. Comms is involved, Leadership is involved, but comms and legal are almost in every single crisis. If it's an employee event somebody was killed in the workplace and it's because of whatever reason, you know, hr is going to be involved. Right, it's a cyber attack Then your information security and your technology officer are going to be involved. So it's going to change depending on the crisis, but always should have communications and legal at the table. Looking at that working in lockstep and it's wonderful when that happens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, especially because your comms people. That is their craft, that is their skill, and especially when you're the CEO or even if you're head of product or head of engineering. I think sometimes there might be too much of an emotional bias on some of those things.
Speaker 1:If you're coming in I don't know if you've seen that, or- not, because, well, let's face it, a crisis is only a crisis because something didn't work right, something went wrong, someone was killed, a railroad went off the tracks, we were breached in a cyber attack, or a customer was breached in a cyber attack, so something didn't work right. It's never a crisis when everything's going well, so that's just going to ratchet up everybody's emotions. From a communication standpoint, it's important to understand that, because we're not actually going to be able to appropriately address this crisis if we don't understand where everyone's coming from, so that we can get them where we need to go. And so it could take a little while and that's the challenge, of course is that in most crises, time is of the essence, and yet you've got to somehow get people on this path with you so you could do the right thing instead of doing nothing, which is often most people's default position, which is let's just say nothing, or let's just say the bare minimum and leave it at that right.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I thought was interesting Boeing had two plane crashes within a year and a half or so, and their statements were overly lawyered and ice cold. I mean, everybody uniformly looked at those statements and were like really, 346 people are dead in these two plane crashes and you're like basically thoughts and prayers, and yet you know there's a lot. You don't know when you have to put that statement out, you know could it have been pilot error.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's not the airplane's fault. You don't want to overdo it, but you can't come across as being almost uncaring when people's lives were ended and many families globally were impacted by those two events.
Speaker 2:It's interesting when you can feel where it's overly lawyered or sometimes it's overly emotional. The one I always remember from grad school is during the BP oil spill and the CEO made it all about himself, like, well, no one's suffering as much as I am and everyone's like you need to go away. This is not about you, but it.
Speaker 1:Didn't his weekend plans get ruined or something?
Speaker 2:Yes, and you're like I'm sorry, the Gulf of Mexico is completely under crude oil right now, but it seems like comms really is that, for lack of a better term almost like the adult in the room that's helping you strike the right balance for whatever the situation calls for.
Speaker 1:You have to be the truth sayer in the room Like you have got to be the one who walks in the room and just says it, and it doesn't always make you very popular to do that. When I was at Xerox and I was the chief brand and comms officer, the pandemic hit. And you know, the week before everyone was told to send their employees home we had already sent our employees in Italy home Because, remember, italy was a really hot spot I went to the CEO and said we need to send everybody home and he was like are you nuts? And I was like no, I mean, have you not paid attention to the news? So we had a whole meeting and nobody else agreed with me. And the next day I had to go back to him and I was like so can we talk about sending everybody home? And he's like I thought we had a meeting about it yesterday. And I'm like, well, we did, but we came to the wrong answer, so we're going to let's have that conversation again. And so he said, okay, you got five minutes to go.
Speaker 1:And I did, and he sent everybody home and he told employees in an all employee phone call, like you guys have Ann Marie to thank for me actually getting ahead of this issue. And the way he got ahead of the issue was me saying, like here's the thing. We don't even know what the deal is with this thing. All we know is it's very transmissible from human to human. You are going to send everybody home. So the question is do you want to send them home today and get ahead of being ordered to send everybody home and be perceived as a good leader, or do you want to wait until the government tells you to send everybody home and just do it then? Either way, you're doing it, so you just have to decide when you want to do it and wanted to do it ahead of time. So we sent everybody home and then the order came 48, 72 hours later. He got a lot of credit from our employees.
Speaker 2:That's goodwill.
Speaker 1:That of credit from our employees. That's goodwill. That's goodwill man. This guy cares about his people. You should have just taken the credit. That's my job is to give you credit and he was like no people should know how that went down. So for communicators, it requires a level of courage for any leader, but especially for a communicator, because there's we're probably the only ones in the room with no direct relationship to the cause of the event. We are probably the most objective person in the room. In a crisis, we have to stand strong and ask the questions and be unemotional and super calm and not accusatory, and just try to get people moving in the right direction.
Speaker 3:When you think of essential elements, that communications teams or even if you're a leader right, what's a playbook to have in place to help you contain the crisis, when stuff pops up?
Speaker 1:What are the key elements you would include in that? Yeah, it's funny. Playbooks are a thing. There are whole firms that will come in and build you a crisis playbook. I always think that's a hilarious notion.
Speaker 3:Seems like it would be situation to situation. Right, it depends.
Speaker 1:Right. You can't possibly be prepared for every possible. I mean, now listen, if you run a rail company, you can be prepared for a derailment, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1: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 thought you were going to be involved with. So I'm not a big believer in playbooks.
Speaker 1:In fact, at one company I worked at, I arrived my first week somebody came over and handed me like this three quarters of an inch thick crisis playbook and I was like really, and I put it in the drawer and I never, ever looked at it, and this was a company that had many crises during my tenure there but we never once related to the book, and I'll tell you, no CEO has ever asked me what does the police playbook say about how to handle this crisis?
Speaker 3:Let's go through our manual.
Speaker 1:It says, if an employee dies. So I am just a big believer in all the pre-work that makes it possible to successfully manage a crisis, a crisis. So hire really good people with diverse experiences, who may have handled various crises in different companies or at agencies or whatnot, and then let them tackle the problems when they start happening. Establish authority and trust with the leadership team, because it actually doesn't matter if you're in charge and you have a playbook. If the CEO doesn't trust you, you are not going to be able to influence the outcome of this crisis. Define what a crisis is. Who needs to sign off on the actions related to that crisis.
Speaker 1:I'm just a really big believer in hire people with good judgment, great experience, different experience, and make sure that everything that you're doing up to the point of the crisis ensures that you have the authority and the trust and the seat at the table to influence and drive that discussion and that outcome, because otherwise you're just you're. You're just going to take it along for the ride. Don't be a passenger on this bus. Drive this bus.
Speaker 1:We're really the only ones, as I said, that are sort of objective in this situation and have that external sensibility to understand what's happening outside the business so that we can bring that to whatever solution and communication strategy we're developing.
Speaker 3:I think you make the best point is that the communications team is probably the most neutral party in any room when they're dealing with something like this. You just bring a different point of view, that and it takes out the emotions completely from it, which is needed. How do you manage those emotions up front if you're a comms person?
Speaker 1:Listen and empathize with that person, because often all that person really needs is to emote. They need to get all that they're feeling out there and they're probably going to get to the right place. But if they don't have the space to do that, you're going to be bouncing up against it when you're trying to get them someplace else. So I do think that despite the fact that we are communicators because we are, in theory, better at communicating I think this is one of those very important situations where it's better to just listen to people and let them go through it If it's 20 minutes an hour whatever because they're probably going to talk themselves to exactly where you need them to be, or close to it, and then understand that those emotions are real.
Speaker 1:If you're a CEO and say, like you're in a precarious position. Your company's not financially performing 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 response is, even if you're not articulating it, there's like a knot in your stomach Like is this the thing that's going to push me out the door? What you need is a comms person who understands that. That that's your starting point, but here's where we need to go and actually, if we manage this crisis really well, it will elevate your standing instead of being the nail in your coffin.
Speaker 3:That makes sense. One of the things that we talk about often is transparency and how transparent you can be, because we're always up against general counsel and their feedback as well around what you can and can't say. How do you balance transparency with the legal constraints that come up during a crisis?
Speaker 1:I mean. The thing is, you don't want to build trust between the comms and legal team in the middle of a crisis, right? Because if it's not there, trust me it's not coming that week. So that's a relationship that is so absolutely essential. That comms legal relationship. I have never had a general counsel. Well, actually, once, once I had a general counsel and it was painful not to have that trusted relationship. But in every other role we were like attached to the hip because we understood there was going to be so many touch points where we were going to have to come to mutually agreeable decisions that we had to be on the same wavelength. And who can build the relationships that are going to allow you to influence the solutions, move quickly and do it with trust, because you can't build it in the middle of a crisis.
Speaker 3:So say someone's day one on a new job. They were the new comms leader. How do they quickly because you have to get that buy-in between multiple departments as soon as a crisis comes up how do they quickly gain that trust from business leadership, from those department leads? What's the best way for them to build trust quickly?
Speaker 1: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 at Lockheed Martin and a major military program. So I was on like day two or three a major military program. The Pentagon had changed the acquisition strategy and thrown everything into flux and I remember standing in the middle of my office thinking, jesus, what are we doing now? And I just like gathered all the people who needed to be in the room on this.
Speaker 1:Even though I was the new person, I was like, okay, we have a crisis, we need to come up with a media statement, a media plan, at least for 24 hours, then we can regroup tomorrow, cause this was at like four o'clock in the afternoon, I pulled everybody together, we figured it out, we moved out the statement and it worked fine. And then the next day we got to work as a larger group on a plan. If you're new, like you're going to need to pull in the people who are there and use your best judgment. This is where the judgment piece comes in, because judgment isn't something that like appears. You can't go to Walmart, pick it up off a store shelf.
Speaker 3: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: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 people and be like can you just come to my office Because I can't email you, and we just had to move quickly, email you and we just had to move quickly. I actually love those.
Speaker 3:What do you think? They're fun. I can see you easily doing fine under pressure. What do you? What do you think was your secret sauce in that moment, though? How did you get everyone to go along with what you?
Speaker 1:staying calm. You know I had I'd written about the defense industry as a reporter, I had worked at a different defense company, I understood the subject, I understood what we were dealing with and so I could move really quickly 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 been talking about, is getting other people there, and so in this case I guess I got more latitude than somebody who was totally green would have gotten, because I was a known entity and people trusted me Right. Otherwise that trust would have to be developed over time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Like so. Trust truly is the secret sauce for it to be effective.
Speaker 1:I think it is. I think it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm very curious about one of the most unexpected crisis scenarios that you managed through. You don't have to name names, but is there any that comes to mind where you're like that was unexpected.
Speaker 1:Yeah, actually A blimp, a blimp.
Speaker 2:Like the Goodyear blimp, like the Goodyear blip.
Speaker 1:When I was at Lockheed we had this prototype airship it's called the Hail Deep and we all got up at 3.30 am to watch this massive, massive it was like, I think, five football fields long airship takeoff from a dock in akron, ohio. It was beautiful dawn, lovely, but it wasn't three hours later, when I was getting my car to drive to work, that I got an urgent phone call that the blimp was was about to crash and it was rush hour. It was pennsylvania i-95 was in its path. I was like, oh, jesus Christ, so that was definitely a crisis. I mean, again, we had a plan for what would happen if we had issues with it, but it really looked like it was going to be a flawless test and it did not. It was not a flawless test and it ended up coming down in a wooded area very close to a beaver dam in Pennsylvania. The good news was we immediately dispatched a communicator to the beaver dam to answer all the local news press questions. So we basically it wasn't like a national news story, but certainly in the Philadelphia, ohio, pennsylvania area you know it was a couple of days of coverage of this massive airship that went down and, you know, working again by the before.
Speaker 1:It took 10 minutes to get to the office. By the time I got into the office, we had all the necessary people on the phone. I'm like where's the airship? Like it was just like drilling the questions. Like, okay, I've dispatched this person, let's get this information written up, get it into that person's hands. They need to be on site. Reporters are going to come to the location. Blah, blah, blah. Work with the local authorities. We were seamless. I had everybody on an open line in my office for three hours. I was like, just come back and talk on the squawk box, I'm leaving the line open and so that's you know.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is the stuff that happens in the middle of a crisis, you just have to stop doing everything else and just do this.
Speaker 2:Well, which begs the point of not having a playbook, because I don't know if you're working at Lockheed Martin, you probably don't think you're going to have to deal with the National Beaver Society because the blip crashed in their dam. Do you know what I'm saying Like? But now here you are.
Speaker 3:The ASPCA has got you on a speed dial. Yeah, I can't imagine.
Speaker 1:Right, Like you cannot plan for every possible crisis trying to hurt the beavers no no beaver was killed. No beaver was hurt in the testing of the singer ship.
Speaker 2:What do you know? If a crisis response was successful, what do you measure?
Speaker 1:Nowadays, with social media, there are all kinds of tools that you can listen to how people are talking. So there's the qualitative and then the quantitative. On the qualitative side, you know if people are pissed off. You mentioned UnitedHealthcare earlier and I actually would love to go back to that, but it was pretty remarkable that a man was murdered and people were talking about how hot the assassin was and how people are feeling about your company when they're cheering for the murderer instead of being completely outraged about what happened.
Speaker 1:And I would just say one thing I actually think that UnitedHealthcare is doing a very good job with this. So you know, yesterday was their earnings and their CEO of the parent company, United Health, talked about what's wrong with the healthcare system, and he also had an editorial in the New York Times a week or two after the murder happened that addressed it. Now it does beg the question as the nation's largest insurance company, what are you doing to solve the problem? So great that you're now acknowledging that there is a problem, but what are you doing to solve it, which I hope is the next piece for that? But I've seen them lean into this in a manner that I think is better than some companies do in these situations.
Speaker 3:I have a quick question follow up for that, because with UnitedHealthcare, what I found interesting, just as an observer and someone consuming, they're getting out at front about acknowledging their role but then their actions seem to not align with their acknowledgement. So, for example, like an article came out yesterday about how they're one of the few insurance companies who are increasing I think it was cancer medication by over 1000% compared to other insurers, making it more expensive for their customers. So when you see like you see the CEO coming out and they're acknowledging it, partly responsible for the state of the healthcare system, but they haven't taken it to what should be the next level, you know as the nation's largest insurer.
Speaker 1:Here are the things we're going to do differently, right, boom, boom, boom, boom, right, and and hopefully, fingers crossed that's their next piece, because otherwise, in a couple of months, this yes, it's broken and we're really sorry and we have to all do better is not going to play well with the vast majority of the public, because they're going to be like yeah, we heard that from you for six months now and you haven't done anything different.
Speaker 3:It's the new thoughts and prayers.
Speaker 1:Right. So I do think that that is always the challenge right, Even if your crisis communications response is great. Boeing had the same issue. Their issue was the problem with the manufacturing of these planes. That has come out and now gotten a lot of media coverage and government intervention and other things right. I often would say it's comms' job to like prepare the garden, fertilize the soil, make sure that it's an environment in which things can grow, but if things don't grow here, that's not my fault, that's your fault.
Speaker 2:Can you tell a lot about a company's culture by how they respond in a crisis? Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I mean because that response isn't coming out of nowhere. And if it does come out of nowhere, then it probably won't be trusted. Think about the insurance industry right now and these fires, I mean.
Speaker 1:It's not a good scene and they had already cut off people's insurance policies, and I lived in California. Insurance was extraordinarily expensive to get and that was when you could even get it. Now you can't even get it in many places, and I wasn't in a fire zone, but at this point you don't really know what a fire zone is. It could be anywhere. So I think that the way in which these companies have approached their business will make them inherently trustworthy in this situation because of everything that led up to it. Now maybe somebody will step out and do the right thing.
Speaker 1:Do the right thing has multiple implications because at the end of the day, many of these are publicly traded companies and they're mining their portfolio for risk and they only want to have a risk exposure of make it up 30%, 40%. So that means we can't cover any of these folks unless they pay this much more money, and that makes it prohibitively expensive and most people can't afford that. And so again, we get down to sort 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 on this and try to figure out how we might be able to at least address this? So I saw on the news last night. People are hanging signs with QR codes to their GoFundMe pages in the front of their burnt houses in Pacific Palisades so that people driving by can just get to their QR card and give them money. That's terrible In this country, with the kind of money this country has, that anyone should have to have a GoFundMe page, especially if they had insurance.
Speaker 2:Agreed. You mentioned that almost every company is going to be in crisis this year. I feel like the insurance companies are like they're in the hot seat. Buckle up.
Speaker 1:That kid is going on trial, that man is going on trial for shooting the UnitedHealthcare CEO, and so will the healthcare industry, insurance industry, be on trial, because that is going to be part of that entire trial. There's two trials right now and if they got combined, you know, or maybe even three, if they bring federal charges they'll get combined into one trial. But make no mistake, he will be on trial, and so will the healthcare insurance industry.
Speaker 3:I'd love to talk about advice that you personally might give to folks who are in a crisis, dealing with crisis, just based on your own experience. What's your go-to stress reliever? What do you do when you're in an active crisis situation?
Speaker 1:when you're in an active crisis situation. Well, after the work, I would definitely have a glass of red wine During it. I mean, I think it's really important to just try to stay calm and clear and whatever you need to do, that is important Exercise or meditate or whatever it is for you. Exercise or meditate or whatever it is for you like. Being very calm and almost impersonal about the situation is really important when everyone else is flipping out.
Speaker 3: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:Judgment no question Judgment.
Speaker 3:What is the best piece of crisis management advice that you've ever been given? Don't be afraid to ask the hard questions.
Speaker 1: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 know everything that you need to know, your crisis is going to mushroom right, and you could have gotten ahead of it if you had just kept going down that line of questioning to get what else do? I need to know that we're not doing right so I can respond, because there's going to be a reporter calling me about this in less than 36 hours. So tell me everything now so I can get ready for it. So I think, ask the hard questions and ask the hard follow-up questions.
Speaker 3:Almost like an attorney. Like I don't want any surprises here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, that's the worst thing that any business can have is a surprise.
Speaker 3:Okay, what are some or what's one crisis communication myth that you would like to debunk?
Speaker 1:You don't need a playbook. You need courage, commitment and clarity, but you do not need a playbook.
Speaker 2: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 are just 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:What do you think work is going to look like? Well, I'm really hoping that the AI is doing all the mundane things and that we're down to a three day work week.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like the world.
Speaker 3:We're here for it.
Speaker 2:Painting. Yes, yes. What music are you listening to right now?
Speaker 1:You know, I listen to such a bizarre blend of music. What was playing in my car just today? I was listening to a little John Legend a little while ago, nice, nice.
Speaker 2:All right, all right. Do you know he started as a management consultant? I read that Isn't that wild yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Listen, bain, or I think Bain or BCG. Yeah, it was one of the.
Speaker 2:It was one of the MBBs, I thought. I know, mel and I come from Deloitte 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:I am reading Mel Robbins' Let them Theory.
Speaker 3:What do?
Speaker 2:you think it is a great way to start the year. Nice, that's a tough one, like that whole idea.
Speaker 1:I think that would be. It's tough, right, and I was actually having a little mini meltdown about something last week 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:Yeah, yeah. Who do you really admire? I?
Speaker 1:really admire Michelle Obama. I think that she is authentic, I think she has demonstrated really good judgment and I think she lives her values. You know, she's not afraid to live them, and I think that's like one of the most important things we can do, especially as women, and stop trying to contort ourselves into what everyone wants us to be and be who we want to be.
Speaker 3:I recently someone on social media said that they're going to RSVP as Michelle Obama going forward when they say no to things and she's not showing up to anything anymore.
Speaker 2: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 a reason.
Speaker 3:No explanation needed.
Speaker 1:That actually is something that I have been over the last couple of years, trying to 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 to tell them anything? Why does anyone need to know why I'm not doing something?
Speaker 3:No is a full explanation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Right, but I wasn't raised like that and for most of my life I always was like I can't do that because I have these other and I'm like you know, nobody cares, Nobody. I'm making a bigger deal out of this than anyone else. No, I can't do it, Sorry, Next time. So I think that it's just. It is something that we have to practice in order to get comfortable with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's definitely a muscle. I'm always like worried about everybody else's feelings and it's like no one gives a shit. You can either come or you can't, it's fine.
Speaker 1: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:Yeah, last one, a piece of advice you'd want everyone to know a piece of advice you'd want everyone to know.
Speaker 1:I think it's important to understand who you are and then be the best version of that person. We all spend so much time trying to fit in to different scenarios and situations that we sometimes get so lost and then we're not the best version of anything. So no, we're not perfect. Figure out like what's where do you get your joy, what, what makes you unhappy? And then try to be the best version of the person. That is that, and don't worry about what everyone else thinks. You know, frankly, they're going to talk about you anyway. So you know like there's just really no point worrying about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let them yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, we all have to get inspiration from places. I'm hoping that you know, as I keep reading this book, that it is very inspiring to remind myself that I have no control over what other people think. I only have control over what I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And how you live your life and how you take your energy, you know or channel your energy I think that's such sage advice is to figure out who you are and then just try to be the best version of that, and that's it.
Speaker 1:No one's asking for any more than that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Love it, love it.
Speaker 3:Thanks guys. This episode was produced, edited and all things by us myself, mel Plett and Francesca Ranieri. Our music is by Pink Zebra and if you loved this conversation and you want to contribute your thoughts with us, please do. You can visit us at yourworkfriendscom, but you can also join us over on LinkedIn. We have a LinkedIn community page and we have the TikToks and Instagram. So please, please, join us in the socials. And if you like this and you've benefited from this episode and you think someone else can benefit from this episode, please like, rate and subscribe. We'd really appreciate it. That helps keep us going.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:All right, Take care, friends. Bye friends, Bye friends.