Notes from Nick and Mark’s “insights,stories and lessons from inside one of the biggest stories of recent months: the multiple outages that hit Telecom’s XT network.” PRiNZ conference “Taming the Tiger” 28-29 May 2010
Often funny and dry, Nick and Mark offered a list of the key elements of crisis communication management – lessons learned from having to deal with several “outages” of the XT network over just a few weeks this year. They recommend Andrew Griffin’s book “New Strategies for Reputation Management”.
Prepare your leader/s. They need training to develop self-awareness, so they know their own strengths and weaknesses
Simplify the crisis manual. Make it user-friendly.
Understand powers and limitations. That is, the people involved in the crisis communication need to know who makes decisions, so that they don’t over-step each other’s roles
Watch the team dynamics. The other part of behavioural crisis management. The team that know one another, have rehearsed together, perform better when the occasion demands. In the case of XT – the geographical disjoint was a weakness in this regard.
Communicate early and often, e.g. first update within 2 hours of the crisis; 2-hourly updates; shorter time frame for social media. Team members need to understand how the crisis will be seen / reported by the media.
Don’t forget your own people. Don’t assume they won’t be emotionally affected. Example – abuse of call centre staff. Communication and leadership needed for the staff dealing with the public…at Telecom, a movie was made showing how everyone (Telecom employees) was dealing with the outages and public backlash/media attention etc. Showed a real hands-on response – people just getting on and dealing with it. The movie was put on the Telecom intranet to show staff what was being done – affirming, encouraging, positive. CE (Paul Reynolds) was shown as leaderly – a role model: “Be truthful… ‘Fess up… This is not acceptable.” This in-house movie proved to be great company-wide communication that brought everyone together with a sense of purpose.
Own the crisis. Focus on the stakeholders that matter.
Practise, practise, practise. For Telecom XT – 5 outages in 3 months!! There is no substitute in preparedness for having been put through your paces on a regular basis. (Ironically, the day after this presentation, Mark was being interviewed again on National Radio, after the latest crisis: in Otorohanga, the 111 service was non-operational for 3 hours….causing unacceptable delay in emergency service for someone who needed an ambulance…)
Show, don’t tell. Don’t just tell the media you care or that you are doing everything you can – show them. No empty commitments. Front up – daily – pull all advertising – pay compensation – make changes.
