O Captain! My Captain!

Unless you’ve been living under a social media-less rock the past few weeks you will have noticed that United Airlines is going through a bit of a rough patch. Communication failures, employees acting out, press making a laughing stock of you…needless to say they aren’t having the best time right now. I can’t help but feel bad for whoever is responsible for their public relations department. That poor soul is now responsible for taking a serious crisis, responding and addressing it while also dealing with smaller crises daily it seems. What started out as an awful enough crisis situation (a flight attendant and security guards are accused of dragging a passenger off a flight that was overbooked and it was all caught on video) has now been relegated to the cherry on top of a pretty horrendous sundae. A valuable 3 foot tall rabbit mysteriously passed away on one of their flights, a scorpion fell on a man from the overhead bin and bit him…you can’t make this stuff up and the media have been having an absolute field day with it (And then…a scorpion: United Airlines and how [not] to handle a crisis.)   And to make matters worse the CEO of United has come off worse for wear during this valuable time for his company. In a huge snafu it was discovered that while, publicly, he showed sympathy and empathy with the passenger and promised to do whatever it took to remedy the situation (This will never happen again” he stated live on ABC News Morning Show,) privately and internally to his employees he was singing a different tune. “"While I deeply regret this situation arose, I also emphatically stand behind all of you, and I want to commend you for continuing to go above and beyond to ensure we fly right” his internal memo read (United’s staff memo makes the internet even angrier.) The memo goes on to call the passenger “disruptive” and “belligerent,” which you can see in the video, the guy clearly didn’t start that way. This is a classic case of social media crisis management and why it’s so important for companies and organizations to have a plan for such times. But not only is the actual crisis communication plan and execution valuable and an absolute must for companies but so too is leadership and their response to a crisis. You can’t have a company attempting damage control while its leader is off in left field, creating more fires than they are putting out.

You’ll remember a few weeks back we talked about leadership and vison. We also talked a little bit about management functions and how those functions differ from true leadership roles. A leader in a crisis is invaluable. Throughout history various accounts of leaders standing up during times of extreme stress have been recorded. “During the Great Fire of London in 1666, King Charles II ‘joined the firefighters…handling spade and bucket’” attempting to help put out the great blaze with help from his subjects (Communicating throughout Katrina: Competing and Complementary Conceptual Lenses on Crisis Communication.)  Crises can help or significantly hurt leaders in the long run. While cities, companies, and organizations can heal or recover over time, sometimes reputations cannot. An example of a crisis significantly damaging someone’s reputation is President George W. Bush during Hurricane Katrina. Not only was he “distracted with other issues when Katrina struck” he also allowed the Bush administration to form a “blaming strategy” to “take heat off the federal failures over Katrina” (Communicating throughout Katrina: Competing and Complementary Conceptual Lenses on Crisis Communication.)  He placed blame on local officials rather than stepping up and acknowledging that key departments needed to help those in Katrina’s wake were ill equipped and had serious communication problems between them before the crisis even began. Any good leader should be prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of their company or organization. In a crisis, “if there are sacrifices to be made – and there will be – then the leaders should step up and make the greatest sacrifices themselves” (Leadership in a Crisis – How to be a leader.)  Leadership in a crisis situation is defined as a “collective and dynamic” process and it “requires perception and sense-making skills by leaders in order for them to determine appropriate courses of action” (Linking Crisis Management and Leadership Competencies: the Role of Human Resource Department.) When you are responsible for an organization, especially as its core leader, you have to be ready to take responsibility even if you think your organization has done nothing wrong. As FDR once said “The buck stops here.” Leaders in today’s world have to be ready for anything and be prepared that a crisis can – and usually does – get worse before it gets better.  In order to be prepared for that event, when and if it comes, it helps to have a leader with a realistic vision. Again, I spoke about vision in a post a few weeks back. To me, part of having vision is being able to see not only the best of times for your organization or company but also the worst. You have to be realistic and acknowledge the reality of the times we live in. Anyone, anywhere can be caught on video or in a picture doing something that may hurt their organization. A good leader with a solid, realistic vison of the future of their organization will be able to see those possible threats and let his team in charge of developing a crisis communication plan know what they see. Without a leader willing to “go down with the ship” how can employees be expected to do the same when the time comes? When crisis hits, you have to trust in your Captain and know that they have not only their best interests in mind, but even more so the organizations.

I hope you guys enjoyed this week’s post and I’ll see you guys next week! Only a couple more weeks left, and then I will be taking the blog on a summer hiatus! Hope you all have a pleasant week!