Speaker 1: Hi everyone, welcome to this edition of The Broadcast, where we give you bite-sized bits of best practices to help you be a better leader and a more effective communicator. Each week on The Broadcast, we ask a discussion question. The question that we asked earlier this week was, what are the worst phrases that you've ever heard in a crisis communication statement? The folks at AJB Communications refer back to April 2017, when United Airlines dragged a passenger off the plane, and they said that they re-accommodated the passenger. And Gina also says the worst word she ever heard was re-accommodated the passenger. Now, Lee was speaking more generally and said, here are some phrases that she hates, and she's given us several of them. We don't know. We never knew. We didn't plan for it. We never planned for it. It wasn't our responsibility. All of those are statements of denial, and obviously she's inferring that you kind of need to own the parts that you own and plan for contingencies. And Andy says her all-time worst phrase in a statement is simply to say, no comment. And I think just about everybody in public relations agrees that no comment is a dumb phrase. Now, I have two phrases that nobody brought up. In fact, I asked the question to see if any of you are as aggravated by these two words as I am. You ready? The least favorite words, two of them for me, top priority and committed. Our top priority is safety. I have seen people who have flames coming out behind their head. And as a reporter, I would interview them, and with flames behind their head at an explosion, they would say, at our company, safety is our top priority. And I would always think as a cynic, obviously not, Sparky. You got flames behind your head. Likewise, they would say, we're committed to safety. Again, obviously you're not committed to safety. There are flames coming out behind your head. My top priority is that you never use top priority in any statement. CEOs always want to call things their top priority, but they change the top priority every 15 seconds. You can't have more than one top priority, so stop saying it. Second, don't use the word committed. I'll give you an alternative to both of those words. You ready? My alternative word is goal. So if there are fires and flames coming out behind you, you can say, at XYZ Company, our goal is to operate a safe workplace where our employees are visitors in our community. However, there are times when things go wrong, and sadly, this is one of those times. This is what we can confirm. Take that language, plagiarize it. That is one of my preambles that I use in my crisis communications plans. It says goal, which is a forward-looking, uplifting word, but that you don't get locked into. You can't fail at a goal. You simply recommit yourself to a goal. See where I'm going with this? Call out the irony. Safety is a goal. However, there are times when things go wrong, and this is one of them. Create your own verbal compare and contrast in your statements. Don't let the reporter do it for you. You own that part of it, and if you do that, you'll be much more successful in your crisis communication statements. I hope that's helpful to you. For the BroCast, I'm Jared Bro.