Navigating Crisis Communication: Insights from Dori Clark and Marshall (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: We live today in what you could argue is a golden age of ideas. What do we need to do? How can we prepare ourselves to future-proof our careers?

Speaker 2: I'm here with my wonderful friend, Dori Clark. Dori, you are an expert at helping people communicate their message in a very crowded marketplace. You have a fascinating background. You've worked in the political scene, you've helped people deal with crisis, and you teach this at the Duke Fuqua School. Tell us about what it's like to communicate in times of crisis.

Speaker 1: When leaders are faced with a crisis, immediately it becomes a very tense situation where the things that they may normally do when it's calm are not being able to be followed. You have things coming at you, and you really can't plan things out. The key is really to understand a few things. Number one, people oftentimes tend to want to over-promise, over-answer. They don't want to look stupid by saying that they don't know. As we always hear, the cover-up is worse than the crime. That extends even to people who just don't know, and they make an honest mistake by just pushing a little too far. You want to say as much as you know, but no more than that, because you'll get hammered if you end up misstating facts. The second thing, which I like to tell my students at Duke Fuqua, is this. There's a saying in the world of crisis communications, that ultimately there's only three avenues that you can take. There's really only three things that you can say. The first is, for an individual or a company, I didn't do it. If you really didn't do it, you just say that. The second is, I did it, but it was justified. You explain why. You try to change the narrative to make sense of it. The third is, yes, we did it, and we're sorry. If you are going to have to end up at that last piece, you want to get there as quickly as possible, because if you start out by denying, which is sometimes a human impulse, and it takes days and weeks and months to get to the acknowledgement, unfortunately, your reputation sometimes has become irreparably tarnished in the interim.

Speaker 2: I love what you're doing. It's very related to our stakeholder-centered coaching process. We give leaders feedback. They get the good news. They find out what they need to change, and when they have made mistakes, they apologize. Sooner is better. I love what you're doing. I think it helps organizations. I think it helps individuals. It's a good way to look at living.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Marshall.