Leadership: Communicating in a Crisis

How did you approach fostering transparency during a crisis moment?

I think it’s about communication. The difficulty is, you cannot say everything because there are things that are confidential. When you are a public company, it’s even more critical. You can communicate on a number of subjects, which are subjects you can communicate on, in public. If you release information to your team, you have to release that to the market. It’s very difficult but, at the same time, you can only work if you can create trust with your teams. That’s not always something that you can do with everybody in the organization. In fact, you create trust with people you can connect with and when you work with a team of 2,500 employees, in different locations, trust is about connection, about what you can say, it’s about how people can see you, how you react. The best way to create trust is to meet people. You can meet a number of people, talk with them again and again and again, but when you have to manage a crisis in parallel, it’s very difficult, because you’re locked in an office, surrounded by advisors and it doesn’t leave you the time – even if you don’t sleep much – to speak with many people in the organization.

When thinking about communication then, firstly, how do you choose what to communicate? What are your priorities, in the crisis? What is the number one priority that you choose to communicate and then you can look at how and when and to who?

You need to rely on your team just to make sure you are aware of what is going on. You cannot be disconnected. So your team has to help you to understand what the misunderstandings are, what people are afraid of, what are the messages you need to clarify? You have to be honest, if you don’t know or you cannot tell them. I think I would advise anybody not to limit communication and to communicate again and again. If you communicate something in the morning and it’s wrong, you have to communicate again, maybe in the evening, to say that people misunderstood what you communicated in the morning. It’s fine. When you go through a crisis, be in Covid or any other crisis, the structure that you put in place for communication in normal times, doesn’t work anymore. The time is different, because you have pressure on everything and what is true today might not be true tomorrow. What you know today, about this virus, could be very different tomorrow. The frameworks that may be very successful in normal times, don’t work anymore.

It’s different, it’s more dependent on what the feedback is from your team, dependent on what’s going on, on BBC News or Sky News in the morning and you have to adapt.

So the frequency of communication, typically, has to increase in a crisis?

You have to be agile in a crisis. You have to be agile, in general, but in a crisis, what people really expect is communication that is consistent about what is going on in their life, what is going on in the news. In a financial crisis, if you have something on Twitter, with a journalist thinking that they know something that nobody else knows, or a journalist on the news, saying something about your company or the industry, how do you react to that and how do you make sure that the information from the organization is definitely the best?

What is difficult for a public company compared to others is that you cannot release information, if it’s unknown by the market. For instance, if you have a leak in the press for something that is true, you are not supposed, most of the time, to confirm it, except if you do with financial analysts in the morning. You really have restrictions that relate to the governance structure of public companies. Any information has to be released first to the market. At the same time, you release information to the market, you can release information to your team and that’s what the challenge is.