Managing Crisis Communications with Senior Advisor to Former President Barack Obama | Greymatter

You. Hi, everyone.

This is Alisa Schreiber. I'm the marketing partner at Greylock Partners. And welcome to Gray Matter. I am so excited. Today we are with my friend and former White House principal, deputy press secretary and current founder and president of the Schulz Group, Eric Schulz. Welcome, Eric.

Great to be here.

So today we're going to dive into building and implementing a communication strategy. We're going to talk about managing crisis, and we're going to talk about how to make your way through a really rapidly evolving media environment. But before we get started, I'd love for you to quickly just go through an overview of your career.

Sure. Thank you for having me here. I'm a longtime listener.

First time caller.

Yeah. Yes. So I have worked in political campaigns and in Capitol Hill, in Washington for a while now, worked on national campaigns, statewide campaigns, worked for Senator Chuck Schumer, Al Franken, President, presidential candidates like John Edwards and John Kerry. And for the past six years, I was in the White House for President Obama. I was originally hired in the spring of 2011, that's, as you recall, when Republicans took over the House of Representatives and vowed all sorts of congressional oversight investigations into the White House. And what the Obama administration decided was to hire a bunch of outside people to help field the response to those investigations. So that didn't deter the president's existing staff from his priorities. So they hired a bunch of lawyers, some researchers, and a comms team to help manage the response to those investigations. But at the time, these were things like Fast and Furious operation, the Solyndra loan from the Department of Energy, the IRS targeting GSA conference spending. And at the time, those were front page stories that we had to manage. Over time, my portfolio expanded to do a lot of the crisis communications. I tell people that nobody ever wanted to see me in their meetings. When Jay Carney and Josh Earnest became the Prescador, he asked me to be his deputy. And so that involved a lot of briefing in the White House briefing room, traveling with the President on Air Force One. But mostly it's just unglamorously working stories for reporters. And we had a sort of ethos in the White House that was we don't insist on favorable coverage, but we do want fair coverage. And so that just meant making sure that president's arguments were presented in stories, whether that's on tv, online, or in the newspaper. And that's what we spent the final years doing. And we can talk a lot about how our communications tactics changed over the years in the White House. Because I think we did a lot of growing given the sort of ever changing media landscape. But we feel good about where we ended up. And now I continue to work with the President. I am a senior advisor, and I work out of his personal office where we help oversee a lot of the projects that he's doing in the post presidency.

You mentioned you saw how your own communication style and some of the tactics that you used in the White House evolved over the six years that you were there. I think it'd be remiss to not talk about the current media landscape and some of the stuff we're seeing with fake news or alternative facts. So why don't you walk us through a little bit about the evolution that you had while in the White House and then how you would work with companies or how you would work with entrepreneurs to navigate what we're seeing today.

Sure. If you go back to the 2008 presidential campaign, then Senator Obama and I was not a part of this campaign. I think it's fair to say that that operation rewrote the playbook on how to communicate. They tailored messages. They were able to target communications to the right audience and sort of revolutionized how political campaigns communicate. When they got into the White House, and they will be the first to admit this again, I wasn't there for the first two years. They sort of reverted back to the old ways of doing business. So that meant a White House briefing at noon or one o' clock every afternoon, sending out the public guidance at 5 or 6 o' clock at night, the night before, and just sort of a lot of the old habits that had sort of been institutionalized for decades before. After the reelect in 2012, my bosses, who are much smarter than me, decided that they needed to sort of shake stuff up, that the old ways of communicating just weren't fitting for this current media landscape. And thankfully, we had a president who was more than interested in engaging. For example, when the president went to Alaska, he was the first president to visit the Arctic to talk about climate change. We didn't do an interview with 60 Minutes or the Washington Post. We did an interview with Bear Grylls, this outdoorsman who has a PrimeTime show on NBC. And we wanted to reach an audience that cares about the outdoors, that cares about energy and the environment, but not necessarily attuned to the political back and forth of the Paris climate deal coming together. So one statistic I like to use that's a little dated is that we know that today, 1 billion people check Facebook on their phones back in 2012, the president's reelect. There weren't even 1 billion smartphones in circulation. If we are not adapting to that, to how people get their information, then our head is in the sand. President Obama was the first president to go on late night television. President Obama was the first president to go on daytime talk shows. The View, Ellen. Now it's sort of commonplace. You see a lot of politicians there. But when we did it, it was new and it was not without controversy. You had a lot of sort of old guard media political types saying, oh no, they're debasing the office of the presidency and thought this was really risky for us to do. Our view is this is where a lot of people are tuned in, that it would be malpractice to not reach the audience where they're at. So we worked really hard. President went to Vietnam and he sat down with Anthony Bourdain and we talked about culture and food and the importance of the interconnected global economy. We talked about building relationships around the world. We talked about the impact that young people are having both here and abroad and the change we're trying to achieve. So again.

And he drank a beer, if I recall.

Yes, he did.

And had some noodles.

Yes. But look, we used to live in a world where three white men in their 50s delivered us the evening news once a day, right at 6:30. That's just not where we are anymore. That is not where people get their information. And anyone who thinks that we can sort of revert back to those days is, I think, just fooling themselves.

So you've talked a lot about how you've put the former president in front of people using kind of new media outlets. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the strategy to go directly to the American people as well, because there's also, especially today, there's so much opportunity for folks to tell their own stories and in some ways disintermediate the media. So maybe we can talk a little bit about what's the role of traditional earned press and what's the role around owning your own narrative through platforms where you can self publish.

So this was another one that was not without controversy. We sort of came to the White House at a time where the technology allowed us to tell our own story. And this is not one that went over well with the press. You know, you sort of veer towards lines that we were accused by our critics of being propagandists because we were subverting the sort of prism of the free and independent press corps. And so our response to that is we still do a daily White House press briefing. We still answer all of your questions. The President still does press conferences and interviews with all sorts of news outlets. But we're also going to make sure that we're communicating our story and, and making sure that we have the tools available to share what we're up to on Facebook, on Twitter, because so much information is just being circulated person to person right now. And we wanted to make sure that we were supplying content so that people could hear directly what our take was.

It's so interesting to hear that. And then look at the state of the world today, where it's almost become like the only thing that matters is this megaphone from Twitter. Our current administration can just say whatever they want. The whole argument is, well, I can reach 30 million people or 50 million people through my tweets, so what do I need the press for?

I think that's the existential question of our time, right? How people get their information and what information they trust. And I still believe that when you read something in the New York Times or the Washington Post or CBS News or 60 Minutes, that that comes with some guarantees of integrity, that something's been fact checked, that something's been sort of pressure tested and run through an editorial process that's ruthless to make sure that we're getting information that is true.

The notion of trust is actually a really great segue into what I think the bulk of our conversation will be today, which is around managing a crisis and thinking through the right way to approach if your company or the organization that you work with is in a crisis. How do you define a crisis? And maybe can you give us an example of a moment in time when you were working with the White House, that a crisis evolved and it was unexpected.

So if anyone in the White House press corps is listening, this rant will sound very familiar. In the fall of 2016, one of the President's last international trips, we were at the G20 in China. We were at a smaller airport, and the airport sent out the wrong stairs. And so if you have that image of any President of the United States descending from Air Force One on the staircase, they sent us like, the mini stairs, so we had to go from, like, a lower exit. And if you had read the media coverage in the US Newspapers about this, you would have thought it was an international scandal of epic proportions. And if you just rewind back to that time, right, he was at the G20. We were talking about international trade, we were talking about Syria. We were talking about Ukraine, but the Washington press corps was fixated on the stairs. And so, yes, that was one we had not anticipated. I was not ready for. And I do believe that the press corps at large sort of needs to take stock. Right. We sort of live in a different environment right now. And I do worry that when the bar gets lower for what's a scandal.

That doesn't serve anyone's interests, or the stairs get lower.

Hey, okay. Yeah, you'll be here all week.

So what did you do in that situation? Like, what were even the conversations you were having around that?

Well, a lot of it was over drinks, and a lot of them got heated. Our basic view was this was not an intentional slight from the Chinese. It was just a smaller airport. And those are the stairs they sent us. It wasn't sending a signal to the world that, like, the US Is no longer a superpower. It was the wrong staircase.

I think that's actually a really good moment to just pause and realize you have to kind of have perspective.

Yes, yes.

Even as the comms person who's getting hammered with these questions, it's remembering that this is about.

You're totally right. I have lost my temper many times with reporters, and each time I regret it. That you have to remember that the newspaper comes out tomorrow and the next day and every day, and realizing that the relationship you have with that journalist is far more important than any particular news story. If you can just keep that front of mind, you'll be a lot more successful. We need to sort of take stock of where the line is, because I think that you can't get outraged over everything. Right. That's something that's, like, so exhausting right now.

Taking that example one step further. It's so much about what the moment in time, like your news doesn't exist in a vacuum. Whatever has happened within your company, your organization, your administration, is going to only become a crisis relative to everything else that's going on in that environment. So things that five, 10 years ago were not a big deal are now a huge deal and become front page news. It's about defining it. What happened and then what happened within the external narrative or the external environment.

There's PR problems, and then there's just problems. The people who get through crises well are the ones who understand it. You have to solve the underlying problem, and then we can help tell a story around it. But unless you've addressed the actual problem, the rest of the sort of narrative that you build is meaningless. I go back to the darkest time. I had in the White house, which was healthcare.gov being down and the launch of open enrollment for the first time, that was really hard. There was zero appetite in the press corps to talk about anything else other than our busted website. And that's for good reason. This was the President's chief domestic legislative accomplishment, and we had years to put it together. We couldn't get it right. We should have been in the barrel for that, and we were. But there's no storytelling I can do until the website gets fixed. And so I think recognizing that was important. Now we can certainly set up a process by which we're telling that story. We're surging resources. We. We're instituting some new accountability measures, some benchmarks that we need to live up to. Here's where we think the website will be by X date, and we really better get there. But at the end of the day, the only reason the stories got better was because the website got better.

So how do you counsel folks now then, when they're going through similar crisis, like a product maybe shipped and there were problems with it, or data breaches or even personnel issues? Pick your flavor of crisis. What's the thing that the head of comms or the CEO in partnership with their comms leader should think about first? And then what are some steps they should be taking?

The press corps and the media and external stakeholders and maybe members of Congress? Everyone's going to be freaking out and sort of breathless and fast and coming at you swinging hard. And if you can actually take a breath and play the long game, you're going to win. At the end of the day, my sort of first order business, when I'm encountering a challenge, is to figure out what your value statement is. Because chances are, no matter what you're dealing with, if it's a tech issue, if it's personnel, if it's something has gone wrong, chances are it's going to take some time to figure out the facts. And that might take a few hours, that might take a few days, that might take weeks or months to figure out what actually happened. And given the media environment we live in right now, you got to buy yourself that amount of time to get the facts. Because the last thing you want to do is is offer something that can be later contradicted. Because I believe once you yield your credibility, the whole game's over. And so my first order of business is to always develop your value statement on the front end.

Can you give me an example of how this might play out?

One of the things I had to work on in the White House was the failed Department of Energy loan to Solyndra, a solar panel company. And this was part of the stimulus, which was largely successful and effective and sort of succeeded by every economic metric beyond people's expect. But not everything was a home run. This particular loan did not work out and the company went under. There was a lot of anxiety and interest and accusations and political meddling and accusations flying left and right about why this loan got approved and it shouldn't have. It's going to take us a while to figure out why this loan got approved, what went wrong at the company, why money kept going out the door. So what we did on the front end was figure out what we want to say that again reflects our values that can't be contradicted subsequently, but doesn't necessarily have all the answers on the front end. Our basic sort of value statement for that was these decisions were made by career professionals at the Department of Energy based on the merits. And that was sort of our top line that we had on day one that we stuck with through like three years of investigations because it didn't get too granular. It was something we could stick with. And then as reporters had nitpicky questions, we'd trace those down. And I remember one person saying, well, Eric, this is just drip, drip, drip. And I was like, it's been three days, but in this news cycle it feels like an eternity. So I think it does take time to get facts and we don't always have the patience for that. And that's why I think sort of a value statement at the front end and then just doing the due diligence to make sure you know what your story is.

It's really interesting that you talk about this person made this comment to you three days after the story broke. It seems like today a massive story can break and within two days it's gone. What's the reality of how much time you actually do have to influence a story?

Now, I had a boss at the White House who said that today the candle burns brighter but faster than ever before. So that story gets real hot and intense and sort of like wall to wall, breathless, non stop coverage. And then two days later, it's nowhere. I think that understanding that can help inform crisis communications. Right? When you're in the barrel, everyone's watching everything you do and say and the spotlight is on you like nobody's business. So I think that understanding that how you react and perform under that window of pressure will tell the story for the long haul.

When companies have successfully managed crisis, it's less about what actually happened and it's more about how the company behaved in the moments and days and weeks following whatever the problem was. And that's much more an indicator of like how the story's gonna play out over the long haul.

And it reinforces your brand, correct? Right. Companies, politicians, groups, organizations, personalities, how they respond to these moments determines and then reinforces how we think of them and what their character reveals.

So a lot of the folks that listen to our podcast are oftentimes they're first time founders or they're entrepreneurs, they're building their companies, many of them are doing it for the first and maybe haven't gone through a significant PR crisis in their careers yet. Ultimately, any company gets to any kind of scale and you're going to have stories that you're going to have to manage as you continue to grow. How should entrepreneurs think about relationship building with press? And why does it matter?

So my guiding principle has always been relationships are everything. And I believe that developing and investing in relationships is paramount. And that's why credibility matters. The time you spend investing in getting to know the reporters who cover you and what makes them tick is going to be invaluable. And that's why I tell people, get off your email, go meet them, have a beer, get a cup of coffee, go figure out sort of how they're thinking about the world. You'll learn stuff, they'll learn stuff, and you'll develop a relationship that's going to pay dividends over the long haul. It's great to have a tweet that goes viral, but go engage people, don't do all your spinning online. There's no substitute for personal interactions and engagements. So I believe that sort of first principle, invest in relationships with journalists. Because again, every conversation I've had is sort of helpful for me telling my story. But I also get to learn how reporters, how the skeptics are thinking about what we're doing and that helps inform our strategy. I believe that's paramount in terms of working with reporters and sort of that day to day. I'll often use background or off the record and knock on wood. I've never been burned. I've been sloppy before full admission, I've been sloppy, I've screwed up, but that's on me. I've never encountered a reporter who has burned me after agreeing to go off the record or on background. They understand there's plenty of times where you want information injected into a story that just cannot be attributed to you. There's a whole host of sensitivities around that, and reporters, I believe, are generally understanding of that. Sometimes they'll challenge you and they'll push for more transparency and more candor, but that's their job. If they're not pushing along those lines, they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing. So I have no problem using the ground rules to your advantage in terms of when you're interacting and making your case.

You mentioned trust. And I think that construct only works when you've established trust and you've established credibility on behalf of yourself and also on behalf of your company.

There's nothing more important than trust. And I got into plenty of heated conversations with reporters, and they were rightfully skeptical of what story I was selling, but I don't think they ever questioned that I was telling the truth. And you can make an argument, but you can't lie. I believe the spectacular failures we've seen in communications are all people being dishonest. And if you can just sort of root that out of your toolbox and make sure that if you're the head of comms at a company or working on a project or a founder or an entrepreneur and somebody at that table suggests, well, maybe we should just sort of skirt this or not tell this, you got to put your foot down. You got to be real clear that the facts need to be on our side here. And the moment somebody suggests crossing a line is the moment where you got to stand up and say, that's not acceptable, that we have our personal integrity at stake. But the brand of the company, and I think so much of how we perceive people coping with crises is the reaction to it. The moment you start to mislead the or say something not true is the moment you've yielded the entire sort of conversation to others.

I think that's a very valid point. And you had mentioned earlier that people were scared when you walked in the room when you were in the White House because it usually meant something was going down. How are you most effective at being influential in that room and helping guide to the right course of action in terms of managing a tough story? Ultimately, it's about you and your relationship with the reporters who are going to be covering this. And it's about preserving the brand and making sure that the right story gets out. So how do you think about having influence in that room?

We should just be candid at the outset. I was blessed to work with brilliant people. And at the White House, you don't get there by suffering fools. So most of the people when I was dealing with these crises were lawyers, and they smartly could see around the corner and had institutional equities that needed to be protected. But they also knew that we lived in a world where the story matters. And so I would work real close with the lawyers on the language and the story we were telling and how we were doing it. And we'd get into it sometimes and they say, well, here's what I think you should say. And I say, I don't go to court to argue your briefs. You're not going to write my press release.

As long as you're both singing from the same hymn book, it's fine.

The moment you want to switch roles, I'm happy to go argue a case or write a brief. But for now, we got to work together and figure this out. I think that having that collaboration and having the leadership buy into the fact that, yes, communications needs to be happening in tandem with the lawyers, with the policy people, with the political people, so that everyone's not siloed. My advice would be to make sure you are at the table. And if, as a communicator, you're feeling like you're not getting information or you're being read out a couple sort of steps down the road, that's not going to work. You got to be at the table, you got to be in the room, and you got to be helping set the process for how you're going to deal with something.

Has there ever been a time or do you have any advice for folks who are trying to influence journalists that seem to already have their mind made.

Up all the time?

I tend to think a lot of journalists will challenge you, but I've rarely had an experience where a journalist has her mind made up or is out to get you or is trying to be malicious or nefarious. I think ultimately they're doing their jobs, which is trying to get to as close to the truth as they can get. And so if they're challenging or pushing back, it's usually in an effort to get closer to the truth, not in an effort to, like, throw you out, necessarily. Like, I have a personal attack on you.

I totally agree with that. It is their job to be skeptical. That is sort of in their DNA. And I was actually talking to a reporter the other day on a story, and she's like, well, let me go talk to some other people and do some research and do. I was like, no, you should just write what I say. I was like, isn't that how this works. Like you just put up on the website, like. And so of course they have to do their due diligence. Of course they're gonna be skeptical. Of course they're gonna kick the tires and sort of like have a back and forth with you, or else they wouldn't be doing their job. And again, I believe that back and forth helps you develop a stronger sort of story or narrative or framework for what you're trying to do.

I think we're living in a time where there's a real allergic reaction to corporate speak. But at the same time, when you're dealing with a tough communications challenge, you can't always be 100% transparent about everything that happened for various reasons. There might be legal concerns, there might be personnel issues. How do you think about the balance between being totally transparent and coming off like a PR robot?

My belief is the PR person in the room should always have a bias towards transparency. That everyone else is going to say, we can't say that, we can't say this, we can't say that. Let them argue that. And you need to be the force for candor and transparency and openness. And then you'll come to a middle ground. That's the value statement we talked about having. Or that sort of unearthing the facts that as you figure out sort of the sequence or the TikTok of what went wrong, figure out how that story weaves together. And so my belief is that you should always have a bias towards transparency and be as candid as you possibly can be, knowing the constraints you're under. Now. There are a lot of times where you can't. Things are sensitive or there's legal constraints or personal constraints. And my answer to that is to own it. Just be like, I can't get into this. Don't obfuscate. You can try a shiny object here or there, but the point is like, look, I'm sorry, I just can't get into that. And it's not gonna be the first time a reporter has heard that. It's not gonna be the last. I think you'll engender more respect and credibility with the stuff that you can share. If you're just upfront with, look, I just can't get into that. And stop the gamesmanship. This PR speak thing is. Is cracking that code is the key. When you have a problem and you want to have sort of an initial reaction and you want to sort of do something that reflects your values, making sure it doesn't sound lawyerly or bureaucratic is the key, making sure it sounds earnest and real and that a real person could say this. I mean, that's a good test. It's like, would you go on television and say this?

Just read it out loud.

Yeah.

You know, to yourself in the mirror.

And if it sounds ridiculous, it is ridiculous. And we could watch the news tonight and we'll see quotes that are ridiculous. But I think the successful communicators are the ones who are keeping it real.

I like to ask, especially for people who are true practitioners of their craft, what is the one thing that somebody who has been listening to this podcast can do immediately, even if they're not suffering from a crisis right now? What's one thing that one of our listeners can do immediately that would make huge impact on their companies and the future success of their teams?

So we had a practice in the White House that we called red teaming. And I don't know if that's generic or broad or not, but no one.

Knows what a red team is.

Here's the top secret I'm disclosing. What we would do is let's say the President's State of the Union was coming up. There was a whole team of policy and communicators and lawyers and smart people putting together that State of the Union address and the package to go with it. There was a separate team that charged with identifying the problems and vulnerabilities in the State of the Union. I got lucky. I was always on the red team, so I always just attacked everything. And so again, something as large as the State of the Union could be, it's too pie in the sky. Nothing's going to get done. Nothing got done from year one last year, or it's too small, or this tax break doesn't make sense, or what are you doing about XYZ issue? And so we always found it helpful to do that exercise so that you could anticipate what the attacks were going to be. Now, the hard part was coming up with the answers, too. But I mean, obviously State of the Union doesn't get much bigger than that. But we did this for small announcements too. Right. You sort of have a tough Q and A and you figure out what the problems that your critics are going to seize on and you figure out the answers for those on the front end.

I think that's great advice. So we'll leave it there. Thank you so much, Eric, for coming and sharing your thoughts. And I know everyone's going to really enjoy this podcast, so I appreciate you coming in.