146: How to Tell the Painful Truth in a Crisis When You'd Rather Not with Mike McGill

When it comes to telling the truth, the full truth, sometimes communicators feel like their leadership can't handle it.

If Lt. Kendrick gave an order that Santiago wasn't to be touched, then why did he have to be transferred? Colonel, Lieutenant Kendrick ordered the Code Red, didn't he? Because that's what you told Lieutenant Kendrick to do.

Object. When it went bad, you cut these guys loose.

Your Honor.

You have Marcus inside the phony transfer.

Your Honor.

You doctored the logbook. Consider yourself in Kentucky. Colonel Jessup, did you order the code? Ray, you don't have to answer that question.

I'll answer the question. You want answers?

I think I'm entitled. You want answers? I want the truth.

Welcome to the Confident Communications podcast, where we help communicators create the right response at the right time and deliver it in the right place. How many times during a crisis or critical situation, communicators in your organization have you felt like Lieutenant JG Dan Caffeine wanting to back leadership into a corner where they have no choice but to tell the truth? In this episode, I'm Speaking with Mike McGill, a former producer at CNN turned public relations guy who now runs Water pio, a communication firm helping water utilities meet their customers growing expectations for information and truth. Mike is sharing three takeaways for how to get answers.

You want answers?

I think you're entitled to answers. You want the truth or how to get at it in a time of crisis? The backdrop for our conversation was the Flint water crisis. If you remember, that was a public health crisis that started in 2014, lasted four years after the drinking water for the city of Flint, Michigan, was contaminated with lead. The citizens of Flint wanted the truth. The local officials didn't think they could handle it. Take a listen.

Mike. Water pio. I've wanted to talk to you on this podcast for a long time. Welcome.

Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

Here's the reason why is you know that Twitter is this wild west. And when you find a cowboy or cowgirl who speaks your language and understands communications media, the industry, like you do, you tend to follow them, right? And you are one of those people. And I think the reason why I connect with your message so much is because you are not afraid to be outspoken to, you know, say what you feel. And you speak from a very similar place that I am. You know, usually, you know, worked in the press in the. In the previous. In the past, you have DC experience, but now you're working as a PIO or you work in the PIO World public relations. So you get it on a different level than most people get it. So that's why I appreciate that. Bring you in. I mean, really, if we had days, we could talk about so much. But let's focus on. I wanted to focus on trust, transparency, and what can happen when that is lacking. So in other words, this idea of stakeholders, when there's an expectation, gap with the public, with an institution, an entity, an organization, what can happen? So, Mike, first of all, tell me about your world when you did work in the press.

Well, it was pretty crazy. Well, I got my start with the Political Hotline, which now is run by National Journal, so didn't pay any money, but everybody in D.C. was reading what I was writing every day. And that led to my gig with cnn, where I was an associate producer. Producer on their political game shows is what we used to call them, their talk shows. And Reliable Sources and Capital Gang were my two main shows. So I worked every week, breaking down how the press did their jobs, the big decisions on what you covered, how you covered it.

Who were the commentators at the time you were there?

Oh, Novak, Shields, German, Kato Byrne on Capitol Gang, and Bernie Kalb and Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources. And with John Potter, it's sprinkled in, and they were great. And you, you got an education? I'm at 25 and I'm working on these shows, and I'm getting an education.

Jump in for a moment and tell you that seems like a lifetime ago.

It does. It does. It's half my life now. It's half my life now.

Okay.

But it sticks with you. It sticks with you. And then I did local for a couple years, and that kind of got the desire to work in journalism out of my bones, because I had an antichrist of a news director. And then I went into PR and had my struggles at the start, but everything I learned in news kind of transferred over into PR and kind of set me apart. When I went in the water in 2007, no one had really done what I had done and then applied it to being a communicator, cater for water and wastewater utilities. And it really. It worked well because this is an industry that is behind the times when it comes to communicating, so getting people up to speed. And my first job in water was for a utility to serve 2 million people. And they're like, we need you on the air right away. Our water mains are popping like popcorn. We need you to get out there and take fire and calm the public down. And that was it. Back in 2007. And I've been in water ever since.

You've been in water ever, ever since. So let's talk about a water story. If we were to ask anyone on the street, give me a negative, bad press water story, and I would think most would indicate the Flint water crisis. Now, I know just following you on Twitter, that this was your story that you were culling for lessons in what not to do in terms of communicating and a piece. And the reason why I wanted to talk about this with you is one, just your knowledge on this industry, but also what can happen when there is a public perception problem, for one, but when the stakeholders determine that an agency, a public agency, is not meeting the expectation that they're claiming that they're doing so. Any lessons that you can pull out of Flint water crisis for us, and again, from your public relations point of view, but also when you worked in the media, from that point of view as well. So can you set the stage? Can you sum up the Flint water crisis?

Sure. And the way I quickly will do it is A Few Good Men, the movie that's on in rotation every 15 minutes almost. There's the closing scene where Cruise goes after Nicholson's character and talks about Lieutenant Caffey. Lieutenant Caffey and Colonel Jessup. I didn't know if you wanted to go cruiser Nicholson or character.

Oh, Mike, you always go with the plot with me. Okay, I'm in.

Okay.

In the scene.

You got it.

We're in the court.

So closing scene. And it's not even the last line you can't handle. The truth is actually the setup, how he gets in there and he says, you ordered a code red and when it went bad, you cut these guys loose. And that is Flint in a nutshell. You had a series of bad decisions, both long term and short term. And when they went bad, and this is in your book, you talk about dismissal. They dismissed the people out there. They had it. They had the bad water. They knew it. And in fact, someone wrote with the EPA in that region saying there's bad water out there, but the powers that be found a way to dismiss it because of the people involved. I mean, this is a systematic racism story as much as water crisis because the people were involved. They didn't have any political power because they had an emergency manager running the entire city who was completely unaccountable. So those people made decisions that were bad. And when the repercussions came in, they hit them. They covered up. They hoped it would go away in time and wouldn't be that big a deal. And instead, boom, they found lead everywhere and it became the public health crisis. It did. They, the PIO for the state actually said while lead was in that system, coursing through the system that anybody worried about water and flint can relax. They completely dismissed what was going on. And as a result, everybody in water was affected by that. People who you didn't think you, you had to look at and wonder if you could trust them now. You couldn't trust them. And that has spread out all across our industry.

There's so many stories with the Flint water crisis and quite brilliant, Mike, I should say, to tie in the final scene in A Few Good Men because that's exactly what Daniel Caffey did. He backed it. Well, he went all in. You know, he risked it, he rolled the dice on it.

But he was in contempt.

Yes, he was in contempt. He backed Colonel Jessup into a corner and he was, he bookended it with the truth, with his ego. Right. Of people refusing. He was trying to dismiss him as an officer. Right. You know, like of course you damn right. I order the gold red. But in the Flint water crisis, you're absolutely right. Like if you watch that story and, and you're absolutely dead on. It is not just a story about water. It's corruption, it's cover up, it's racism for the people of Flint who they did not believe. It's not, you know, and it's not just, it's just race, but it's also income. You know, it was lower income. Right. Is that they did not think that they would ever rise up and do something. But it's this idea that the people of Flint were the Daniel Caffey's. Like we are going with the help of, you know, activists and lawyers, we're going to back you into that corner. So tell me then, what do you think was the number one mistake that was made in that crisis that you still see happening today just in other institutions, other areas.

Okay, first, I want to say for anybody who hasn't read up on the Flint water crisis, there's a great book. It's called the Poison City by Anna Clark. Let me just put that out there first.

Okay.

When it comes to, you know, what you want to point out about the situation out there and what was said and what was communicated. This was a situation where it was clear that it was bad. They had red flags. They had red flags with other water contamination issues. And in fact, they also covered up an outbreak of Legionella that killed people as well. That Came out later down the line. So you had other news making contamination issues and the regulators and the communicators still went to the mat and said, everything is fine. There's nothing to see here. It's like that scene in Naked Gun where the fireworks exploding in the background while Leslie Nielsen is out there saying, nothing to see here, everything's fine. They had all the red flags in the world. They chose not to give credence to people who were. Had very clear concerns. Very. They could present their concerns. They held up the water bottles. I said, something's up here. And they were like, no, you don't know what you're talking about. And that was. That was deadly. You know, literally deadly.

Yeah, it literally was deadly. You know, another part of that story that I found so interesting is when they were backing themselves into the corner. If I have to go back to A Few Good Men, it's almost like the flight logs, right? Like when they said white logs. They had video of the town officials, you know, pressing the button to switch it from the Detroit. Was it Detroit river to the Flint River. Is that what it was?

That's correct. Detroit water to Flint River.

So they had the button, had that video, they had that B roll there. They had. But then you also had to. That was countered against video of brown water, of people showing the brown water coming out of the sink. So it's as if it were a multimedia crisis for them as well. They simply could not argue against the truth. What was being shown on television. Correct.

Well, they had all that past footage. It was a celebration. It was written up in the New York Times as a great thing. The mayor was taking a drink of water saying, everything is great. And it was the series of bad decisions. They switched to a more corrosive source of water, bean counters. The emergency manager took off corrosion control and they lied about it. And that led to the perfect storm where lead from those lead pipes leached into the water. And they figured that you can game. Here's the thing about the regulations. You can game the regulations if you really want to. And that's what they also did. Everything's fine according to the regulation, but you can game it. And that's what they did because they had a two year window where they would get back off the Flint River. And they tried to stretch it out until they could get to that point. And by that time it was way too late because it was almost an instantaneous situation where the Flint river water just corroded the pipes and lead went right on in.

Okay, Mike, So let's now talk to bring you in now. And this is good in terms, this is the beauty of being our age is you have the experience of time. I think, you know, since you and I worked at a time before social media, right, Like a crisis was not as much a boulder, just like cruising down a mountain. It was, it was like a slower decline on the way down.

You had some time, yes, you had.

Time, right when we were both in Washington, but now it's so fast. So give me, if you could tell me just from that experience that you had back then, working in the media and working in public relations right now, what needs to be done? Where if you are the communicator, you are working with leadership that is either, you know, in between corrupt to lack of transparency, they don't want to put this information out there. What are the three things that you could tell these communicators if you said, here's what you need in this time to be able to handle like one of these trust crises that we have, what would you recommend any organization to do when you have that type of a situation?

Okay, so I'll combine two at the start, plan and practice. You know, I am a big believer in swats, Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And I tell people entering that room, if you hold back on this, you will fail. So I need your honest opinions, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. I'm doing it right now with one utility in Texas coming out of the Texas freeze, you know, going over their communications. I need to hear honestly what you think your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are. Then we can prepare, plan and then practice. You've got to drill, drill, drill. When you have a communications plan, especially in my field where you can have so many different problems happen in water and wastewater, I do hurricane drills. I do water quality drills. The next piece, when you say drills.

Are you talking tabletops? Are you talking actual run throughs?

Actual run throughs, Full scale exercises? I mean, we have shut down plants for a full scale exercise where I have had to do the press work on it as if, hey, listen, we're shutting down the plant. All that preparation, all that work, then because you've done that work, you have the confidence to act. And when you're in the middle of the crisis, you've got to act. You've got to act quickly. I say accuracy is job one, but speed is job one. A And when you get your footing because you've reacted well and quickly, then you get people on a regular system of updates throughout. You want them to get on a schedule so they don't freelance everywhere and they're harder to honestly control. And then finally follow up. The crisis isn't over. In my field in water and wastewater, actually, you can turn a crisis into a positive if you keep hammering home the messaging. After the crisis is over, here's what we're doing to learn from it. Here's where waterways have improved because of the work we've done and people will be more confident in you when you hit the next crisis. So those are my kind of steps. The first step, prepare, plan and practice. The second step, act with confidence. And the third step, follow up to.

Sit on that second step for a while. How does someone act if they are working with leadership or they're just working with people within their organization who do not want to act in the best interest of their stakeholders? They want to either cover or they don't feel that they need to release too much information with the risk of information being taken out of context. What are some of the things that a communicator could do to nuance massage that message from those leaders?

Well, I call it bunkering. You know, it's kind of that visual you get in that bunker and guess what, you're cut off from the outside world. You don't do very well. And that is a mistake. I have had to tell people. If you do this, if you bunker, you decide not to communicate, you are on track to lose your job. This is, in a moment like that, you have to be brutally honest. If you don't communicate and communicate early and often, well, you could lose your job here. And here are all the reasons why. Because I've got case study after case study after case study of people who bunker who will lose their job. When you get that personal and you can't do it in front of a room of people, you have to kind of take them off to the side. But when you get that personal, it hits them. They realize what's going on here, that this is a whole other level of response that needs to be taken, that the old ways are not going to work. And I say this when I give speeches about it. The old days and the old ways of communicating are over. They're over if you decide to. One of the things I'm discovering in the breakdown I'm doing for this one utility is that they waited and waited and waited until the information they had was they thought was completely correct. They waited 12, 18 hours between updates. Well, by the time they got that out, the information was bad. It was old, it was outdated. And when they put it out and they got new information, they had to backtrack like one hour later on the information they just put out. So they hurt their credibility.

In that case, who is bunkering, like, who was withholding the information? What level?

Either either the executive director or the incident command. And when you do, you know, you know this.

I do.

You know, if. If communications is an elevated and emergency response process, then it's, it's reduced in importance. And that's where incident commanders who are focused on solving the problem, this is. They are completely focused on solving the problem. It's an operational report approach. They're worried if they solve the problem fast and properly, they figure the comms will be fine with it. And that's not how it works. If you create information gaps, people will fill them, and they'll usually fill them with the wrong information because they don't know what you know. This is the whole social media. If you have gaps in information, social media will fill them. People will fill them, and it won't be right. So that's what you have to worry about.

I'm surprised to hear that you're working with people who are emergency managers and you're still trying to convince them to be more open with their messaging.

Well, I'll say this. The people who are leaders in emergency management get it. They understand because you can have the best response plan going, and if you can't communicate it, it can look like the worst response plan going. But in the end, the incident commanders are often the directors of engineering or the executive directors or those positions where what they say goes. So this is their first time, if they're in the incident where they're working with a communicator saying, no, you need to talk about it this way. We need to get this information out. Now. If there's that pushback there, they'll fall back on the fact that they're the incident command, they are the leaders, and what they say goes. Even emergency managers, the leaders in emergency management that are guiding them through the process, can't overcome that as well. I've seen that happen before.

And now, Mike, do you think when we're, when you discuss ICS and when we just from emergency management, when you have an incident command system from a larger scale, let's say a federal scale, it's understood how to communicate, you know, you have these federal guidelines. But are you saying, like, as you get into the municipalities, you get into the, you know, you get to the smaller utilities, municipalities, even if there is, you know, an ICS approach to things, you may still have people at the top that are fighting you on releasing information.

Absolutely. And this is often the first time they've hit a major incident. They don't have full teams of communication staff, they don't have the resources, they don't have the personnel for many of these utilities or counties, municipalities, they work with a city or county PIO or where water and sewer is 12th or 15th on the list. Honestly, that's why I started my firm. So communications is naturally lower on the list. And for many of these people, they have gotten away with the idea of, well, we're out of sight and out of mind when it comes to public attention. And I've been able to move through my world without any problem by being out of sight, out of mind. So I'm going to apply that approach that has worked for me over these years to response in an emergency. And it just doesn't work. But you know how it goes when people get nervous and they go back to what they know. And for many people leading an emergency response at the municipality or county level on a water or wastewater crisis, they go back to, I'm going to fix this problem and the communications will go along with it. The public will appreciate that I fixed the problem whether or not I talk to him about it. And that's not the way the world works anymore.

Mike, your message about bunkering. So at the end of every podcast, I offer an indestructible PR tip. And for one, I do appreciate that you have been in the book. You've gave a testimony to the book, a blurb on the book, you've read the book, you dog eared the book. I've been grateful for your support with it. But I would like you to provide an indestructible PR tip for the time that we're in right now. And it's interesting, you know the stories now coming out about the cdc, how the internal memo about the Delta variant, how the war has changed with that messaging. Give me your indestructible PR tip for how to manage this idea of bunkering. And how do you bust someone out of the bunker?

It's an old adage we had in a newsroom. I was a planning editor for a couple years in dc. I was juggling stories left and right. I need content in my newsroom. Our adage was, if I hear from you first, I trust you first. If I hear from you last, I trust you last. And it's basic about just about any other human relationship we have you come to me first with a difficult topic and you come to me first with a difficult topic. And I'm more ready to believe you when you come to me with that difficult topic. If you're the communicator, you're also answering those first couple of questions that always come to a journalist's mind. The negatives. Whenever I look at the story, I ask the first negative question right off the bat. So if you go first with information about lead information about other chemicals in water and present that to me in a way that explains it for my viewers and readers, and water covers everybody in a person's viewing area or reading area, I'm going to appreciate that, I'm going to understand it, I'm going to take it in and I'm more likely to repeat it out. That is how you can win in this difficult day and age. You've got to be out there first. And it's the same thing applies in a crisis. It's the anti debunkering message. If I hear from you first, okay, here's my information. I'm going to present it to you. I'm not going to make you wait or try and find it for yourself. I'm going to give it to you. I'm going to answer questions right then and there. You're going to be in a better position to report it and I'm going to be in better position because the information will get out there from my point of view. So that's really what I try and drill in when I'm speaking to people who don't quite get it because it does attach to basic human relationships. Normally, if I hear from you first when we're having conversation, friends, family, I'm going to trust what you're saying first. If I find out about something and I have to ask you about it, I'm worried from a position where I'm questioning your response. So that's a big point that I try and get across, especially today's, what I call the instant information age.

So, Mike, thank you so much for sharing your experience and that gritty experience. It's really good to hear from people who walk the talk, right? They know what they're doing because they're out there and you've been working it and grinding it for so many years. So thank you so much for finally being on the podcast and for sharing that wisdom.

Thank you for having me. I greatly appreciate it as well.

My thanks to guest Mike McGill for helping us understand the trouble with having a bunker mentality.

For more information about Mike and his work.

You can find him@waterpio.com you can also find him on Twitter at waterpio. Also, I want to hear from you. What do you want to learn on this podcast? Is there a particular topic you'd like me to discuss or question you would like to ask? I'm here to serve. Head on over to my website molly mcpherson.com podcast scroll to the bottom and there's an online voicemail option for you to let me know what you're thinking. That's all for this week on the podcast. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.