84: A Crisis Response Case Study: Minneapolis Police & George Floyd

Minneapolis. What can I say? A deadly Memorial Day for George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. It's a heartbreaking story for so many people, but especially African Americans, black men, young men, and the people of the Twin Cities. The fatal encounter happened in Minneapolis, but the Twin Cities experienced it all, and all of Minnesota felt it. Last week, I retweeted a post from Adrian Vermeule, a professor of Constitutional law at Harvard Law Review, when I was trying to follow the riots and the protests in the Twin Cities. And he had tweeted, to be honest, I didn't foresee that the final collapse of civil order would begin in Minnesota. Well, neither did I. I'm recording this episode the day after the riots in the Twin Cities, four days after George Floyd's. I'm still exhausted, mentally exhausted, and already from the quarantine, already emotional for my daughter who finished her senior year of high school last week. Last night, we drove through the campus one last time for the senior parade. I'm sure many of you parents of seniors did the same thing. And then when I got home, I was texting friends back in the Twin Cities, trying to follow the coverage online. The word this is unbelievable was written over and over in these texts. And my friend sue, well, it was her birthday. It was certainly a memorable one. Now, today, the day of this recording, it is Friday, May 29th. I spoke with my mom, and she was devastated by the riots and just the sight of the destruction that had happened the night before because it was the burning of her childhood neighborhood, the Midway section of St. Paul. My dad is from there as well. Well, and I was born there. The emotions around all of this are raw. But the lessons from last week. So it's Friday night, and as I record this right now, there are riots all around the country that I'm watching on Twitter and watching on television. Now, I'm going to let the wiser minds investigate and establish the facts behind what happened in Minneapolis and the greater issue, the sadder issue of race relations. But I do want to impart a lesson from Elaine that I want to remain in, and that's the communication lane. The mistakes that stood out to me, well, there were many, but there were so many of them that came that stemmed from poor communications. So if you work for any organization that may experience a crisis, and nowadays, you know what that can be. Anyone? I know you want to ensure that your crisis management plans prevent and reduce the threat of a crisis, and certainly not to incite one. But in order to do that, you need to know how to act and how to react in the face of a crisis. But with this real time technology, the problem is ensuring that the response is not only timely but accurate. Something so difficult to do with social media. And I know from my experience that it's difficult to rein in bad press, especially in the social media age. It just moves too quickly. And I know that a lot of communicators out there, you may not have the tools or the support that you need to respond. And leaders, from what you witnessed in Minneapolis and in other cities during all of these George Floyd riots, the stakes are extremely high. Every word of your response, of your crisis, if you ever have one, well, it must be the right one at the right time. So on today's episode, a three step process for response. Whether it's a response that needs to be contained in your industry or even the uncontainable, the ones that just bleed, frankly, nationwide, this process can protect you and mitigate an emergency, or at least do everything in its power to try and quell any type of action that we're all seeing from last week. So these three steps in the process, they should be able to help you. And I took them, like I said, from watching the aftermath of George Floyd, and it hits home for me. If you listen to the podcast, you know, the Twin Cities, that's where I'm from. I grew up in the St Paul suburbs, but where I lived, I was minutes away from Minneapolis. So I have so many friends and family back home. And this is just a really devastating time for them. But I also understand on a greater scale, a far greater scale, a sadder scale, is the impact of race relations. It's sad. And we need change, and we need change fast. And a way we can do that is through communications. So here we go. Number one, in any event, you have to respond quickly. The need for speed in a crisis is critical because as events escalate and as the technology accelerates, so often it's the tech that can be a driver in the story. For instance, the phone, the video capability of a phone, the social media, the sharing. The amount of time to respond to a crisis has shrunk dramatically in the past 10 to 20 years. Back in the day, if you worked in communications 15 years ago, we had deadlines, we had print deadlines, we had broadcast deadlines of local news, national news. They're at the end of the afternoon. We had embargoes, we had time to cradle the story until it went public. We had those golden hours to package a response. Now everything is in real time. Often key stakeholders hear about a crisis at the same time the organization is experiencing the crisis. So you see the problem. Rapid response is essential. You don't have to dot every I and make sure that every T is crossed, but you do need to get out in front fast. There is a crisis response term called stealing thunder. And researchers have found that organizational managers in their organization are viewed more credible when they report the crisis before the other sources. So this self reporting essentially steals the thunder from other sources. Now, if the situation does not allow for an immediate response, and in the case of the four Minneapolis officers now at the time. So last night. So again, I'm recording this on Friday, May 20nint, my sources back home, my friends who were clued in, they were telling me that the arrest hadn't happened yet because it was a question of, you know, at what point do they make the arrest and by which agency. Also, there was the autopsy report that I'm told needed to show external factors for death. Now, of course, this is just hearsay, and this is what I'm hearing from a source in Minneapolis, but it rings true with me. But in other words, sometimes you cannot have an immediate response because you don't have the answers. And organizations need to make every reasonable effort to respond to questions promptly, reasonable efforts, because people expect a response. As we saw in Minneapolis, a lot of damage can happen while waiting for official word. And you don't even need to be a communicator to know that the Minneapolis police, they sat. They sat and they sat. They had a news conference, but they let a lot of dead air go where they did not fill it with any information. And I went to their Facebook page. And on their Facebook page, the pinned post that they had, which was posted in April, was, for current information, just head on over to this website for news releases. And then the last post before that was some innocuous post from April. I followed the website, went to their page, went to the news section. They did have one release on the incident, and they had one update on that release stating that the FBI was involved. @ the bottom of that page had a link to the Facebook page. That's good. Also had a link to their Twitter page. The link was broken, and that was it. That was a dead end. So I'm not sitting in Minneapolis. I'm not working for the press in Minneapolis. But if I wanted more information from the Minneapolis police, if anyone did, there was none to be had. Now, a supplemental story that I'm going to squeeze in here right now. The Day after George Floyd's death, death, something else happened in Minneapolis that blew my mind. There was a venture capitalist who leased office space in a building in Minneapolis. You may have seen this. It popped up on Instagram and therefore the rest of social media. But there was a viral video showing him asking a group of young black entrepreneurs. Not that he would know that, but there were three black workers who were tenants of the building and they were allowed to use the gym. So they posted the video on an Instagram account. So the man, his name is Tom Austin. I don't feel like I'm doxing him, because this is. It is a public story. And he did make a comment on it, but he's white. And he told them that he was going to call 911. He was asking them, did they belong there, who let them in? And he ended up calling the building's property manager instead of. But if anyone ever doubts the. Okay, I'm going to opine for a moment here, but if anyone ever doubts the necessity for black people, black men, especially young black men, for the reason why they need to carry phones, the reason why they have to film interactions. Remember just a week ago, Amy Cooper, the Coopers in Central park with the dog incident where we had a birder, a black man, who was filming a woman who was walking her dog off leash. Again, he started filming the interaction, and she, Amy Cooper, a former employee of Franklin Templeton, she called the police and made a false report and said that an African American man was threatening her life. So if anyone ever wonders the plight of an African American male, well, just look at this week in history, the last week in May, in 2020, and that should answer your question. Anyway, back to Tom Austin. He called, and naturally, these entrepreneurs, they worked for an Internet firm, like, I believe, a social media marketing firm. And naturally, they posted, became a viral news story. And he admitted to his credit, and I give him credit for that, he said he should have handled it differently. He said in an email it was not my job to have done anything. And that's quite true. He ended up losing. He ended up losing his. His lease in the building and also lost his reputation. Now, what was interesting is someone else got tagged into this. So it's very difficult to segment yourself from a crisis if your name happens to come in the crisis. So I had tweeted, naturally, about. Tweeted this Instagram video, and I had, you know, mentioned again that, you know, that these phones, they're used as weapons. And. And we have to use them for good, not for Bad. Well, a former guest of this podcast, Jules Joy, she responded to my tweet and she included a link to a blog post that she had written that week. An article, a very good article, called Avoiding the Employee Fueled Social Media Crisis. I included a link in the show notes. I highly recommend that you read this article. But she had commented about WeWork and their lack of a statement, and she tagged me. Well, a few Hours later, there's WeWork, the verified account, releasing their statement and tagging both myself and Julia on their statement. So on May 27, statement on the incident in a Minneapolis gym on Wednesday, May 26th. And here it is in part. WeWork believes deeply in the power of community diversity and inclusion for all of our members and employees and said we do not tolerate discrimination in any form. We have asked the building owner and operator of the gym where the recorded incident took place to take immediate steps to investigate and address the conduct of the video. For the knowledge of our community, we think it is important to note that the actions did not take place in a WeWork space. Okay. And that's key. So we work got lumped into the story because the entrepreneurs, they had a WeWork space and they had access to this gym, but they were tagged into this story and we work, and they're dealing with their own crisis problems. They did the right thing. They responded. Even though they were ancillary, they responded to this incident and they quelled it right away. So again, I'll include a link to all of that in the show notes. All right, the next step of the process, number two, is speaking with one voice. You need a consistent, unified response. Now, this does not mean having one person and only one person as a spokesperson. Speaking with one voice means it's a coordinated effort. You have a primary spokesperson or primary spokespeople, but they are supported by secondary spokespeople or secondary communicators that you'll find on social. Or it may come up in a video. Or just like the statement that I read from we were, you may create a graphic and place it on a Twitter feed or an Instagram feed. So key messages disseminated across all the communication channels. That's what you're looking for. And that's what speaking with one voice means. Your press conference to the tweet, to the statement, to the other social channels. Mapping out your message builds credibility and prevents mistakes and clarifications. Like in the case of Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, he had made a statement on the George Floyd case. And I watched live in Real time. Because you don't see press conferences that much anymore. But my goodness, this past week, we saw many, didn't we? So he spoke at a news conference that made news, but not for the reason he wanted. Take a.

Listen. I will say this, that that video is graphic and horrific, terrible, and no person should do that. But my job in the end is to prove that he violated a criminal statute. And there is other evidence that does not support a criminal charge. We need to wade through all of that evidence and to come through with a meaningful determination. And we are doing that to the best of our.

Ability. You never want to walk back on a statement, ever. It gets messy. A consistent message is more believable than an inconsistent one because it builds on the credibility of the primary spokesperson at the organization that they represent. You botch it well, then you're behind the eight ball. Mike Freeman, he was always behind and always will be likely throughout the run of this entire story. All right, number three, transparency. We all know that the definition of transparency means open, but the term is a mixed bag. People want it. The public, they often want it. But the people within the organization, they don't often want to show it fully because it could bring harm if they are too transparent by disclosing the wrong information or too much information that causes even more questions. Now, if you listen to this podcast, you know, I've mentioned this many times before about the transparency word. It often causes people to bridle when they hear it. It makes them nervous. And often what I hear in my work when I talk about transparency, the feedback that I'll hear, the concern is that people will take information, that transparent information, let's say it's not a statement, but maybe it's a form. Maybe it's a tax form. Maybe it's just information that's posted online. And they feel that that information, when it's in the hands of the public and it's out there without context, that that information quickly becomes misinformation. And that's understandable. I understand that fear. However, in the hands of good communicators, you will never have misinformation. There will always be a good communicator to put things into context. That's why transparency isn't just opening the doors and letting people in. It's giving out the information. It's opening the door and putting it outside the door and explaining what everything is. Now, let's break down what transparency means. Well, again, let's go in the threes. I love threes. Transparency means this one it means availability to the media. All right, Those are press conferences, statements, online, updated statements, video, live video, tweets, posts. Putting yourself out there as being available to the media is key, even if it's not at that moment. You say we will have a press conference at this time or we will release a statement at this time. Next, willingness to disclose requested or assumed information. So when people ask for information, you provide it. Unless there's a compelling reason, a privacy reason, why you can't, that there is some risk. And if you can't put information out there or you're not as willing, you don't want to throw in denials or diminishment like excuses or justifications. It's all about the appearance of willingness. People will give you a grace period. They'll give you room to move if you're willing to help them with the information. Because this is the time where you rebuild and you bolster the posture that you have whatever information you're trying to get out there at that moment. The more willing you are to give the information, the better off you'll be. And the last piece for defining transparency, it's honesty. And honesty can sound like, I don't know the answer. If you have a history of being transparent, the foundation of trust has already been established. The press, the public, they're going to give you leeway. But in the case of the Minneapolis police, well, there's history there. So it is no surprise. I don't even live there anymore, and there's no surprise that any of this was happening. But if you have built up goodwill with the press, with your stakeholders, with your customers, your consumers, your members, this transparency piece becomes a lot easier. Okay, so there you have it, the three step process for response. The key takeaways. One, respond quickly in any situation. Two, speak with one voice. Be consistent. You need a unified response. And three, transparency. Make your message known. Make your response known as quickly as you can. Today, as I record this, it's a very, very difficult week, and I hope not to see it again and think it's on top of the pandemic and it's just so much for so many people. But my hope is that, of course, everyone learns. And I hope just in this quick episode today that it will help you if your organization is ever struck by a crisis. Hopefully never as bad as the one that we saw in Minneapolis and now throughout the nation. But again, if something does happen, take a moment now to think about your policies, think about your employees, think about how you would respond if something happened within your organization? Are you ready for it? Do you have policies in place to respond from an employee point of view, an internal stakeholder point of view, an external point of view? Do you have a crisis plan? If the last few months have shown us anything, no one has a plan written that said Coronavirus COVID 19 communication plan. Maybe a few, a handful, but not many of us. Some had pandemic plans. The Minneapolis police did not have a George Floyd plan, though many do have a police brutality plan. But as we all hear about it, the term the new normal that applies to your policies as well. So make sure you look at all of your policies and look at your crisis plan and make sure that if you have to respond that you respond in the right way at the right time with the right message. That's all for this week on the podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Bye for.