Crisis PR: The Pandemic & Two Tips

The pandemic presents a dreadful communications challenge for politicians globally, and two particular lessons for Crisis PR practitioners.

Building confidence requires consistent messaging. That’s so much harder when the evolving virus sometimes requires daily shifts in strategy, and so messaging.??

Normally, in a crisis, we counsel boards or leadership teams to build trust by setting objectives and then strategies on how to achieve them. These then remain unchanged unless we absolutely need to. We then execute them with consistent messaging, repeated often.

We also advise that nimbleness is critical in a crisis.?However, when the virus requires so much rapid change, that just adds to the public’s confusion.

This is why communicating requires a lot of expertise from Australia’s leaders, especially when they are being compared to the world’s best leaders every night on TV, each of whom is responding differently to the same COVID crisis. That creates uncertainty.

Two nuances are often overlooked by communicators:

1)???When the strategies are all over the place, be grounded with a foundation principle and consistent behaviours.

When the world is changing, and strategies must nimbly adapt, the consistency of a foundation principle matters.?It builds trust. The public may not always understand the strategic directions you choose to take, but relying on a strong principle means they’ll generally be more accepting and trusting of your approach.

Either by accident or design, this is where NSW’s Premier, Gladys Berejiklian and CMO, Kerry Chant, excel.

Their foundation principle, their objective with the public, appears to be a genuine commitment to try everything they can to minimise deaths - “Whatever we do is about protecting your health”. This baseline objective creates an anchor point when everything else is changing.

Plus, their behaviours are consistent, including the tactic of being out there every day at 11am, patiently taking questions.

This is what engenders trust, I believe, with most people in NSW. It gives them the latitude to make multiple changes in this chaotic pandemic and make a limited number of mistakes.

The comparison with the PM is instructive. Scott Morrison has a much more difficult task, balancing multiple national interests as well as competing states. He has the same aim – to get us through this, but I don’t know his objective or foundation principle for us. Is it getting people back to work as quickly as possible, or is it keeping people safe?

Without that guiding principle, his messaging becomes undisciplined: the pace of the vaccination roll out on one day is, “It’s not a race”, and then becomes “Go for gold” on another.

Another example is the messaging around the National Cabinet – a superb idea but now seemingly riven with division because of the different messaging from each state. A unifying principle from the PM that binds all the premiers to a common objective might transcend the divisions. The message could be, “Whatever we each do, we are doing it to protect people’s health”, or, “The focus for all of us, every day, is to get Australia back to normal” – two credible foundation principles, but allowing premiers latitude to vary strategy, but keeps them appearing united.??

Without that, what we hear is political speak.

2)???Messaging isn’t just about words. It’s more nuanced.

How many people in NSW feel about Gladys Berejiklian and Kerry Chant is more about how the pair come across – not just their words. We can learn a lot by studying their qualities as spokespeople.

A Los Angeles psychologist, Albert Mehrabian, has advanced a theory that, while controversial, is indicative. The 7-38-55 Rule indicates what affects our emotions when we listen to someone: 7% is the words, 38% includes their tone, 55% is in their facial expressions.

We can argue the percentages, but an easy illustration is if someone says “Trust me” but fails to make eye contact: fail.?

While others may disagree, when I watch the Gladys/Kerry show, I don’t feel they emanate hubris, or I’m being talked down to, or that they are campaigning to be re-elected, or that I am being peppered with clever one-liners. Most of that is not in their words but in their tones and facial expressions.

These authentic and consistent qualities are essential in politicians because they are in our lounge rooms, on the tele every night. We get to know them.?From my years of training leaders in communication skills and particularly in ever-changing and dynamic situations, I know these more nuanced qualities can be taught. The proviso is, though, that they are built on foundation principles.