Episode Summary

As school communicators, you play a vital role when crises happen in your district. How you respond can greatly affect your school’s reputation. While crises are unavoidable, they provide a chance for communication professionals to support your leaders and communities.

In this episode, we’ll go over the three phases of a crisis communications plan: before, during and after. To handle a crisis effectively, it's essential to prepare in advance. This involves creating a strategic plan, running drills to test your crisis communication strategy, and developing partnerships with community leaders and local media.

When a crisis occurs, building trust is key. Selecting and training a sympathetic spokesperson and relaying information quickly and honestly allows your community to stay informed and feel included.

In the aftermath of a crisis, reflecting is the first step to improving. Give your community something to do to feel they are part of the solution and strengthen your bond with them and lastly, take care of yourself because you experienced a crisis, too.

While crises are extremely difficult to weather, they are also opportunities to support your leaders and your community when they need you most.

Episode Notes

It’s time to address the elephant in the room: crisis communications. Crises are unavoidable. As a district comms professional, your role is pivotal to saving your reputation when a crisis lands on your doorstep.

In this episode, we’ll show you how to prepare for a crisis, what to do to maintain trust in the midst of a crisis, and how to recover after a crisis. 

After all, a crisis is also a unique opportunity to come to the aid of your school leaders and your community when they need it most. 

Featured in this episode are Dr. Erika H. James, Dr. Robert Hunt, Amy Edmondson and Sir Cary Cooper. 

Dr. Erika H. James is co-author of the book The Prepared Leader: Emerge from Any Crisis More Resilient Than Before.

Listen to Dr. Robert Hunt on Season 2 of the SchoolCEO podcast.

Episode Transcript

NASA Mission Control:  Four, three, two, one, zero. All engines running. Lift off. We have a lift off.

Eileen Beard (Host):  It sounds like the plot of a TV show, but as we record this episode, two American astronauts are stuck in space. You've probably heard the story. In June of last year, the Boeing Starliner launched into space with Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams on board. They were bound for the International Space Station on a round trip that was supposed to last just over a week. But helium leaks and malfunctioning thrusters upset plans for bringing the astronauts back to Earth.

Months later, the capsule returned to Earth without Butch and Sunny. The Starliner had experienced so many problems en route to the space station that NASA felt it was too risky to let the astronauts return aboard it. In fact, they're not scheduled to come back to Earth until March 2025, nearly a year after they departed. What's worse, their return trip is being provided by the Boeing space program's biggest competitor, SpaceX, because their craft was deemed safer than the Starliner. It doesn't get much worse than that. As school communicators, your mission control when something goes wrong in your district, and it will go wrong because your response determines whether your brand lands safely or not. Welcome to the School CEO podcast. I'm your host, Eileen Beard. In this season of the podcast, we're giving you a comprehensive guide to school marketing. And as our season nears its end, it's time to address the elephant in the room, crisis communications.

Crisis is inevitable, but how you handle it can make or break your reputation. But here at SchoolCEO, we have a different perspective. Crisis is your best opportunity, as school comps pros, to come to the aid of your leadership team. This is when your skill set is most needed and when it can have the most positive impact on your community. So how do you manage communication in a crisis? How do you come to the rescue of your school leaders and your community? How do you mitigate the damage to your brand? On today's episode, we'll tell you how to prepare for a crisis, how to build trust and confidence in your brand as you weather a PR storm, and how to recover after it. Let's get started.

Boeing and NASA made several wrong moves in the months following the Starliner's initial failure. But their misstep started before that because despite the mechanical issues that caused repeated delays, they still sent the astronauts into space. And despite knowing the risks of that flight, their team seemed caught off guard by the PR disaster that ensued. So let's start by talking about how to anticipate a crisis here on Earth and avoid making the same mistakes as Boeing and NASA. The first step to anticipating a crisis is obvious but essential. You have to create a strategic plan. We know a crisis can be a chaotic, unwieldy thing to manage. It may be over in minutes, or if the problem is more systemic, it may take years for it to conclude. That's why it's so important to control as many factors as you can before crisis comes knocking. Those of you who worked in school comms during the COVID nineteen crisis might balk at this. How can you possibly plan for a global pandemic? The world hadn't seen anything like it since the Spanish flu broke out in 1918, so you had no real precedent. But no matter how hard it was, I bet you all learned a lot about yourselves, about your community, and, well, about infectious diseases. And now you do have a precedent if, God forbid, another global health crisis were to occur. Creating a strategic crisis communications plan means identifying what types of disasters you might need to respond to.

The spread of disease, a weather related event, Beard misbehavior, and so on, and outlining communication protocols for each type, what roles faculty and staff will play, how they should communicate with one another, who should deliver messages to the school community and the community at large, and what channels they should use to do so. Some misinformation is inevitable in today's hyperconnected world. So when you're creating your crisis PR and comms plan, consider designating someone to monitor social media to help combat that misinformation. And if you're new to this or even if you're a seasoned pro, look at crisis responses at other school districts to help you identify a plan or even private companies. What did they do wrong? How can you avoid making the same mistakes? And what did they do right, and how can you emulate their success? And while you're at it, let your stakeholders know you're doing your homework. Call it preemptive PR. Sadly, we can't talk about school crises while dancing around school violence.

If you've hired a security guard or installed cameras, those safety measures are also opportunities to show stakeholders you're thinking about how to prevent crime, not merely react to it. If your school has conducted drills, make sure your stakeholders are aware. And that brings us to our next step, run drills. Role playing disasters is a macabre but necessary exercise to minimize harm to students and staff. But this goes for your crisis communications plan as well. Dr. Erika H. James, Dean of the Wharton School of Business, is an expert in crisis leadership. She literally wrote the book on how leaders can prepare themselves for such events, which we'll link in the show notes. Here, she likens exercising your crisis plan to working out at the gym.

Dr. Erika H. James:  History will tell us that time and again, another crisis is looming around the corner, and it's our inability or unwillingness to prepare for it that allows it to have a greater impact than it probably necessarily needs to have. Think of it as an exercise that we all, at least the doctors tell us we're supposed to exercise. The reason is that we create muscle memory. We create a a memory in our bodies and in our minds and in our behaviors that allow us to understand how to react and respond when something new happens. So even though we might be preparing for one particular type of crisis or even though we may have just experienced one particular type of crisis, the fact that we may experience something very different in the future, if we have exercised our minds, our bodies, our behaviors, our culture within the organization, then we are more likely to be able to navigate the next thing even if it's not something specific that we were anticipating. If you live in particular regions that are susceptible to weather events and you have a plant or a facility that could be damaged, obviously that's something you need to be preparing for. But there are also other types of events that we might not necessarily know to prepare for and we have to go through the exercise of asking what if questions. We have to think about the hypotheticals. Often times we see a peer or a competitor experience a crisis and we think, I'm so glad that wasn't me. Right?

Dr. Erika H. James:  And we assume that that will never happen to us. And we don't take the time to really think about and learn from what you observed from someone else's crisis.

Eileen Beard (Host):  The third step to anticipating a crisis is to develop partners and comms. Reach out to people outside of your organization and build strong relationships before a crisis ever occurs because you need people you can lean on for support, for expert guidance, for assistance on the ground, and for emotional succor. We recommend forming an advisory committee of other school leaders and staff, fellow communicators, area law enforcement, and community leaders to anticipate issues and solve problems. Here's Erika H. James again.

Dr. Erika H. James:  When you're thinking about managing a crisis and responding to a crisis, it really is about the people. And if you surround yourself with people that you trust, they're the ones who are gonna go through the fire with you. They're the ones who are gonna be there through the thick and thin and help you resolve the challenge that you're experiencing. So I think having trusted, counterparts throughout this process is a critical aspect of prepared leadership.

And the stronger your relationship with local media, the better. Any journalist who knows and trusts you is much more likely to be sympathetic when it hits the fan. I was recently talking to a superintendent who had this advice about building relationships with local media. Read one of their stories or watch one of their segments. Invite them to coffee and don't show up with an ask. Instead, show up with some positive feedback about their work. This isn't merely flattery. Journalists are often hungry for feedback, and they don't usually get it from their audience. Those of you who come from a journalism background might understand. So to summarize, you have to anticipate a crisis to minimize it once it occurs.

You can do that by creating a strategic communications plan, running drills to test that plan, and forming strong connections with people for guidance and support. Let's talk next about what to do once something bad has happened. Building trust during a crisis. When the worst does happen, you have to build trust and confidence in your school or district brand. However, you should already have a strong foundation of trust to build upon. If you already lack your stakeholders' trust, you won't magically regain it during a crisis. For instance, Boeing's reputation had already suffered a big ding before the Starliner saga began in June 2024. In January, a panel blew out of a MAX plane in flight, leading many people to question the safety of Boeing's products. So the brand already lacked the public's trust. The point is, the steps we outline apply to building trust when things are going well too.

When the Boeing Starliner finally returned to Earth, albeit without its astronauts on board, Boeing executives failed to attend the post landing press conference. Joel Montalbano, the deputy associate administrator for NASA's space operations, said Boeing had simply deferred to NASA to represent the mission. The move showed Boeing didn't even have confidence in itself, and Boeing CEO, Ted Calhoun, should have been there. He should have been the face of the company during the crisis. Shortly afterward, Calhoun was let go. The first step to build trust during a crisis is select and train a sympathetic spokesperson. Not only does this ensure that competing information isn't being shared by multiple sources, it puts a face on your organization. A single, honest voice helps instill confidence in a district because the message is coming from a fellow human, not a parade of them, a human your audience can relate to. And if that person, often the superintendent of a district, is well trained by their comms team, they will be able to play the role your community needs him or her to play, the firm parent one moment and the caring friend the next. Because the most important thing your spokesperson can do is to recognize your community as suffering and acknowledge it, just like a caring friend would.

They have to put themselves in their stakeholders place, really empathize with them to gain their trust. See, your spokesperson's humanity isn't a front. It's a tool. That goes for everyone involved in the response. If your spokesperson or your team is struggling to find the right words to use in the midst of a tragedy, you have to put yourselves in their shoes. So what would you want to hear? The next step to building trust during a crisis is keeping up quick and consistent communication. At the beginning of a crisis, that means responding as soon as possible. You do not want the nightly news or Facebook to beat you to it, not if you can help it. In season two of the podcast, we spoke with Doctor Robert Hunt on being forthcoming in a crisis.

Dr. Robert Hunt: Being as forthcoming as you can as soon as you can. And then acknowledging when because I I just can't you know, the we do have additional information, but I, you know, I can't share it because of X, privacy, or, you know, student whatever that is. But making sure people feel like you're sharing everything that you can.

As Doctor Hunt said, that sometimes means admitting you don't have all the information yet. But hearing you say you don't have all the information is much different than hearing it from someone else. Here's leadership expert Amy Edmonson for TED with a similar message.

Amy Edmonson:  Amidst upheaval, leaders must share what they know and admit what they don't know. Paradoxically, that honesty creates more psychological safety for people, not less. For example, when the pandemic devastated the airline industry virtually overnight, CEO of Delta Airlines, Ed Bastian, ramped up employee communication despite having so little clarity about the path ahead. Facing truly dire results, at one point in 2020, losing over a hundred million dollars a day, it would have been far easier for Bastian to wait for more information before taking action. But effective leaders during upheaval don't hide in the shadows. In fact, as Bastian put it, it is far more important to communicate when you don't have the answers than when you do.

Consistency matters too. You have to make the audience feel included and informed. Otherwise, they'll think you're hiding something from them. We can't drive this home enough. If a crisis lasts longer than one twenty four hour news cycle, and we hope it doesn't, that means giving updates as often as you can, even if it's just to say you have no new information, but that you're monitoring the situation closely. Right now, many districts in this country are struggling to comfort their immigrant population in the wake of president Trump's mass deportation order. The truth is we don't know the extent of the ramifications yet, but I've talked to several school communications professionals The point is sometimes quickly acknowledging what you don't know and The point is sometimes quickly acknowledging what you don't know and reiterating your values is all you have to work with, but work with it. The lack of communication would only sow more fear. It's also important to note that quick and consistent communication starts at home, by which I mean, you have to keep your staff up to date. They need information and guidance, how to operate day to day in and after a crisis, what exactly they're dealing with, and how it will affect their jobs, and so on.

Next, be honest and upfront when you do communicate. Yes. That means telling them when you don't know something. It also means not skipping the bad stuff because they'll likely hear that from somewhere else. Ask yourself the tough questions like, are you the victim of something? Are you the perpetrator? Did something happen because you didn't foresee it and you should have? It's a hard pill to swallow, but take stock of the situation and admit it when you're at fault. Here’s Cary Cooper, author of the book “The Apology Impulse.”

Cary Cooper:  If you're a senior manager of an organization, you're a customer, a client as well. Think about how you would feel if your plane was delayed eleven hours. So I think the important thing is empathize with the people at the other end who are gonna be the recipients of your apology. And think through how you would react if you heard what you're about to say.

Despite repeated setbacks in the days running up to the Starliner's launch, its shaky landing and its inability to bring Sonny Williams and Butch Wilmore back safely, the company, well, actually NASA, got defensive and insisted the astronauts were not stranded. Instead of acknowledging the program's failures, NASA tried to tout one of its few strengths, Starliner's ability to stay stranded in space. Definitely not their words, by the way, because of its rechargeable batteries. Defensiveness is the antithesis of apology, and it won't be well received by your community. So be honest. Eventually, the storm does pass, although it hasn't quite passed for Boeing yet. And if you've picked the right face of your organization, kept communication quick and consistent, and stayed honest, you've hopefully gotten through it with your good reputation still intact. But a crisis lasts long after the immediate threat is handled, which brings us to the last phase of crisis communications, the aftermath. This is when the real work begins to help your community heal after a crisis. Recovery and aftermath.

A crisis isn't over when it's over. It's the beginning of a new order. The next step in managing the aftermath of a crisis is reflection. Once again, honesty is key here. Admit to yourselves where you faltered. Take responsibility for those things you can improve moving forward. I once heard a joke that a crisis can be something as small as a lice outbreak or as big as the pandemic, but let's use that lice outbreak to illustrate our point. The truth is that lice used to be a much bigger ongoing crisis for schools everywhere. And that first hundred or a thousand, probably million outbreaks, changed the way schools handle it. Now we prevent it with regular screenings in classrooms. We immediately send a child who has lice home. We require they stay home for a certain amount of time. And as communicators, it's your job to convey those changes you're making, that you are once again doing your homework to anticipate and hopefully prevent the next crisis in your community. The lessons learned from the pandemic were much harder one, but schools have best practices now to prevent another infectious disease outbreak that you can put into place and tout if the worst ever happens. Here's James.

Dr. Erika H. James: You learn not just for learning's sake, but you learn also to do something that information. And what's possible from crisis is that the opportunities that can be realized because of what you have now learned, because of the new investments that you've made to address the crisis, because of the new skill sets that your people now have because they've gone through these really challenging circumstances. It allows for creative, innovative ideas to emerge if we are intentional about seeking those opportunities.

The next step in helping your community recover after a crisis is giving them something to do. A community needs to know next steps, not just what steps your schools are taking, but what steps they can take to feel like they're part of the solution. After the pandemic, that meant asking families to use safety precautions, like handwashing, mask wearing, and staying home at the first sign of illness. After a natural disaster, you might ask for donations and solicit volunteers to help with cleanup. You've heard the phrase idle hands are the devil's workshop. Well, we certainly don't believe that. Inaction does make people feel lost and unstable. Giving people a purpose in the aftermath of a crisis makes them feel better, and it also strengthens their bond with your schools. Here's Hunt.

Dr. Robert Hunt: I think leveraging the people that want to step forward and help. Right? Not trying to put the cape on and do it all yourself, but allowing people to be a part of the process and a part of the healing really, creates, you know, avenues for those relationships to develop, moving forward.

You also have to give your community permission to grieve. You can't expect to return to normal right away, if ever. And saying you'll get back to normal in a certain amount of time tells your stakeholders that they should be over it. Here's James again.

Dr. Robert Hunt: We're so eager to have the crisis end and be finished with it that we oftentimes miss the opportunity to to reflect and learn on what we've just experienced as an organization. And the failure to reflect and learn means we're not really able to capitalize on the experience that we just went through, which then could prevent us from actually seizing the opportunities that can often manifest from a crisis.

Last but not least, recovering from a crisis includes taking care of yourself. Let yourself grieve and vent. Have a personal support network you can rely on when everyone else is relying on you to save the day. Here's Erica James one last time.

Dr. Erika H. James: One of the things that I have found is most helpful for me is to make sure that I have a network of people both personally and professionally that I can decompress with, that will accept me and accept, the frustrations that I have with almost no questions asked. And you know that you can sort of, at the end of the day, do a data dump or a download or just release all of the anxieties and pressures and frustrations that you felt over the course of the day. Because you have to get that out. The more we try to retain and manage everything in our own heads, the more, over time, we're going to reach our capacity. And so having resources and friends and a network of relationships with people that we can just download with is really important.

After all, you can't deliver a positive message of hope to your community if you have no hope to give. Everyone gets down sometimes, and that's when you need your personal support network more than ever to get you through it. Doctor Hunt shared similar advice with us on season two of the podcast.

Dr. Robert Hunt:  COVID was not a one week problem. It was a two year problem. And I think a lot of people experience burnout from a leadership perspective, from a teaching perspective, because they didn't kinda have their own internal warning signs of, I take a step back here. I need to take a little bit of care of myself, make that a priority, and and, you know, so I can then be the leader that they need me to be.

In his own life, Hunt credits close mentors and his wife for helping him work through problems, see things from a different perspective, and for letting him vent.

Dr. Robert Hunt: There's this concept of post traumatic growth and being able to acknowledge the things that you are now better at because you were there.

To conclude, crises are unavoidable, but they are also a unique opportunity to help your school leaders and your community when they need you most. To anticipate a crisis, create a strategic plan, run drills, and build relationships with people in communications, education, civic leaders, and so on. To build trust during a crisis, take care selecting and training an official spokesperson, communicate quickly and consistently, and be very honest with your stakeholders. And in the aftermath, give your community something to do and look after yourself because you experienced a trauma too. Finally, reflect on all that you've experienced so you can learn and grow from it. Your community will be better in the long run for it.

Follow SchoolCEO on LinkedIn or X/Twitter @school_ceo. 

Subscribe to SchoolCEO at SchoolCEO.com for research, stories, and strategies for leading your schools. And if you have a story you’d like to share, email us at editor@schoolceo.com.

Learn more about SchoolCEO and all of our resources on our About page. SchoolCEO is powered by Apptegy, the maker of the leading K-12 communications and brand management platform.