Building Higher Ed Crisis Management and Communication Muscle:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 217 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Stephanie Craig

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed Podcast 217 – Higher Education Crisis Management and Communication with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Stephanie Craig

Introduction and Guest Welcome

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. Our guest today is Stephanie Craig. President of Kith, an elite crisis preparation, response, and recovery firm that focuses on their client’s reputation. Combining her deep experience in politics, media, and business, she mitigates crises, repairs reputations, and inoculates against future crises.

Stephanie has counted former First Lady Rosalyn Carter, the mayor of the nation’s 10th largest city, and some of the most notable global brands, as well as institutes of higher education, as clients. In short, Stephanie’s an expert on crisis messaging, and she joins us today to talk about how higher ed institutions and our presidents can build their crisis muscles.

Stephanie, welcome to the program.

Stephanie Craig: Hi Drumm. Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

Drumm McNaughton: It’s my pleasure. You are an expert in crisis communications and helping build teams and work with teams to build that crisis communication muscle, something that is really important in today’s higher ed.

Stephanie Craig’s Background and Career Path

Drumm McNaughton: Before we get into that, give us a little background. When we spoke yesterday, you really impressed me, but you also surprised me saying that people like us run toward the bullets. So tell us more.

Stephanie Craig: It’s, one of the things that you can’t really suss out from my LinkedIn, but I was born and raised in Canada. I was born on the Arctic Circle to a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer, and between my dad running towards real bullets and my grandfather’s stormed Normandy, I think I come from a long line of people that run towards bullets.

Mine are just more proverbial than their real ones.

Drumm McNaughton: Very true. How did you get to the point where you can now walk in and help institutions build this crisis communications muscle.

Stephanie Craig: It’s one of those things that, as you and I talked about yesterday, I think there’s certain people that find their comfort place in the middle of chaos, and that for me really started as a young age. My mom joked that I’d been through every kind of natural disaster besides a tsunami and I really don’t want to check that one off the list.

So I come from a very natural place of figuring out how to get out of very complicated situations. That natural path for me was into politics. I thought I was going to be a journalist and then I made a smart aleck comment at a dinner and I was off and running on a very, very wonderful, very surprising career in politics.

I’m probably the only person, although we have no way to verify this, to have ever worked in the U. S. House and Senate and the Canadian House and Senate.

So I’ve really spent my entire adult life, both on, in the legislative setting, as well as the campaign setting, coming in, saving people, protecting reputations, helping people build really crisis resilient organizations. And then I woke up one day and said, let’s do this as a consultancy.

Understanding Crisis Communications in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: It’s interesting because when you’re doing this on a campaign, this is a hundred percent crisis communications, isn’t it, or pretty darn close?

Stephanie Craig: Absolutely. And I’ve sussed out in my career that there’s a crisis life cycle. So it starts with learn, moves to spotting, mitigating, managing, recovering, and then learning. For nonpolitical organizations, that’s a much longer cycle. For political organizations, both campaign and less so in the legislative setting, but very much on campaigns, you’re almost doing everything all at the same time. And so it’s very much all hands on deck all the time. And so while you’re handling this crisis, you’re always having to do the crisis mitigation by putting out the positive message at the same time. When you’re in a different type of organization, you have a lot more room to manage the timelines of those things.

Challenges Faced by Higher Education Institutions

Drumm McNaughton: Except nowadays, in higher ed, it’s getting much shorter, especially when we have crises like the October 7th, Hamas, Israel, and we have protesters on the quad, et cetera, et cetera.

Stephanie Craig: Absolutely. I think institutions of higher education find themselves in a place that they quite honestly haven’t been since the 60s. I wasn’t around in the 60s, but it seems from everything I’ve been reading, this is a very similar environment for places of higher education. And you’re dealing with differing forces. And I think higher education institutions deal with more forces than your average organizations. If you’re thinking about a company that makes widgets, you can really easily spot all of their stakeholders, and those stakeholders usually share a lot of the same interests. When it comes to higher education, they have probably double the amount of stakeholders and all of those stakeholders do not always overlap in what their priorities are.

So these institutions are finding themselves in the middle of probably young, fairly liberal students, old, if they take any kind of public money, older, more conservative legislators. Then you have alumni and benefactors and parents and employees. You have all of these folks that are interested in your outcome, and it’s a really tough place for them to be right now.

Drumm McNaughton: And then you have the congressional hearings going on. It’s in some ways analogous to bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Stephanie Craig: Absolutely Drumm, and it’s, I think, one that really demonstrated for me a couple of things that a lot of people, a lot of important people are watching, a lot of people who have their own agendas are watching and that you really walk into that congressional hearing room with several different factions having plans about how they want this to go.

The first set of university presidents that were called into Congress, I don’t think they had a real plan for how they were going to handle what was coming at them. And to me the plan is important because in that planning, you figure out who’s information you need at the table with you.

Drumm McNaughton: I would, I’ll push back a little bit on this. I suspect they did have a plan going in, but I don’t think it was a plan that they expected to be attacked as much as they were. And to me, that’s a preparation type thing where we’re in an election year, we’re in hyper partisan politics, people are going in there to make points for their base, and then sometimes they’re there to get down to the truth, but in this hyper partisan politics environment we’re in, why wouldn’t they expect to be attacked and why didn’t their communications folks prepare them for that?

Stephanie Craig: And I wouldn’t want to just lay this at the feet of the communications folks.

Drumm McNaughton: No, you’re right.

Stephanie Craig: There’s, there is not a single educational institution that doesn’t have some kind of lobbying faction, some sort of government affairs attached to them. Those folks, We absolutely recommend that government affairs is part of your core crisis team, because if you’re in a hot button industry like higher education, lots of people are watching.

 It’s not been really a hot button industry or segment really since the Vietnam War. And it’s just now coming back into it, especially as we’ve all said, COVID has just magnified so many different things. But it’s not only the U. S. Congress, we also have that in other states as well.

Stephanie Craig: The political climates have real ramifications for higher education in real, tangible ways beyond the very visible protests on the nightly news. When your state government makes policies that are very much threatening or academics are very much against, they will manifest themselves in areas that you probably didn’t expect.

We worked with a college in one of these states that has really taken aim at DEI, and I and in that they had a very great academic position open. Before the bill was passed, they had nine applications from all over the place, one in-state. By the time the bill became law, they had one remaining applicant and it was from in-state.

And then think about as we talk about, very frequently, the ripple effects of that. So you didn’t get the best professor, that affects your academics, which affects your reputation, which affects the students that come to your college, which affects the alumni that come out of your college.

So as you think about the ripple effects of decisions and how you handle them, It’s important to really go far down the line.

Drumm McNaughton: You’re absolutely right with that and when you take a look at what higher ed is, the president of a university or the chancellor of a university, is in essence, the mayor of a city. There’s lots of issues that come up, there’s lots of stakeholders, probably as many as a mayor of a city would have, there’s lots of opportunities to get your name in print and not necessarily in a good way.

Stephanie Craig: As we identified, you and I, most university presidents come up through the academic pathway and I can’t think of any, and I said, I think you said you could think of one where the academic leadership of the college, which becomes the leadership of the college, gets any sort of management training.

And so very few of our academic leaders have ever been taught how to manage facilities or figure out how to manage healthcare on a campus, or what happens when there’s food insecurity on a campus. So first of all, it needs to be training for those folks on how to deal with they’re now small city that they’re dealing with.

And it’s interesting for me because I was the communications advisor to the mayor of San Jose, California for a number of years. And as I spend more time engaged with higher education, I see a lot of the same issues falling at the feet of these, of the leadership of the college presidents. The difference is that the city had a whole bunch of people steeped in their expertise surrounding the mayor, and colleges don’t necessarily have that.

And as we talk about crisis, I very much talk about a core crisis team, and that team has to have people on it that can do one of two things or, in the best-case scenario, both, which is they have to bring vital information or the ability to make a decision. And when it comes to things like protests, food insecurity, or managing the political landscape, that expertise isn’t always sitting around the leadership table. So, when you’re thinking about how to prepare for a crisis and how to respond to a crisis, you need to take a hard look at who’s helping you make decisions.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. It’s so critical to have the right things. I remember from my time back in the Navy, we did drills we call them tabletop exercises, crisis management, aircraft accident preparation, et cetera. We go through various scenarios to make sure that we could think, the scenario frequently was initially straightforward and then it would get into some really squirrely areas.

 Okay, how are you training this? You’ve got to have your crisis management and communications at the forefront of the responses, but the preparation is critical.

Building Crisis Communication Muscles

Drumm McNaughton: So how do institutions build their crisis muscles?

How Do Institutions Build Their Crisis Muscle?

Stephanie Craig: You hit something really important there that we talk about. We don’t believe, as you clearly demonstrated, the Navy doesn’t either, that you can go through one day of training and you’re ready to go. We do truly believe that it is a muscle-building exercise, and muscle-building exercises require constant investment.

And you’re so very good at this, we really started talking about, what’s the PIP two.

When you’re thinking about crisis planning, it needs to be planned, it needs to be practiced, as you just said. It needs to be invested in, and it needs to be a priority. Those key ingredients are what makes the Navy very good at maneuvering and it’s what makes any crisis organization better at maneuvering. We’re not saying that academic institutions have to be at the crisis ready all the time, on the balls of their feet and ready to go. But there should be enough investment that they’re able to do exercises.

There needs to be leadership investment.

That is something that we talk about. If your leadership is not invested in making sure that you’re crisis-ready, you’re not going to get the support you need.

Crisis Planning: Clarity + Trust = Speed

Drumm McNaughton: A hundred percent.

The Importance of Planning and Practicing

Drumm McNaughton: Let’s go through those, that PIP two acronym (Planned, Invested in, Practiced, Priority). Starting off with PLAN the pre-crisis preparation, what are some of the things that you do with this

Stephanie Craig: The philosophy that I’ve developed over the past few years is something that we call Clarity + Trust = Speed. Speed is the single most important differentiator between good crisis response and great crisis response, but it can’t be speed for speed’s sake.

And what I mean by that is so we have clarity. It’s clarity of what you stand for. It’s clarity on mission. It’s clarity on who matters. And it’s clarity on your values. And then you add that with trust. It’s you trust your colleagues. You trust in the people, processes, and systems that, at the moment, they’re going to do what you think they’re going to do.

And that comes to the Planned. You can’t build the trust of knowing who’s going to do what, when, if you don’t know what the “WHAT” is. Everybody has to know what their job is. They have to know what the system is.

If you get a call in the middle of the night that something has happened, you can’t be fumbling around to figure out, ” who do I call right now?” That’s why you plan. That’s why you practice is because you know that if you get the call or I get the call that my first call is to Jimmy down the road because Jimmy is a key component of what this crisis response is going to look like. So that’s what we mean by trust. And then clarity on who’s to call that comes into the “Planned”, it comes into the “Practiced” as well. You really want to make sure that you don’t just plan for it. You don’t want to just build a plan, put it in a binder and put it on a shelf. You don’t want it to just sit there and gather dust. That’s why you practice it. You gotta practice it. Because a plan is no good if nobody knows what it is.

Drumm McNaughton: Exactly and you’ve got to understand who’s on your team? And beyond that who are your stakeholders? What are your communication channels? Where do they hang out, et cetera? Who’s going to be your spokesperson? Many folks go, “Oh gosh, well, that’s just automatically the president.” No, this is something that gets worked out between the board chair and the president, maybe you have both of you, maybe one of you doing it. Normally it is the president, but these are all things that have to be talked about ahead of time.

Stephanie Craig: And it’s sometimes it should be neither of them, right? Sometimes if it’s really bad news, it’s the communications person that takes the hit and that’s our job. But you have to know because you don’t want to be making that decision in the moment.

Drumm McNaughton: Exactly.

Stephanie Craig: And one of the things that we’ve seen, so a couple of minutes ago I talked about the core crisis team and who sits on the core crisis team. Some institutions absolutely want their president sitting on the core crisis team. Some don’t, some have built the core crisis team, and then in that core crisis team, they have two to three briefers that will go in and talk to the president and say, this is what your advisors advise. Here’s option one, here’s option two, and if you don’t like option one and two, we’ll go back and we’ll come up with some options. But they feel like the president sitting on the core crisis team puts too much of a thumb on the scale.

So, they deliberate, they come up with a plan and then they present it. So, knowing how your president wants to work, you need to know that before you get the call in the middle of the night.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. All these things need to be scripted out to the best you can do. So you’ve got the Planned, you’ve got the Practiced, the scenario planning, tabletop planning, the just shoot in the dark “what if?” scenarios.

We do the same sort of thing when we do risk planning is we break it down into different areas. Risk planning, the crisis communications should be a part of risk planning. It’s like one institution I worked with a while back, there was one entry in and out. It was in Southern California, north of Los Angeles, one entryway in and out, and guess what? There are forest fires, so what happens if you have a fire coming down the hill toward campus? That’s a crisis communication scenario and a risk planning scenario.

Stephanie Craig: And I would also argue that communications is the one organization that their sole job is worrying about the reputation of the institution. So the reputation of the institution, I don’t care what kind of crisis you’ve had, your reputation can always have a hit.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. And you’ve got to be able to respond back to it. I think that is where you come into the Clarity, the Trust, and the Speed.

Stephanie Craig: And it’s when we talk about, the next part of our acronym, which is “Invested in“, the investment needs to be both monetarily, from the organization. And you don’t have to have big, grandiose crisis scenarios six times a year, that isn’t necessary. Do I think you should do it one and two, absolutely. I think you should do tabletops one and two, but it’s as simple as standing at the head of your table during a staff meeting, holding up the industry newspaper and saying, what would we do if this happened to us? So that’s the investment part. It’s investing in time, it’s investing in people, and it’s investing in really doing the planning.

Drumm McNaughton: Then making it a priority. I think your idea of holding up a newspaper article to your cabinet saying, “What would we do in a situation like this?”, it gives it the priority that it needs, and it keeps things to the forefront. How are we set up to do these kind of things?

Stephanie Craig: This is not higher education related, we did a scenario with a global forestry company. And the first person on the call every single time, because it was global, so we did it via zoom, was the president of the company. And that kind of leadership, because every single person that locked, because we did a series of four and every time after the first time everybody logged in, they knew he was going to be there first.

And so he made it a priority. He said, I’m building this into my busy schedule, so you all better be here, better be on time. And he, if there was a front row on a video call, he was it, asking questions, engaged. That’s the kind of prioritization that we mean. Again, it has to be in the budget, so it’s a priority for the budget, but it also has to be a priority for the leadership to say, you need to show up for this, you need to show up ready. When we say show up, you show up excited and ready to go.

Drumm McNaughton: And as a priority, you get people trained and what’s necessary.

Stephanie Craig: Absolutely. And you take the time to invest. If you have a president or a board chair or if somebody else is your spokesperson that’s not a natural spokesperson, you invest in media training. If you have folks that it’s their first time in your cabinet, leadership training.

It may not be that the first step you need to take is the tabletop. It might be that you need to invest in some leadership training with somebody who understands how to bring people into that fold and into that mindset because I think it’s a very different mindset when you move from being, specifically, an academic, where you’re encouraged to think, right, that’s your job, your job is to think. And when you move into cabinet, your number one priority needs to be your institution and what’s best for your institution. And that’s a bit of a mind shift in your thinking that, quite honestly, takes some work.

Second Level Thinking and Stakeholder Management

Drumm McNaughton: And speaking of that shift in thinking, one of the things that really struck me, and this is typical scenario planning, this is typical things that we would do in the Navy or when I work with an institution for accreditation or whatever the problem is, is that second-level thinking. Let’s talk about that a little bit, because I think that’s something that most people don’t stop and think about it. I just normally think about it from a holistic or systems thinking perspective, or we used to call it, flying airplanes, we’d say being 30 minutes ahead of your airplane, cause you’re already thinking about where you’re going, what you’re going to do, cause when you’re moving 300, 400 knots, things happen pretty quick.

Stephanie Craig: Absolutely. Hopefully, none of these crises are moving as fast as your airplane. I was actually talking to someone about this the other day, I find myself at parties and corners with people that think like I do, which goes with, what if this happens? If that happened, what if that happens?

So we’re not a whole lot of fun at parties, but we’re very useful in there

Drumm McNaughton: It could be kind of fun, but it’s like, Oh, did you see how that blah, blah, blah. 

Stephanie Craig: Right? And so I, before, when we were talking about the political landscape and the political climate for colleges and universities, I talked about ripple effects. The ripple effects are the second-level thinking or the thinking 30 minutes ahead because so many folks, when you’re not naturally inclined to be in the middle of chaos, it becomes a moment of, I’m just trying to survive. Trying to survive really can mean, some people really feel physically upset when these things happen.

So, taking a breath and thinking, I’m about to make this decision. The second level of thinking is if I make this decision, what happens?

The Five Whys

Stephanie Craig: And then I’ve made that decision. What happens after that? And we call it “The Five Whys,” which is also really helpful. Why are you going to do that? Why are you going to do that? Why are you going to do that? And I’ve actually added, what will happen when you do that? What will happen when you do that?

Because you have to think about long-term effects. And to go back into something political, we are very nonpolitical in how we deal with things, but January 6th for organizations was a real seminal moment. And, a year after January 6th, we thought, okay, folks need to really take a hard look at themselves.

And so we sent out what we call CEO guidance to some folks. And we said, “Hey, if you made, promises 355 days ago, you better see where they’re at. You better make sure that you didn’t, if you said you were never donating to somebody that supported that, you better make sure you did it.” That’s the sort of second level thinking that you need to have.

So these companies, if someone said, “okay, I’m never donating to a politician that supports that again”. Okay. Did you? And so thinking through, okay, I’m having this knee jerk reaction, what is it going to cost me a year down the road? Cause inevitably somebody comes and checks.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Absolutely. And you know there’s another piece with that is, and I liken it back to the scenario playing the tabletop if you’ve got a good person running your tabletops, your scenario planning and somebody makes a decision, the training aspect of that is, “Okay we’re doing that. So how does this affect this particular stakeholder, that stakeholder group or whatever?”

So you can start to look at it and it’s okay, this particular statement said this way. Yeah, it satisfies the moment, but as you said, a year down the line, you’re going to have somebody checking on it or even, five minutes after its said, if it’s particularly interesting. And, the whole thing around October 7th, Hamas, Israel, there were so many people make statements about let’s just clear all these students off the quad, et cetera. They’re all outside. We’re going to expel them from school, et cetera. A lot of these statements are coming back to bite people in the proverbial you know what?

Stephanie Craig: And also that you have to be prepared for the follow up question.

And for some reason, so many people weren’t. Like, how are you going to expel them? What happens? Are they invited back next year? Are these are the types of things that you really need to dig deep into before you make a statement publicly, and before you even really make a decision. And one thing that you just said about stakeholders really struck me. We work in Florida a lot, and they have hurricanes.

So, we work with some very different, like they’re institutions, but they have different student bodies. And the way that they approach communicating with their various stakeholders; one, college and a lot of their student body, they work, they commute, they do all of these things. Another one had people in dorms, so they’re a much younger demographic.

So, one prioritized, email’s not going to work, so we need to be text messaging and all over social media, and we need to do it repeatedly.

Other people, phone calls. Literal phone calls. Do not come to campus today, we are closed because of a hurricane.

Understanding your stakeholders is a key piece of building that second level thinking. Because if you don’t know who your most important people are, you are not going to be able to do first, second, third, fourth level thinking with them because you don’t know them. You don’t know how they’re going to react.

The Marriage of Risk Management and Crisis Communication

Drumm McNaughton: The same thing could be said for COVID, which is more from a risk planning perspective than crisis communication, but there was still crisis communications that came into it.

Stephanie Craig: And I think that that’s something that people don’t really understand is how intimately risk management and crisis communications are married. Because you do not just involve communications when it’s time to send out a press release. You do not involve risk management just when your house is on fire.

Drumm McNaughton: There’s got to be the planning ahead of it.

Stephanie Craig: And the planning together. Silos are a crisis’s best friend because the silos just keep letting the crisis roll on and on and on because no one’s talking to each other.

Drumm McNaughton: Exactly.

Opportunities in Crisis

Drumm McNaughton: And then there’s the other piece of this is there’s always opportunities in crisis to be able to take lemons, and I’m sorry, I’m going to say it, take lemons and make lemonade out of it. COVID was a good example of that. It forced people to go for online education. It got many faculty members perspectives changed on online education. It gave institutions a new opportunity. A crisis is the same type of thing if it’s thought through properly and you can pull the right levers when you need to.

Stephanie Craig: And that to me, you mentioned wildfires earlier. Like I said, at the beginning, I grew up in Northern Canada, where there were trees, they like to be on fire, but after the fire, there’s new growth. And when you have a crisis as an institution, that growth just comes and it reveals talents and creates cohesion and it provokes thought and it encourages planning. I love what you say about that Drumm, that there’s opportunity in crisis.

Drumm McNaughton: It reminds me of a saying that we have when we’re doing strategic planning and we’re doing implementation planning, all of those type of things, is “change is inevitable growth is optional”.

Stephanie Craig: Very good point.

Drumm McNaughton: So we are always going to get change when there’s a crisis

Stephanie Craig: Yeah, my dad used to say, “change is as good as a rest”.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that but there’s some wisdom there.

Stephanie Craig: It’s true.

Drumm McNaughton: So, Stephanie this has been a wonderful conversation. Three takeaways for presidents and boards.

Key Takeaway For Presidents and Boards

Stephanie Craig: I don’t think I have three. I have one “Do it.” Crisis will happen. Absolutely invest, prioritize, plan and prepare for crisis. It is time. If there has been no more warning signs for you to invest in proper crisis planning, this Spring was it. Invest, invest, invest.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you. What’s next for you?

Stephanie Craig: I, we’re just really looking forward to working with some new clients. I’m highly excited about the potential in higher education. I love a good college campus, and so I always take every opportunity I can to get on one. We’re building some neat technology tools, and that’s something that we think about, which is, we want people to have access to the crisis planning skills, to the crisis planning apparatus, and it’s not always in the budget for folks. So that’s how we’re looking at it is how to make some of what we do more cost effective for people.

Drumm McNaughton: That sounds great. Stephanie, again, thank you so much. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to the next time.

Stephanie Craig: Me too Drumm. Thank you so much for having me.

Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure. Take care.

Conclusion and Next Episode Preview

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to our guest, Stephanie Craig, President of Kith. And for her sharing her insights with us on how we can all build our crisis muscles. Stephanie, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and I look forward to the next time we get a chance to talk.

Join us for our next episode when we welcome Nuno Fernandez, President of American Public University System, to the program. APUS is the top provider of education to the military, and that hasn’t happened by chance. It’s the product of great positioning and branding. Nuno comes from a B2B marketing background, having been with global Fortune 50 companies where your brand is everything.

And he’ll join us to talk about positioning and branding, two critical things that only the top higher ed institutions understand. And he’ll tell us how your brand can thrive and survive through the demographic cliff if you can position and brand your institution properly.

Thanks again for listening. See you next episode.