Transcript
Michele Crymes: Welcome to the podcast, everyone. My name is Michele Crymes. I am a program director with CIPE’s Anti-Corruption and Governance Team. I am here today with Ellen Barry, and we are going to have a very interesting conversation about crises and about what happens inside an organization when there is pressure and communication starts to break down. This conversation is part of a series where we have been talking about lessons that democracy organizations can take from the private sector, and vice versa. I am really glad to have you. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ellen.
Ellen Barry: Great to be here. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Michele Crymes: Just to give our audience and listeners a sense of who you are, I am going to read a little bit from your bio so that we know who we are talking with. Ellen Barry has provided strategic advice to C-suite members and boards of directors navigating crises ranging from cyberattacks to national disasters to financial malfeasance. Working both as in-house counsel for Fortune 20 companies and with global consultancies, she has provided high-level crisis counsel, CEO advisory, financial and corporate messaging, employee communication, and community, investor and government relations. Her work has included outreach to NGOs, nonprofit management and communication leadership. If there was anyone who could really help us bring some of these lessons to bear from the private sector, it is you. You have this wonderful background where you have had your foot in both worlds and are able to translate some of these issues for everyone.
Michele Crymes: I am going to go ahead and get us started. I want to talk a little bit about operating in increasingly complex environments. Organizations today face a convergence of challenges ranging from geopolitical uncertainty to regulatory fragmentation to rapidly evolving information environments. Over the course of your career, what has changed most as crises emerge and unfold? And where do you see organizations consistently caught off guard?
Ellen Barry: Well, thanks for letting me share some of my experience from the corporate world. I have done a little bit with nonprofits, so hopefully I can be helpful with that nexus. I would say the single biggest change, and everybody says this, is social media. It is the quickness with which information is relayed. As social media has evolved, we are now looking at AI and the corresponding information, disinformation and misinformation. What is real? What elements am I using when I am making a decision in a very rapidly changing environment?
Ellen Barry: To the second question you asked, about where people get caught off guard, I would say there are two things. One is that they are not prepared. There is an opportunity today because it is not if a crisis occurs, it is when. Something unexpected is going to happen as an organization, as a governmental body, as a leadership team. You have an opportunity to get prepared.
Ellen Barry: The other thing that probably trips people up the most, and where I do think corporations often get it right, is having someone who says, ‘The buck stops here. I am going to be the one who makes the decision. I am going to be the person who speaks publicly.’ They may not be the same people, but you have to have those points of contact, roles and responsibilities very clearly defined.
Michele Crymes: That is really good insight in terms of how decisions are made. The idea that there is a decision, that we are going to accept responsibility, or however it might form. One of the things I thought of as you were speaking is this idea of being ready, because it is not a matter of if but when. We have talked a lot in this series about the fact that it takes a community of private-sector actors, perhaps democracy actors, coming together and building trust. Trust is often cited as one of an organization’s valuable assets. Yet it can take years to build that trust between the private sector, democracy organizations and nonprofit organizations.
Michele Crymes: I would like to talk with you about what, from your perspective, that trust and the ability to collaborate during a crisis looks like. What distinguishes organizations that are really able to build and leverage that trust from those that are not?
Ellen Barry: The key thing, again, as far as being prepared, is that you have to build those relationships today. You are not going to be able to do it in the middle of a crisis. People say, ‘I do not really need to talk to the press.’ Well, yes, you do. Because if you do not have a relationship with a reporter, you do not have a relationship with people who understand your business. In the same way, if you do not have a relationship with your governmental regulators, or with the NGO that may not actually be that kind to your industry, when a crisis happens, you are going to be in a lot of trouble.
Ellen Barry: I have worked a lot with oil and gas companies, which a lot of NGOs do not like. Oil and gas companies go up and down in their popularity with governmental bodies. One of the things I saw in a very serious crisis was that there was a fellow whose job was to be the liaison to nonprofits that dealt with the environment, land management and the community. When there was this giant crisis, he suddenly became the person everyone needed because he had those relationships. Once a settlement was made after the situation, he was integral to deciding with those NGOs where the settlement money would actually be useful and where it should go.
Ellen Barry: It was funny because I was in a boardroom with 45 guys, and all of a sudden all these engineers and operations guys were saying, ‘Let’s talk to the guy who actually has a degree in environmental studies.’ He rose to the occasion and was extremely helpful. I thought that was a great example of making those connections early.
Ellen Barry: A lot of people do a SWOT analysis of the people who do not like them. A corporation will do a SWOT analysis of NGOs that are coming after them, so to speak. But what they should be doing is saying, ‘OK, what are these people’s concerns? How can we mitigate them early on?’ In the same way, you need to have a relationship with the mayor, the governor and the regulators. The first time you meet someone in Washington, D.C., as a corporate leader, you do not want to be sitting on the other side of a green felt table. That is not where you want to make your introduction as an organization. I am not necessarily advertising for lobbyists, but I am saying you need to understand who these people are and have relationships with them.
Ellen Barry: A lot of times corporations do community outreach, and that is an opportunity for them to say, ‘Hey, we all live here. We all care about our kids. We all care about our community.’ You build relationships that way.
Michele Crymes: This is great because you are making the exact same point that we started with in this podcast series, which is that we need to have those relationships. They need to exist before the crisis becomes a crisis. When you start building that trust long beforehand, you never know when these relationships will become pivotal and useful.
Michele Crymes: On our end at CIPE, we focus on working with associations, bringing together associations and strengthening them so that they are critical and well-placed partners. There are lots of stakeholders we can think about as part of creating these relationships. I wanted to ask you a question around stakeholder expectations. As you already mentioned in your example, there are NGOs and the idea of doing a SWOT analysis for the folks who do not like us. There may be different expectations, and communities are demanding things from private-sector actors and nonprofit organizations. I would be really curious to hear, from your perspective, how leaders make decisions as they are working through a crisis and facing all of these conflicting stakeholder expectations.
Ellen Barry: I think that is a great question, and I think it is the biggest challenge a leader has in the middle of a crisis. I worked with a large multinational last year. They had a very serious crisis, and there was a lot of information coming in from a lot of different arenas and channels. What was most interesting to me was that there were two channels that we, as their crisis adviser, gave a little bit more credence to.
Ellen Barry: Surprisingly, one of them was the local newspaper. This happened in a small town, and the local newspaper had a reporter who had relationships with people who worked there, with the local government, and had historical knowledge of the industry and the business. The local paper ended up being extremely important in educating us as crisis advisers and educating the leaders around what the community was worried about.
Ellen Barry: The other place was a social channel. A Reddit channel emerged very quickly, and all of a sudden there were local people saying, ‘Hey, what about this? What about this? What about this?’ We used that to go back to the CEO and say, ‘You have to address this.’ You can address it by saying, ‘Here is what we do know. Here is what we do not know.’ To my mind, that is the thing leaders do not do enough. They do not admit that they do not know something.
Ellen Barry: You do not become a CEO, a sitting politician or the head of an NGO without having some ego and some confidence in your decision-making. So it is almost anathema to say, ‘I do not know.’ But you gain a lot of credibility, particularly with employees, residents and third parties who do not know anything about you, when you say, ‘You know what? Right now we do not know, but we are going to find out, and when we do, we will share with you what we can.’
Michele Crymes: I think this is really interesting, bringing in the local newspaper as a source for education, and also connecting leadership, decision-making and communication. You start to see this feedback loop, this way of communicating that allows for real-time updates and whatever level of transparency is appropriate and allowable. That begins to build trust during a crisis between private-sector actors, NGOs, communities where customers might live and all sorts of groups.
Michele Crymes: Something I have noticed in my work at CIPE is that sometimes expectations conflict. What NGOs might be looking for and what the private sector needs can be different. In your experience, when nonprofits, NGOs and communities are suddenly working together through a crisis, how do they work through these conflicting expectations and sometimes conflicting needs?
Ellen Barry: Sometimes they do not work that well. Sometimes NPOs, corporations and governmental entities do not work that well together because there is no pre-existing relationship. I am going to reiterate this: Building those relationships early and often makes a big difference.
Ellen Barry: When they do not work well, that is where you really see a crisis take on a life of its own. If I, as an NGO, think my point of view is being ignored or dismissed, I will take that opportunity to independently go on social media or go to the traditional press and say, ‘These guys do not know what they are doing. They are not listening to us. They do not care about us, and they do not care about you.’ Then they build allies against the corporation or the leadership. There is no good to come from that. I would say ignoring NGOs is at your peril.
Ellen Barry: At the same time, going back to oil and gas, trying to convince the board of an oil and gas company that they should pay attention to activist NGOs is not easy. But you have to say, ‘Look, you at least have to recognize that they exist. They have a point of view, and there is something they are trying to do. They are not always going to be at odds with you.’ But you are right. It is not great in the middle of a crisis, because people whom you have annoyed or dismissed are going to use that opportunity to advance their own agenda, and it may not be to your advantage.
Michele Crymes: That is why building these relationships is so critical and important. Something connected to that is that corporations, multinationals and businesses are now expected to take positions on things that happen. It may be beyond their corporations. It may be about governance, ethics or societal challenges. Related to what you are saying, leaders are making decisions about when to collaborate and when not to collaborate, when to speak and when not to speak. What are the risks in either direction if you make the wrong decision not to speak, or if you speak at the wrong time? I would be curious for us to share, in particular with NGOs, what the risks are so that we can get a sense of what it means when we are collaborating between the private sector and organizations that are looking to support democracy and transparency.
Ellen Barry: I think that is a great question. Since we are taping this during the World Cup, I would say this often turns into an own goal. Corporations would do well to talk to an NGO and say, ‘I know you have a point of view that you would like me, as a leader or CEO, to adopt. You would like me to get out there in front of it. Let me tell you a little bit about my other stakeholders. I have customers. Some of my customers are governmental entities. I may or may not have shareholders. I have employees who run across a political spectrum. So I may not be able to be quite as outspoken as you would like me to be, but let me tell you some of the things I am dealing with, and I would love to know how you think I should respond.’
Ellen Barry: It is never as black and white as people think. We have seen that in the last few years. People have come out and it has backfired. One of the things that is interesting is that I have done a lot of advising of boards, particularly around issues related to DEI. We start those conversations by saying, ‘How do you really feel about this? How important is taking a stand on an issue like this to you personally and to your business? And how important is it if you do not take a stand?’
Ellen Barry: It gets back to being true to your values and your mission as an organization. That is where NGOs and corporations need to come together in private-public partnerships and say, ‘What do we agree on? Where can we find common ground?’ From there we can say, ‘OK, is this worth it for us?’ There are people and leaders who take a stand and say, ‘This is where I am. This is what I am doing.’
Ellen Barry: You can look at someone like Mark Cuban, who is a great example. Recently, with Cost Plus Drugs, he really believes in trying to make prescription medicines much more affordable for Americans and has found some common ground with the current administration. He is able to say, ‘The goal is the most important thing. Let’s not let everything be affected by something over here that I may not agree with.’
Michele Crymes: That is often the approach that CIPE or the ACG team takes when we are collaborating with different partners. There may be lots of areas where there is no agreement. But, for example, in things like forced labor, we talk about what we can build on. Over time, and it does take time, CIPE has been able to bring together factories, union workers and different levels of industry because we have taken the time over the course of our projects to build trust.
Michele Crymes: What we are seeing right now is so much fragmentation and all these geopolitical realities that are changing from one day to the next. I would be curious if you could share how corporations and multinationals are working across these different environments, how leaders make decisions and how they communicate during a crisis.
Ellen Barry: The leaders who do the best job during a crisis are the ones who take a stand and say, ‘OK, here is what we are going to say, and here is how we are going to communicate, and how often we are going to communicate.’ One of the things that gets people in trouble, and I am talking my own book here, is that you cannot listen to every single adviser. Do not bring in five different people. Do not ask everybody on the board. I know the board might be mad at this, but you do not have time.
Ellen Barry: You do not have time to navigate and make sure everybody is happy. What you need to do is ask: What are the things that got you there? What are the values that made you the leader you are? What are the things that you, as an organization, care about? And how do you lean into those in the middle of a crisis?
Ellen Barry: It is an unpopular word with some people, but the more empathetic a leader is, the more people are going to react positively. This may not go directly to the question you asked, but I want to cite something recent that I had nothing to do with. There was a tragedy involving Air Canada pilots and two men who were killed. They basically gave their lives to save everybody else on the plane. The CEO of Air Canada came out with his statement only in English. These were Quebecois pilots, and he lost his job. A few days ago, as we are taping this, Air Canada appointed a new CEO who is multilingual.
Ellen Barry: It is a simple thing, but Canada is a bilingual country. Air Canada is a bilingual organization. These men who lost their lives were, I think, first-language French-speaking Quebecois. It was important that the empathy and understanding of who they were and what they did for the company and for all the people on the plane be acknowledged. I think it is a great example. Unfortunately, the previous CEO had apparently made a big deal of saying, ‘I do not have to learn French.’ Arrogance is not that appealing, and it is never appealing in the middle of a crisis.
Michele Crymes: This is a really great example. I was planning to ask you about what distinguishes the leaders who can navigate crises well versus those who cannot. But I think you have given us a great example of what it looks like, and what kind of agility and thinking private-sector leaders need in order to navigate all sorts of things we are seeing right now, from geopolitical turbulence to things that happen locally within a community.
Michele Crymes: This has been a really great conversation, and I want to take the time to wrap us up. I always like to ask a question that helps us think forward five to 10 years. What trends do you believe will have the greatest impact on how organizations build resilience and maintain the stakeholder trust we have been talking about?
Ellen Barry: I hate to sound like a Luddite, but it is about keeping your humanity in the face of so much technological pressure and change. The human element, and communication one on one and one to many, will continue to be really important. The good thing about AI and the information people get is that, in the middle of a crisis, you will be able to access historical records that say, ‘Here is what happened the last seven times something like this happened.’ In the old days, that might take two hours or six hours. Now it takes 83 seconds.
Ellen Barry: As a leader, you will have access to that, and you will say, ‘Wait a minute. Here is someone who did this right. Here is what he or she looked at.’ Their humanity will be tested more, and their ability to analyze and synthesize information, and then turn it into human compassion, human empathy and human decision-making, will be paramount.
Ellen Barry: I was very lucky to work with a man in the middle of an awful crisis once. We spent months and months together. He was the CEO, and we had big meetings every day trying to navigate the crisis. The lesson I learned from him was that, at the beginning of every meeting, he said, ‘How are the people?’
Ellen Barry: He was talking about the families of the people who had died in the incident, the families and individuals who had been injured, and the rest of the organization. He wanted to know every day: How are the people? Not, ‘How is the stock doing?’ Not the nature of what was going on operationally. He started with the people. To me, that is what distinguishes an exceptional leader. The level and amount of information leaders will have to synthesize over the next five to 10 years is staggering. But they had better learn how to do it and keep their humanity.
Michele Crymes: I think that is a really great lesson for our colleagues who may be listening and for private-sector actors who may be listening: the important integration between information technology and the basic human skills we are all born with. This has been a really interesting conversation. It adds another layer to the conversation we are having about these dynamic feedback loops and how we bring the private sector, NGOs and democracy workers together to think of new solutions in a new environment.
Michele Crymes: I am so grateful that you were able to be part of a previous CIPE event and also part of this podcast. This has been really great, and I hope all of our listeners are taking away some of the great lessons and gems that you shared with us today. Thanks so much, Ellen.
Ellen Barry: Thank you. Great talking to you. I could talk to you about this for hours.
Michele Crymes: We may take you up on that. Take care.
Ellen Barry: Be well.
