Have you ever wondered how top leaders manage crises?
In this next episode in the crisis leadership series, discover actionable strategies from our conversation with Rick Hoaglund, the seasoned director of crisis management services for Empathia. We discuss the fundamental role of company culture in navigating emergencies, from making pivotal financial decisions to fostering a resilient mindset.
Building trust and fostering cultural preparedness are cornerstones of effective crisis management. Imagine orchestrating a high-stakes situation like a conductor leads a high school band. We break down how crisis managers, much like conductors, need to ensure synchronization and clear communication within their teams, and discuss the strategic planning and calm demeanor required to steer an organization through turbulent times.
Rick Hoaglund is the director of crisis management services at Empathia. He has more than 30 years experience and a proven track record of cost savings and increased employee safety through his facilitation of safety and compliance initiatives. Rick has responded to several emergency and mass casualty incidents. Additionally, he holds a Masters in Aviation Science/Safety and a FEMA Professional Certification.
Go to https://betterhelp.com/resilience or click Notes on Resilience during sign up for 10% off your first month of therapy with my sponsor BetterHelp.
Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams + position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in fostering resilience and trauma sensitivity.
Have you ever wondered how top leaders manage crises?
In this next episode in the crisis leadership series, discover actionable strategies from our conversation with Rick Hoaglund, the seasoned director of crisis management services for Empathia. We discuss the fundamental role of company culture in navigating emergencies, from making pivotal financial decisions to fostering a resilient mindset.
Building trust and fostering cultural preparedness are cornerstones of effective crisis management. Imagine orchestrating a high-stakes situation like a conductor leads a high school band. We break down how crisis managers, much like conductors, need to ensure synchronization and clear communication within their teams, and discuss the strategic planning and calm demeanor required to steer an organization through turbulent times.
Rick Hoaglund is the director of crisis management services at Empathia. He has more than 30 years experience and a proven track record of cost savings and increased employee safety through his facilitation of safety and compliance initiatives. Rick has responded to several emergency and mass casualty incidents. Additionally, he holds a Masters in Aviation Science/Safety and a FEMA Professional Certification.
Go to https://betterhelp.com/resilience or click Notes on Resilience during sign up for 10% off your first month of therapy with my sponsor BetterHelp.
Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams + position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in fostering resilience and trauma sensitivity.
And it's something that's kind of often overlooked, and I'm talking about culture in more than one way. So culture of your company, determining way ahead of time if we have an event, what kind of expenses will we cover, what will we reimburse people for, and this goes beyond what insurance will cover. So, for instance, if someone were injured, if someone were killed on our property, caused us to activate, would we pay for the funeral? Would we pay for hospital expenses? Beyond what insurance will cover? What will we do? And that does kind of set the tone for your culture.
Manya Chylinski:
Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinski, and today we have another episode in our series on crisis leadership resilience in high stakes environments and today we're talking about tools for teams in a crisis, and I chatted with Rick Hoaglund, who's the director of crisis management services for Empathia and he has over 30 years of safety and crisis management experience. We talked about the need to be flexible and the need to have a plan and the importance of communication in the crisis itself and in dealing with the team. I think you're going to find this really interesting, Rick. Thank you for making time to talk with me today. I'm very excited to have you on the podcast.
Rick Hoaglund:
Thanks, I'm excited to be here. This is the first time I've been a guest on a podcast. I have a podcast of my own, but I have never been a guest before.
Manya Chylinski:
Never. Oh, I'm so excited to be the first. Well, let's kick it off with my question that I start out with, which is if you could have dinner with any historical figure, who would?
Rick Hoaglund:
it be and why. I'll be honest, this is a good question and I've been thinking about it. I created a list and I went with kind of an obscure person, just so you know, because I really thought about it. I took it personally and I even went as far as obscure person, just so you know, because I really thought about it. I took it personally and I even went as far as to say, can I even and this isn't my choice, but I even thought, can I interview myself after my death? I don't know, it's kind of weird, but I did go there. I looked at all kinds of historical famous people and I actually came up with the person that I think I would like to have dinner with is a guy named Jonathan Larson. Okay, I don't know if you've ever heard of him. He's a playwright and he wrote the play Rent.
Manya Chylinski:
Oh yeah.
Rick Hoaglund:
Yeah, and Jonathan was. From all accounts, I didn't know him. He's not someone that I knew, but I've known about him. He was a gentleman that never lived to see the success of his work and he worked in a diner most of his life. He also wrote some other plays and musicals, but nothing that went on to Broadway. And when Rent went on to Broadway, that was huge for him Of course it would be huge for anybody and he had a lot of sort of new actors and actresses that were going to be in the play and they have all become very famous now from starting in this musical named Rent.
Rick Hoaglund:
And the reason I chose it is he actually died two nights before the play opened, so he never got to see the play. His parents flew in for the opening and found out he had died and they suggested that the play go ahead. It should open and the play did and it ended up being the 11th longest running play on Broadway. It's huge. And it had a revival two years after it closed, which nobody does. That, I mean, it's kind of amazing.
Manya Chylinski:
That's a great selection. I wish I could make these things happen, because I would want to either join you or hear the results of your conversation.
Rick Hoaglund:
Yeah, because I would want to either join you or hear the results of your conversation. Yeah, he had no idea that it would be successful, and not only that. His parents established a place for artists to get grants. So in his name, today, artists can apply for these grants, and it's just kind of an amazing story that he has no idea that this went on. I guess it's a little like Van Gogh he died before he was famous as well. But I just think the contemporary nature of Jonathan Larson is really interesting to me too. Thank you.
Manya Chylinski:
I appreciate the thought that you put into that. So we are here today talking about crisis leadership and we wanted to talk about it generally but also look at tools for teams who are dealing with a crisis and balancing the need to be ready and be rehearsed, but be flexible in the moment. And just to get us started, I would say how do you define crisis leadership?
Rick Hoaglund:
I think I'll give an analogy might be the easiest way. A crisis, an effective crisis leader Notice, I use the word effective because there are some out there that are going to tell you that this isn't the way I do it and it's different for me, and then I always come back and go. But is your style effective? And in my perfect world of crisis management, if I had to choose a leader, this is kind of what I would do. They're a conductor. They're just like a conductor of a symphony.
Rick Hoaglund:
You start with a group. That sounds terrible. Think about your high school band. The first time you get a piece of music, it's horrible. I can't imagine being the conductor of a high school band.
Rick Hoaglund:
The first time they get their music, by the end everyone's playing and I guess this is meant to be exactly as I'm saying off the same sheet of music, Everyone is playing exactly alike. They're ready to go, they're ready to perform it in front of others, and that's kind of what an effective crisis manager does. They're making sure that everything's coordinated, that there's synchronization between all the people. They're making decisions how softly, how loud, what tempo things go at. They're also making sure that the message is clear that they're trying to as a conductor.
Rick Hoaglund:
It's about emotion and it's about making the audience feel what you feel, and crisis management is a little bit that way too. I mean, you're really making the communication so that the team works as an effective unit. The crisis so that the team works as an effective unit. The crisis, the leader of a crisis, is definitely a team lead Right, Making sure all the details are there but, at the same time, super calm under pressure. Yes, that's huge, and I've seen I guess I should say I've seen conductors that don't look like they're very calm, but the reality is a crisis leader a good crisis leader is a super communicator and they're communicating in a calm way.
Manya Chylinski:
Now, I like that analogy and it strikes me that where the analogy kind of goes off track is that, as a conductor, you are leading the orchestra, the team and you're practicing and the end result is you have the school concert. Crisis leaders could do all of this work and not have to ever do it in real life Exactly, and I'm even saying that.
Rick Hoaglund:
You know the school concert part of my analogy it's never going to go as well as a school concert goes.
Manya Chylinski:
Yes.
Rick Hoaglund:
Let's just face it it's a crisis, so you're trying, for that might be like the ultimate goal, like the whole time you're prepping for it, the whole time you're getting your team ready, the whole time you're developing tools and you're doing all your homework before this happens.
Rick Hoaglund:
You may never have the big concert at the end. You may always strive for it, though I think it needs to be there that you're striving for it. But in the back of your mind, you have to know that there's going to be a surprise. In every single crisis event, there's some surprise, there's some twist. It's almost like a movie that suddenly has a big twist at the end. There always is Sometimes they're not huge twists, but it never goes exactly as it's planned, and so you need a crisis manager or a crisis director that can handle those shifts and handle those changes and be able to communicate it, like I said, in a calm way and in a clear way, because communication is key to all this and making sure that your team isn't getting caught up in the fact that things are changing. You've got to be flexible.
Manya Chylinski:
Yes. Well, how do you, as a leader and as a team member, how do you plan for that flexibility and the unknown element of what's going to happen when there's a crisis, since you can't predict what is going to happen that you need to?
Rick Hoaglund:
deal with Some of it is. There's probably two different ways that I would say, and they work in conjunction with each other, and one of them is when you're writing your plans, they should be directive to the point where you're able to have a standard way of doing a process, but they still need to be flexible, and this would mean like doing it used to be and I've been doing this for a long time, forever since dirt was invented. Basically, I started it and it used to be. We had a plan for fires and we had a plan for earthquakes, and we had a plan for this and a plan for that. Now, which I agree with this, it's more of an all hazards approach, okay, so that you have similar steps, similar processes and similar thoughts around how to do all of these events. And then you say, but in a fire, we do this, but in a hurricane we do this, like you might. Just, it's almost like a decision tree that tells you you know, you goes, the beginning of it is all the same. And then it kind of says okay, here's an exception, here's an exception, here's an exception, okay. And I think that makes it flexible.
Rick Hoaglund:
And the other piece that I think if I were preparing a team or if I were preparing myself for being flexible during a crisis.
Rick Hoaglund:
It's drills and you're going to hear me say that drills and exercises and practicing this thing, because in making sure that you're not just walking through the steps in your practices, that you're truly trying to poke holes in it and trying to initiate your group to think that there's been a change, right, and those are generally through, like you could have, like we call them injects, but they're just like pieces of information that suddenly it changes everything.
Rick Hoaglund:
I just did a drill where everyone thought it was about a hurricane, but in reality the drill was about a hack to their systems. Oh, wow, okay, and it threw them like crazy. We used the hurricane as a way the hackers got into the system, so the whole group was ready for a hurricane scenario. It wasn't a hurricane at all, it was a hack into their system and they had to totally change, including the players, because the I'll be honest with you the IT folks were kind of sitting back whittling their thumbs, saying, oh, I'm glad I'm not really very involved in this drill and suddenly they were the reason that we were having it.
Manya Chylinski:
Now, with your experience in crisis management, I imagine you've experienced that sort of shift in real life, in a real crisis, how do you help as a leader? How do you help the team make that shift and, I guess, also kind of deal with the difficult emotions that must come with that?
Rick Hoaglund:
I think it comes down to a couple of things. One is communication. As long as you're transparent with your team, so the team itself has to be resilient I'll use that word in the broadest sense possible. They have to be comfortable with each other, feeling like they can talk and have open communication among the group, and then, as a leader, you just have to explain things are changing. Here's the new way, and there are people and I'll be honest with you, I'm one of these people that kind of accept change pretty easily.
Rick Hoaglund:
But there are people and any crisis leader in any team needs to know there are people that that is more difficult, yes, and you need everybody on this team, you need all these kind of personalities.
Rick Hoaglund:
I think it's really important to have that. So being able to say this is the change, here are the reasons and here's where we're going to go, so giving a path forward, I believe, is incredibly important in the communication. The other would be ensuring that your team is comfortable with each other, and being able to this is getting back to the resiliency again being able to voice when they don't think it's a good idea, because maybe they have valid concerns that need to be brought forward to the group so that it can be discussed. Because now, because now, suddenly, you are changing courses and I think I'm being honest, I think this comes back to communication, communication, communication. It's being able to answer those why we're doing this, how we're doing it, and even things like how long we believe, and reassuring the group that this is the direction forward, for now there could be another change. In fact, there always is. I'm just telling you, it's more than once, more than once.
Manya Chylinski:
When I hear you talking about the importance of communication, the underlying thing that I'm thinking about is the importance of trust that you trust what your team is saying. You trust what the leaders are telling you about what's happening.
Rick Hoaglund:
I think it's from a leadership perspective. It's definitely transparency. Here's what we're doing, here's why we're doing it and in some ways, it's the team needs to be coherent with each other, like they have to be practiced. They should, if possible, they should know each other. Some of this is not going to be possible. Perfect world, they would have practiced every day or they work together every day. That's not going to happen, but at the very least they should know that this person is a specialist in this. This is why they're here. I'm familiar with them. Hopefully we practiced something like this before. It'll never be exactly the same and that's where that trust comes from. And the idea that if you don't trust something, you can question it, I think is really big.
Manya Chylinski:
Well, you just said something interesting that made me realize you talked about the hurricane slash, actually a hack exercise, and that the IT people were kind of sitting back thinking that they necessarily needed for this. We're talking about a team in an organization, a company, a workplace. There are some people on the team I'm guessing a small number whose job is specifically crisis management and emergencies, and the rest of the team are people whose jobs are completely different. It's the IT team. It's somebody else in a different department that you've pulled together. So how do you manage that kind of functional team?
Rick Hoaglund:
You need that diversity in your team. Where people have diverse Well, they have to be diverse like in all ways, and by diversity on this team, what you're referring to is like kind of like diversity of skill set and diversity of their job set, and it's incredibly important to have that, because an event doesn't pick just HR, because an event doesn't pick just HR. An event doesn't pick just crisis management folks. We're there to ensure that the groups are working together and working well. I think understanding who makes up that team really helps. It helps the decision makers. It also helps the team itself to be coherent. They need to be a part of the planning.
Rick Hoaglund:
When the plan is being put together I should have prefaced this with you need a plan before you can even activate. But when that plan is being put together, you need people from all these different pieces of an organization to own their little piece of it. So, finding those people that are your champions I will say in each division whether that's the person that actually represents you at the table. Hopefully it is. If not, at least that champion can help write the documents, ensuring that it fits well with the rest of the plan, making sure and develop sort of the step-by-step nature of what each of those positions are doing.
Rick Hoaglund:
It's important that the specialists own that because emergency response professional you don't know all those steps. You might know human resources needs to be involved if you have this thing going on. So if you have a hurricane coming in and you need to evacuate your people, you'll need HR to help you. You'll need the human resources people, but you don't know those steps. What are those steps of getting somebody into a hotel 150 miles away? That might be an HR function, that might be another division function, but they need to work together in developing the plan.
Manya Chylinski:
So, as a crisis management professional, part of your skill set has to be working with this diverse set of team members and trusting their expertise.
Rick Hoaglund:
Exactly. I don't think the crisis manager needs to know every single step. Yeah, For instance, you know, if you are a company that has a badge in, badge out system, that crisis manager does not need how to go to step-by-step, how to go well, a report of everyone that badged into that building, everyone that badged. They don't need to know that, they just need to know hey, there's this process we have where we badge in and we badge out. Oh, that would be useful if we had to do an evacuation. That would be useful if we had a fire. That would be useful in the following events. So we need to include that in our plan somewhere.
Manya Chylinski:
Okay, so we've talked about the importance of communication with trust and transparency. What are some of the other tools for teams that someone needs to be thinking about if they're building out their crisis plan.
Rick Hoaglund:
I think one of them is cultural component, and it's something that's kind of often overlooked, and I'm talking about culture in more than one way. So culture of your company, determining way ahead of time if we have an event, what kind of expenses will we cover, what will we reimburse people for, and this goes beyond what insurance will cover. So, for instance, if someone were injured, if someone were killed on our property and it caused us to activate, would we pay for the funeral, would we pay for hospital expenses? Beyond what insurance would cover? What will we do? And that does kind of set the tone for your communications. That would be internal and external communication. So internally meaning to your employees, externally, meaning to all of your customers, potentially on a website or social media, all of that piece. So how do you fit your company culture in that?
Rick Hoaglund:
Secondly, I want to talk about culture of where the event occurs. So that would be like a community culture or, if it's in a foreign country, what does the foreign country look like? And you should be prepared to accept the culture of where the event occurs for part of your response. So if, for instance, your event happened and it happened in a place like, let's just say, a First Nations land, so you may have different rules, different customs, you may not. They may be exactly the same, but they might be different. So we want to make sure that we are respecting the local culture, the local way of doing things and that's something that people often forget Others is to remember your community resources. So incorporating things and people and how to use that when you've had this crisis event Right, and part of that plan that people forget.
Rick Hoaglund:
It's not just about taking people in and saying you have a skill set we can use. It means actually vetting them ahead of time. It means having a very large, unfortunately, process for spontaneous volunteers, spontaneous donations of things. What do you do? And you have to think long-term Memorials if there was a death, what do you do about memorials? Are we going to open them to the public? This all needs to go into your planning.
Manya Chylinski:
It just circles back to. So much of the work that you're doing is well in advance of something happening. You're making the plans, you're building relationships, say with the communities, with first responders, for example. You're kind of setting the stage so that when something happens, you just flip the switch and people do what they've been trained to do.
Rick Hoaglund:
I will be honest with you Everyone I've worked for or worked with has some sort of a plan.
Manya Chylinski:
Okay.
Rick Hoaglund:
But I will tell you that when it has failed there have been a couple of reasons, and I'm not saying failed meaning it totally fails, but it kind of fails within the company. They need a lot of assistance, let's put it that way. So that's usually for two reasons. One is a lack of effective preparation and leadership, meaning that their plan is that their leader will tell them what to do. I've actually seen that before, I've seen it written. We will go into the president's office and he will tell us what to do. That does not work. And I think the second one is when they're preparing, sometimes people don't do the pre-preparation steps. I'll call it that Like the steps before the actual writing of the manual or the and on and on and then developing your strategies or your plans around what are those higher probability, higher risk events, and then maybe even developing general plans. Like this can be used for a lot. We might have to be very flexible if we're using I appreciate that point.
Manya Chylinski:
You were earlier talking about the all hazards plan and I imagine that for certain organizations or in certain locations, yes, all hazards, and these are the ones that are most likely given our circumstances.
Rick Hoaglund:
Exactly Like I said, an all hazards approach would be. You have some steps, at the beginning especially, that are very similar, and you're borrowing from all these other risks, like, oh yeah, this would work for this, this would work for this, so that your plans really are very, very, very similar, except for here and then, like I keep saying, you've got to practice it a lot, but the biggest mistake is relying on a single point of failure in leadership.
Manya Chylinski:
Yes.
Rick Hoaglund:
There was a very large company, that very large, that literally their plan was. We go into the president's office and he tells us what to do.
Manya Chylinski:
Well, I don't know this, but I imagine some of the challenge of creating the plan and being crisis ready is psychological. It's the fear of I don't want to think about this horrible thing happening, even if intellectually I know planning for it in advance is important. I don't want to go there and think that this is going to hurt my team, my community, my people.
Rick Hoaglund:
It's funny you said that because that happens once in a while when we're planning drills or exercises. So a drill is basically a action in your plan let's just put it that way. So it can be either just a discussion, it can be a drill, it can be an exercise all the way up to actually doing a lot of the pieces of it. You don't do everything, but taking it a little bit farther. All of that, and I've had people worry that if we did a drill about I'll just use an example a fire in a building, that they will have a fire in the building. They're really worried about that and I said, well, you probably would have that fire anyway, and at least you've exercised it, you know what to do, and they go. I know that's logical, but it's kind of like it's a superstitious thing.
Manya Chylinski:
It's a little bit. What is that? Confirmation bias? You buy the blue car and suddenly all the cars you see are that same shade of blue, but you never noticed that before. So it's oh, I'm thinking about a fire. So now that's the thing that's. I'm afraid that's what's going to happen, rick. We're getting close to the end of our time, and is there anything I didn't ask you that you wanted to make sure to share with our listeners about tools for teams and crisis management?
Rick Hoaglund:
I would say I'm going to drive home that missing piece again about culture. And it really hit home with one of the activations that I was involved in and it was an activation in a war zone and our idea initially which proved to be wrong, I will be honest with you, it was just the initial gut was we'll set up these phone banks and we'll have people, we'll give them a resource to be able to communicate to counselors, and I like that idea. The piece that we didn't consider in the very, very beginning we actually, before we ever launched this, we had come to this, but I thought it was important lessons learned was using locals on those phone banks. So we ended up using local counselors speaking local languages that also were involved in the actual conflict, could truly authentically identify with those that called in, and that was really important. I mean, we made sure that these weren't people that were going to be more harmful than good, because that can happen too if you're involved in the conflict you don't want.
Rick Hoaglund:
Not everyone is the right fit for that, but at least people that could identify with the conflict is what we wanted and it worked incredibly well. But at least people that could identify with the conflict is what we wanted and it worked incredibly well. But it was a good lessons learned for us and it wasn't because we did it wrong, because we didn't write. It's just the first gut wasn't to go there, our first gut feeling.
Manya Chylinski:
Okay, well, thank you so much. Before I let you go, can you tell us what you do and how can people reach you if they want to learn more about this?
Rick Hoaglund:
My name is Rick Hoaglund and my email. I'll go ahead and give you my email ahead of this R Hoaglund, so it's R-H-O-A-G-L-U-N-D at Empathiacom and that's spelled E-M-P-A-T-H-I-Acom, and we're a company that does crisis response, so we can set up call centers. We can put people on the ground that do briefings and things for responders or companies. We help with preparing plans and doing drills and then, if the worst comes to worst and you actually need people on the ground, to set up a family assistance center where you're helping people, we can staff and we can also assign counselors to be with family members to lead them through. So that's what we do and I'm the director of that division.
Manya Chylinski:
Well, thank you so much for sharing a little bit of your expertise in crisis management and crisis leadership today. It's just been a fabulous conversation.
Rick Hoaglund:
Well, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Manya Chylinski:
Thank you for listening. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I did. So if you'd like to learn more about me, manya Chylinski, I work with organizations to help understand how to create environments where people can thrive after difficult life experiences, and I do this through talks and consulting. I'm a survivor of mass violence and I use my experience to help leaders learn about resiliency, compassion and trauma-sensitive leadership to build strategies to enable teams to thrive and be engaged amidst difficulty and turmoil. If this is something you want to learn more about, visit my website, www. manyachylinski. com, or email me at manya, at manya chylinski, or stop by my social media on linkedin and twitter. Thanks so much.
