Lessons learned from navigating national crises with Linda Rutherford, Southwest Airlines

In this episode, Linda Rutherford joins On Top of PR host Jason Mudd to discuss her take on current airline crises and go into depth about Southwest’s crisis communication plan and how they’ve managed their past crises.

Guest:

Linda Rutherford is the Chief Administration Officer for Dallas-based Southwest Airlines, the nation's largest airline in terms of domestic Customer boardings. Linda is known for creating and leading powerful teams that equip, empower, and engage the business to serve its people and customers.

Five things you’ll learn from this episode:

1. Linda’s take on current airline crises

2. Southwest’s communications department and response plan

3. How Southwest has responded to past crises

4. How to manage the media and consumers’ perception of a crisis

5. How to balance your message post-national crisis

Quotables

“Today, communications represent the pace of media. Before, it might’ve seemed a little slower and more leisurely, and today, I would also say that public relations represents a lot more responsibility for brand reputation and issues management.” - Linda Rutherford

“Certainly, the role of journalists has changed significantly, much like our roles in communications have.” - Linda Rutherford

“Obviously, first and foremost, it is the safety of our passengers and employees on the affected flight. It is what do we need to do to get them safely on the ground, and then what do we need to do to understand what happened so we can go about learning how we prevent it from happening in the future.” - Linda Rutherford

“We like to say that we're in a deregulated environment, but we're regulated in the air and on the ground.” - Linda Rutherford

“I also like to say that we operate, we fly the general public, and we operate in weather. So what could possibly go wrong daily? That's why you spend a lot of time preparing and understanding what your contingencies are.” - Linda Rutherford

“My analogy is when Taylor Swift tickets went on sale, and Ticketmaster had a brownout, that's basically what happened.” - Linda Rutherford

“We did have a union, which we were negotiating with at the time that was perpetuating the story by calling crew, scheduling technology, antiquated. So that storyline was out there, and a lot of media were picking that up.” - Linda Rutherford

“There's a lot of demand to say everything at once, but we didn't necessarily have the credibility to say everything at once.” - Linda Rutherford

“We did tell the whole story. We had our chief operating officer give congressional testimony before a Senate subcommittee and told the whole story like I'm telling you.” - Linda Rutherford

“I tell people all the time that PR is about building up that equity so that when you have an issue, people already know that you're trustworthy and honorable and that you do the right thing.” - Jason Mudd

“The first thing you need to do is respond to what's right in front of you, and then you can begin to build on the story as you go and as you learn more, admit mistakes, be honest, and then be very transpar