NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
By Skip King, Reputation Strategies
How to handle tough questions from the media without resorting to “No comment.”
It’s nearly as bad as it gets: a staffer falls to ground from a 15-foot plat- form. His lanyard, still attached to his harness, has a broken carabiner on it. Think you know what happened? Fact is, you don’t. All you know is that you’ve got an injured employee and a piece of equipment that failed. Among the things you don’t know: whether the equipment failure was the cause of the accident, or a result of it. If the former, you don’t know WHY the equipment failed. A manufacturing defect, perhaps? Lax inspection procedures? Improper use on the part of your staff? There are almost certainly other possibilities. It’s at this juncture that two import- ant courts should come to mind: the court of law, in that litigation is almost certain, and the court of public opinion. Truthful answers are needed for both, but the legal circus will arrive in its own time. You can expect the press, which presides over the court of public opin- ion, to show up five minutes ago. They’ll want answers.
Four essential tools. But you can take entire lines of questions off the table. When I teach organizational spokesper- sons how to work with reporters, I pro- vide them with four essential tools for managing interviews. Those tools are: • “Must Air Points” (things the spokes- person must express during the interview.) • The “Perfect Quote” (a quote you create ahead of time that’s too good not to use, lest the reporter extract a quote from something else you said.) • The Clock (you control how much time you give the reporter, not the other way around.) • “Cans and Can’ts” (these set and man- age expectations.)
it’s likely that local law enforcement and an accident investigator from your insurance company or an independent will analyze the situation. That takes time. Further, the broken carabiner will require forensic metallurgical analysis. That takes a while, too, and by the time the answers come back, it’s highly likely that the news media will have moved on to other, more current stories. So, effectively, you’ve removed causal questions from the interview and still told the truth.
Can/Can’t use cases. What other sorts of things can you use Cans and Can’ts for?
• You can tell the reporter you’re going to stick to the things you know and won’t answer speculative questions. • You can exclude things like subjective information related to employees. Performance reviews are invariably subjective, so you can (we’d argue should, if you haven’t already) set organizational policy such that HR re- cords are off the table when it comes to reporters. If you establish such a policy, by the way, do it before any- thing happens—and stick with it. Not discussing employee performance should be thought of the same way you think of giving references for ex-employees: when the employee was hired, when they left, and wheth- er you’d rehire that individual.
SET LIMITS
The Cans and Can’ts are the most valu- able in staying away from questions and answers that could get you into trouble. You need to establish them before giv- ing the reporter your first answer. If the reporter asks you a question before you state them, simply say, “Bob, I’m happy to answer your questions to the extent that I can. But before we begin, please understand there are some things that I CAN talk about, and some things that I CAN’T. Here’s what they are.” In the case of our earlier-stated hy- pothetical, you might say “One of the things I can’t talk about is what caused this accident. We simply don’t know, and the investigation and forensic anal- ysis is likely to take months.”
NEVER SAY “NO COMMENT”
What’s your reaction when you see a news story and a source says, “no com- ment”? If you’re like most people, you probably think they might as well have said “guilty as charged.” Reporters think that, too. “No com- ment” is an ineffective way of refusing to answer a question. When sources don’t want to answer, it raises suspi- cions—and can make reporters even more aggressive.
• You can use objective information to describe employees, should you choose to do so: “All of our front- line employees are seasonal hires.
And this is absolutely true. In addition to your own internal incident analysis,
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