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Leadership Levers
This podcast spotlights leaders' actions so they may enhance their organization’s performance and culture.
We feature CEOs and industry-recognized Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who share their experiences and insights on three key challenges: people, performance, and profit.
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Leadership Levers
Safeguarding Your Investments - Crisis Management & Reputation Strategies for Leaders with Stephanie Craig
Is your organization prepared to turn a crisis into an opportunity while protecting its reputation and driving performance?
In this episode of the Leadership Levers, we sit down with Stephanie Craig, President of Kith.co, to explore the critical importance of crisis preparation and reputation management for organizations.
Stephanie shares her unique background, from growing up in Canada’s Arctic to working in both US and Canadian politics - how these experiences shaped her ability to navigate high-pressure situations and help leaders do the same!
Stephanie emphasizes that a strong organizational culture and open communication are key to mitigating crises. She shares how leadership teams that prioritize collaboration, avoid information silos, and align on shared values are better equipped to respond to challenges swiftly and strategically.
She highlights the direct link between crisis preparation and organizational reputation - noting that reputation often accounts for a significant portion of a company’s value.
Through real-world examples, Stephanie illustrates how clear communication and proactive planning can turn a potential crisis into a positive outcome, as seen with a government contractor’s payroll issue.
Conversely, she shares how miscommunication between departments, such as in the Disney arbitration case, can lead to reputational damage.
Stephanie concludes with actionable advice for corporate leaders and private equity professionals - treat crisis preparation as a necessity, not an option. She encourages leaders to invest in processes and protections that safeguard their organization’s reputation, fostering resilience and long-term success.
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Welcome to the Leadership L Podcast. I'm your host, will Gladheart, cmo at the Culture Think Tank. At the Culture Think Tank, we empower leaders with metrics that strengthen culture, drive performance and return. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address organizational change. Today, our guest is Stephanie Craig, president of Kith. Thanks for taking time to join us.
Stephanie Craig:Hi, Will. I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
William Gladhart:Absolutely. Let's begin by having you share with our audience a bit about yourself, your background and your organization.
Stephanie Craig:Well, I think it's probably a little bit easier if I do it a little bit in reverse. Kith is a crisis preparation and reputation management advisory. We work with C-suites of varying size organizations everything from a couple million to a 50 billion company to help them build processes and procedures and teams that can spot and respond to and recover from crisis really fast to protect their greatest asset, which is their reputation. I came to this work honestly. My mom frequently said that I had survived every kind of natural disaster except a tsunami, and I choose not to check that one off the list. It is something I don't want to experience, but I come from a really kind of strange background.
Stephanie Craig:I grew up all over Canada. My dad was one of those Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers. You know the red jacket and the hat. No horse, though. We didn't have a horse, unfortunately but it meant that I traveled and lived all over the Canadian Arctic. So I was born in the Arctic, which provided a lot of really interesting skills that I keep with me now. I also come from a long line of people that ran towards actual bullets. As I said, my dad was a police officer. My grandfather was at Normandy. I just tend to run towards the verbal bullets and all of this really kind of wild background led me to politics, which is also born out of a real love of people. But I'm probably the only person and we haven't been able to verify or not verify that I am the only person to ever have worked in the United States House and Senate and the Canadian House and Senate. So I come, my skills are born out of both natural disaster and political disaster.
William Gladhart:That is an interesting combination and the fact that, as we were chatting before, that you were born basically in the Arctic Circle, which is fascinating too, so in the middle of nowhere. But so we'll be discussing three questions today as a warmup to start our conversation. Could you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?
Stephanie Craig:Well, it's interesting because, given that, where we focus on which is crisis, most folks think that it just happens to you that one day you wake up and aliens have landed in your courtyard or your CFO has absconded with your pension fund. The aliens, yes, the CFO, no. These things don't just happen, and companies with good culture, good communication, great processes, checks and balances don't happen to have these things happen as often. You can't guard against everything, but if you have a very thoughtful leadership team that knows and trusts one another, that doesn't have silos of information, those are really that. If you had to ask me to identify the number one factor in a corporate crisis, it would be information siloing, because there are very. There's one job besides a CEO that has a responsibility for protecting your reputation and, by the way, your reputation is about 35% of your value, of your organization pretty big asset to just leave unprotected, and so communications is really the only other entity that is focused on protecting your reputation, but it's not just their job, and that seems to be the difference between a good corporate structure and a great corporate structure that can see mitigate, recover from and get better out of a crisis than those that can't. Who's sitting at your leadership table? Are they talking to one another? Can't. Who's sitting at your leadership table? Are they talking to one another? Are they sitting down and dedicating time, money and energy to preparing for crisis?
Stephanie Craig:And, falsely, people make the distinction that there is a physical crisis and a reputational crisis. If you can't make your widgets, for whatever reason supply chain problem, factory goes down, labor unrest if you can't make your widgets, that is going to make somebody unhappy. That is a reputational risk. And so, as for leaders that are really thinking about okay, how can I elevate what I do? I've got all the good credentials. I want to elevate what I do, and, of course, this is a bit self-serving, but investing in crisis preparation is going to go a long way to having you weather the really kind of ugly things that come your way that aren't necessarily weatherable for people that are not prepared.
William Gladhart:Yeah, I think. Well, it's great that you bring that up, because I think we can all either pinpoint a large customer service entity or a financial institution or an agency that was supposed to protect XYZ information and did not, and trust was broken. Obviously, a crisis ensued. There wasn't a communication pathway, it was all hands on deck and many are not handled in a way that reflects the organization or even the people in the culture. So I think you bringing that into the mix with the communication elements is hugely important. So it's been our experience that leaders tend to struggle in three key areas beyond crisis, in the areas of people, process or profit. In your role, especially as not only a leader but also working with organizations to help them manage the elements of their next steps, can you identify which one of these areas has represented a cultural challenge for one of your clients or someone that you've worked with?
Stephanie Craig:Well, I'm actually going to kind of throw this on its head. We're going to say the people in our world. It's the people plus the process equals the profit. I just had the opportunity to speak to the Association of Financial Planning in Nashville and it was an interesting feedback from our session because people the attendees who are financial planners, cfos, those sorts of folks were very surprised at how much a crisis could impact them and what they could do about it, and so our formula is quite similar to yours. So the differentiator for good crisis response, so the differentiator for good crisis response, crisis management to great crisis response, is speed, but not just for speed's sake. It's strategic speed, your ability to get ahead of it, to spot it, that sort of thing. But the formula on the inputting to the strategic speed is clarity plus trust.
Stephanie Craig:Clarity and you kind of touched on this already. Well, clarity and your values, what your corporate values are. Clarity in your stakeholders I think a lot of times, leaders focus on their stakeholders being the folks on X slash, twitter. When you really take a hard look at who your people are, where they are, who they trust and how they communicate, they're most likely not there. So, building trust with those folks because when you have trust with your stakeholders, you figured out who they are. You figured out how to communicate with them. When you have trust with them, when something goes wrong, they give you the benefit of the doubt. Right, if they know who you are as an organization, they will give you the benefit of the doubt, and that is when you talk about impacting profit. That helps you get back on track so fast because you're not having to rebuild that trust because they trusted you when you said it happened because of this.
William Gladhart:Yeah, I think that's a great tie in of those three elements. But you know, touching back to that people or process kind of, what did one of those challenges look like and how did it negatively impact an organization that your team worked with?
Stephanie Craig:Well, actually I will say I'm going to give away the ending it didn't negatively impact them because they so. We work with a large government contractor and they have they are. They have a number of veteran employees. They have a number of veteran employees and they just happened to have a payroll that was supposed to run on the Friday before Veterans Day and their payroll provider came to them on Thursday evening very late and said we're not going to be able to deliver your payroll until next Wednesday. Wow, and so not only were they not going to be able to pay their people and take into consideration when this happened right, this happened the first third of the month, so most of them have already paid their mortgages or paid their rent.
Stephanie Craig:So, coffers are a little low and then their employer is going to say, well, we can't pay you, but what we did with these folks is they knew their values. They knew their values and that, no matter what their people were going to get paid if they needed it to make it through to the actual pay period.
Stephanie Craig:So, that wasn't even a question. They'd done the work, they knew that that was the goal and so figuring out. What we had to figure out was how to message to these folks that it had happened, message to them that there was help, and then orchestrate the help.
William Gladhart:Yeah, that's huge. I mean, what a scary crisis for a company, for one. But also too, there's a whole other layer wrapped in when you're talking government, veteran, ex-military, etc. So obviously you kind of wrapped in both the challenge and the positive outcome as well. So you kind of knocked out two questions at once, which I love.
Stephanie Craig:Well, one thing I just wanted to add to it is they communicated. They were open, they were honest and they communicated. They offered help to their employees. They said if anyone needs the help, here's a phone number and we'll figure out how to get you help. Through the weekend, of their 2,000 employees that were affected, 12 called and they were helped. And then, about two months after the event, there was an employee survey. Loyalty to the company and trust of their leadership went up 10 points Wow.
William Gladhart:Wow, even have metrics to show that it was all executed and as they were executing the response.
Stephanie Craig:They were figuring their way out. That is what really good leadership looks like and what really bad days can turn out. On the flip side, we had a work with a client that had a very, very public industrial accident and that you can't prepare for, that you can have all of your procedures and all your processes and they all. That you can have all of your procedures and all your processes and they all worked. We'd worked with them before, but it happened. It was very, very public and it became very litigious, as most of these things do.
Stephanie Craig:So then that becomes working with legal teams, which is a huge part of what we do, which is why I want to go back to something I said at the first, which is is that communications? We had just wrote a column about disney and disney doing they had I don't know if you recall seeing this well, they, they had, uh, had a patron who his wife, had gone to an allergy, one of their allergy friendly restaurants and had had and died from an allergic reaction, and so he sued Disney and I would guess this is just a guess, totally hypothesis, a total hypothesis on my part the legal team did not communicate with the communications team, because the legal team in went into negotiations with with this man and try to tell him he had to go to arbitration because he had signed up for Disney plus and it was in the fine print.
William Gladhart:Oh yikes.
Stephanie Craig:And so, of course, this man, who's grief-stricken has a very heart-spulling story, goes public with it, and all of a sudden it becomes a PR disaster because the communications folks didn't know what the legal folks were doing.
Stephanie Craig:Could have been completely bypassed if someone had said you know what the legal folks were doing. Could have been completely bypassed if someone had said you know what. That doesn't seem like a really good idea. Let's figure out a different way. And so those are the types of examples that we like to give. First example they did everything right. They knew their guiding values. Everyone talked. They knew their processes, they knew their procedures. Their people knew who they needed to call and what they needed to do. They ended up really having it turn into a positive on the flip side. Those silos were there, they were not talking, and it resulted in a reputational damage at a time when, honestly, disney's had a bit of a rough road.
William Gladhart:And it's kind of one more tick to the reputational hit. So, as we wrap up today, is there anything else you'd like to add or share with fellow leaders?
Stephanie Craig:I think that it is. Here's two things, because I know that your audience is both corporate leaders as well as some private equity folks. For corporate leaders, there's a difference between good and great leadership leaders. There's a difference between good and great leadership, and that is making crisis preparation a must have and not a nice to have. I would also add corporate boards. There's so much research around corporate boards, putting a lot more emphasis on good crisis planning, so your board could be very interested. And if you're thinking about getting into a company in private equity, if their reputation is part of their value, make sure they've done everything to protect it. And if you're going into one that doesn't have a great reputation and you think you want to keep it, you think you want to try and build that up, put in the proper protections. It's easy, it's just some thoughtful structuring.
William Gladhart:Yeah Well, Stephanie, I've enjoyed having you on our Leadership Levers podcast. Thank you for your insights.
Stephanie Craig:Thanks so much. Well, really appreciate having me.
William Gladhart:Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers podcast. Find all our Leadership Lovers episodes on the Culture Think Tank website at www. theculturethinktank. com or listen on your favorite streaming platform. We'd love to hear from you about the challenges you have faced as a leader. Tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experiences in strengthening culture and performance, one action at a time.
