Leading People Through Disasters

Kathy McKee: Well very seriously. There are statistics that indicate that companies who don't plan and face some kind of a disaster may not ever recover and consequently go out of business, so it's not something that should be ignored, but interestingly enough, there's a tremendous degree of complacency, at least in this country, around planning, and ironically, even after Hurricane Katrina a couple of years ago, companies, organizations that were located in that area became complacent. Well, we got through that; we can get through the next one, and that's really not the right attitude to have.

Rachel Salaman: Do you think that complacency comes from just time pressure and prioritizing other things?

Kathy McKee: Well absolutely, but there's also a bit of denial in there. Recently, we had a huge fire here in the Santa Barbara area of about 250,000 acres of forest land burned, and at one point it appeared that the fire would come over the hill and into the city of Santa Barbara, and there was a very high degree of panic and people kind of running around in circles, and as soon as it was pretty clear that we wouldn't be having the fire, everyone went back to being complacent.

Rachel Salaman: Has the need for disaster planning changed much in recent years?

Kathy McKee: I think it has. The weather, first of all, has become increasingly devastating, and even you, in the UK, just suffered a horrendous flood. The Midwest part of the United States is under siege right now with way too much rain. We're having a drought on the West end of the United States, and because of weather, for one example, people need to be prepared for these really weird things, as well as the whole terrorism, which seems to have turned into an industry, and it's hard to plan against an invisible enemy, but being prepared for things like chemical hazards or bombs, bombings, is really important so that you are ready in case something awful happens to your company.

Rachel Salaman: Do some types of organization need disaster planning more than others?

Kathy McKee: Well, we believe that all organizations need to have some kind of preparation. For a small company it's not as difficult to do; it's very time consuming. For a large company that may be very complex with lots of products lines or divisions or geographical locations, it's really important that you have a plan in place so that you can keep any of those businesses running.

Rachel Salaman: Now your expertise in this area comes from personal experience, doesn't it? What was the first disaster you had to cope with and what did you learn from it?

Kathy McKee: The very first one that we coped with was a very severe 6.8, I believe, earthquake in the Los Angeles basin, and we were not, we being First Interstate Bancorp, were not prepared for that, nor were any of the city or organizations located in the downtown area of Los Angeles prepared. And what we learned from that was that, first of all, we needed to have a plan, which was very quickly developed by a staff of people at First Interstate. We planned an earthquake preparedness program and then we had a drill to practice what we would all do in case the building shook again, and ironically, a couple of weeks later after that drill, the building caught on fire, and that's where we really had the learnings. And what we learned from that was that we hadn't thought about a disaster that would dislocate us out of our building. We didn't have backup space and we definitely had not thought about the impact of trauma on the employees, and so we put together a program of trauma counseling that we ran everyone through, from the clerks to the senior executives of how they were feeling, how they could learn to cope with their feelings, and how they could get back to productive behavior as quickly as possible, and then we also trained our managers to be able to recognize strange behaviors and how to deal with that and how to help employees. So, the two lessons were to put a plan in place that was structured so that we could keep the business running, and the second thing was how to work with our employees.

Rachel Salaman: So in those examples that you just told us, who was taking the lead within your organization?

Kathy McKee: There were several people who were taking a leading role, and we'll talk about the building fire. First of all, we had established a critical incident management approach and had put one individual in charge of the emergency operation center, and that was part of that earthquake plan that I mentioned earlier. So he ran the incident, if you will, and making sure that the backup IT systems were running, and that there was a whole effort to find space so that 3,000 employees dislocated, so finding space, finding equipment, so that was one path. The Human Resources senior leader stepped up and brought all of us together. We had four different HR organizations because there were four different pieces of the company located in Los Angeles, so we became a team to put together a whole approach to managing people and getting people back to work and, as I mentioned earlier, working through the trauma that everyone had suffered in varying degrees, so that was a whole leadership role. Another leadership role that came into play was the Corporate Communications Executive stepped up and joined the team and we put together a very comprehensive employee, for the time, and this was in the late 80s, comprehensive employee communications program primarily print and meetings, and this was before internet and emails, but it worked, and so we had those three pieces and we all worked closely together so that there was communication and we all knew what was going on, so that we could communicate it to everyone, and that is an absolute key in any of these situations this communication. We'll talk about that probably a little later.

Rachel Salaman: So apart from good communication skills, what other skills do you need to be an effective leader in a disaster?

Kathy McKee: There are a couple of areas that I'd like to talk about with respect to this. One is the first and most important thing is that whoever is going to be in a leadership role has very strong self-control, and in the situation in the earthquake, the first earthquake, one of our senior leaders panicked, and when a leader panics it spreads. It's that whole mob psychology thing, so self-control is very important. Now another piece that's very important is remaining dispassionate. Being in control, being very empathetic, understanding that other people are not going to be as calm as you may be, but self-control and dispassion are two things that come to mind. And the other thing is the ability to think very quickly on your feet and make decisions. People are looking for leadership and so it may not be the CEO that leaps out in the leadership role, and it could be somebody on the floor of the building where you work that steps up and takes charge. People need to have some kind of calming influence, and so those are some things that come to mind.

Rachel Salaman: This topic can be broken down into two stages: planning for disasters and dealing with disasters. Looking at the planning stage first, who needs to be involved with this?

Kathy McKee: The organization should pull together a planning team that we refer to in the book called 'A core team', and these would be people representing the major business areas of the organization. So, for example, if it were a manufacturing firm you would have someone from Manufacturing, someone from Engineering, someone from IT, someone from Human Resources, Legal perhaps, and Communications. The CEO would not necessarily be involved with this core team, but he or she would let the organization know that this was a priority and that time would be made available for these folks to begin the planning process, and each person has a role to play in that team, depending on the area. There's a lot of research that needs to be done. There's a whole process that's outlined of how you begin that process, but that's the kind of team to pull together. In the book we define the roles that each of those people play. It's a very important piece to think through all of the aspects of the business and how it functions so that you can then get down into the details of what you need to do to ensure that it can continue to function during or following some kind of a disaster.

Rachel Salaman: Now this is what you call in your book a 'Business Continuity Plan', what do you need to remember when you're developing a business continuity plan?

Kathy McKee: Well, let me start a little bit differently to answer that question. Think about a continuum. It starts with preparedness, so what do we need to do to be prepared for the inevitable whatever it could be? So that's the first step is preparedness. In that process you then look at recovery from whatever it is that's happened, like, say, a building fire. So how do you recover from that incident? And implicit in that is scenario planning; planning for the worst case in a variety of different situations, so that's recovery. Then mitigation, how do you mitigate the result of the disaster? And then finally, that whole thing wraps into what's called a business continuity plan. So from preparedness, recovery, mitigation, and continuity; if you keep that in mind to remember those four pieces, and there's a lot of literature available in the business continuity industry, and it has become an industry, that can help an organization with each of those four phases.

Rachel Salaman: So how do you make sure you're taking into account all the necessary human issues when you're writing or developing your business continuity plan?

Kathy McKee: I think it's important to have human issues be top of mind when you start writing the plan, and it tends not to be because we get wrapped up in information technology issues, logistics issues, and we don't think about the need that human beings have in a situation of uncertainty, or danger, or fear, so by thinking through what are the Human Resources' policies that we might want to put in place on a contingency basis to deal with how we're going to pay them, how many days might we cover for people who are unable to work because there is no workstation. May we allow them to use holiday pay or sick pay or other kinds of extra pay practices that we have? Programs that might be impacted: healthcare, for example, there may need to be some contingencies made with the healthcare provider regarding inability to provide data because data may not be available. And then caring for employees; trauma counseling or what's now called critical incident stress debriefing, having a program at the ready so that if employees are distressed that you put your program into place, train your managers in advance to be able to recognize these; involve employees in the scenario planning, the debrief after you run through some kind of evacuation exercise or tabletop exercise and you debrief employees. How did it work? How did you feel? What would make it better? And having communications, notification programs there are electronic systems now. How are we going to let people know where to go? What to do? How to contact their families, how to make sure that families are safe, and be sure that that's part of it?

Rachel Salaman: That's a lot of detail to remember.

Kathy McKee: Yes it is.

Rachel Salaman: And I expect a lot of people don't remember all those things, what kind of mistakes do people make when they're planning for disasters?

Kathy McKee: They don't do enough scenario planning. Organizations that are putting plans together don't do enough scenario planning; looking at the likelihood of an earthquake is very high in California. It may not be as high in the UK, but floods can hit anywhere, so a scenario for earthquake would be here in California, floods, wild land fires, which we've just experienced, a chemical spill, whatever it is, so by doing a scenario helping people understand the roles that each of them play when something like that happens. What do you do? Where do you go? There's not enough of that that happens. Consequently, there's a certain amount of chaos that occurs, and what you want to do is mitigate the chaos by thinking through what could possibly happen and then building plans around that.

Rachel Salaman: So then disasters strikes, let's say your office burns down. Presumably, your business continuity plan then swings into action, what do the people in charge need to prioritize? How do they set their priorities?

Kathy McKee: Well the first thing – there are two things that happen simultaneously: if you have a business continuity plan you probably have made plans for an emergency operation center somewhere on the premises or offsite. So the first thing that happens is that that's activated; the second thing that happens almost simultaneously is that you ensure that your employees are safe, and that employees are dismissed, or sent home, or if they're at home to communicate with them to let them know to stay there. So those are the first two things that happen, and then, using your plan, the next thing that would happen, most likely, would be what condition are our information systems in? Are they functioning? Did we have a backup system? Can we get that up and running? I'm assuming that somewhere in there there's an Incident Commander, so the Incident Commander is taking care of the incident. Let's say it's a chemical spill, the Incident Commander is ensuring that that chemical spill is being taken care of at the same time as the emergency operation center is being setup and that people are being cared for. So it's that kind of a thought process, and that would be part of the plan looking at who does what? When do they do it? What authorization do we need? Hopefully authorization to take action has been delegated by the CEO and that's very important in the plan, so I think that's a good way to think about getting started. And then you've got 18 different directions you're going in all at once, but you've got 18 people who know what their roles are and can make those things happen.

Rachel Salaman: You talked earlier about the importance of communication, after the disaster has struck, who should be communicating with whom and how should they be doing it?

Kathy McKee: The first thing, the Incident Commander would be the person communicating with the media, so that if, say, it's a building fire the Incident Commander representing the company is talking about how the company is proceeding with the incident. The Incident Commander would work with the Communications Officer, if the company has one, to craft the message, and a lot of times what happens, and you see this on television if there's a fire, the Fire Commander, the person – the Incident Commander on that fire is the one interviewed and that's going to happen. If it's a business the Incident Commander representing the business will also be interviewed. Again, the Communications Officer working with the Human Resources staff would craft messages to go to employees, and this is something that's going to happen frequently during the day, the evening, overnight to make sure that everyone has the information that they need to deal with. Communications Officer would also deal with getting additional messages out to the media, as well as to the community that could also be impacted by this, so you think about it in the form of a tree with a lot of branches, but messages are crafted at the top and then dispersed. It's a very important function.

Rachel Salaman: And how should you expect employees to react after a disaster like, say, a fire?

Kathy McKee: As I've mentioned before, employees are going to react in a variety of ways. Some are going to be very angry at the company, the organization for allowing whatever it was to happen, especially a fire. If it's an earthquake, they're going to be frightened; they might be angry because they may not have known what to do. Some employees, after the initial shock and anger, could be frightened. We had employees frightened after the earthquake, and we had three earthquakes, but you're always frightened because you're out of control of the situation, so you have anger and fear, and then that can be followed by sadness because you're out of your office or the things that were in your cubicle may have been damaged by the disaster. Some people become depressed and can't work because they can't cope with the confusion, and so we cycle through that. We might be angry one moment and depressed the next, and it's understanding the fact that human beings react to these situations differently is key to good management of the situation. If the manager happens to be one with great self-control here, she isn't going to understand why other people may not have the same kind of self-control that he or she does, so it's really important to keep that in mind, and it does take some training to have that skill.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you mention 'Employee Assistance Programs', can you give us some examples of what that is?

Kathy McKee: Yes, they're organizations throughout the world that specialize in what's now called critical incident stress debriefing. Interestingly enough, an article in our local paper today on what the Marine Corps doing to do this with troops on the ground in Iraq because they suffer from stress and it manifests itself in a variety of ways. So by counseling people individually or in groups to help them get in touch with where they are at the moment in the way they're feeling about what happened and how they're feeling about the company, how they're feeling about their families, how they're feeling about the uncertainty, and giving them some tips on how to deal with that. And in some severe cases, especially with the building fire, we had one-on-one counseling for several people who were traumatized and it was really helpful and we were saying many times for spending the time and the money to help our employees, and I'll bring this up as well, there's a business reason for doing that, and the idea is to get people back to work as quickly and productively as possible without incurring any kind of workers' compensation claim for stress or some kind of damage. So there's a payoff for the employees, there's a payoff for management, and there's a payoff for the business by doing this, so something that we talk about a lot is being sure that you have lined up these, kind of, resources and have them at the ready in case you have any kind of disaster in your workplace.

Rachel Salaman: How do you know whether or not you should offer trauma counseling?

Kathy McKee: Well, I think if you build it into your plan you know that you're going to have it available. If you have employees who are upset you know that pretty much right away and it's best to bring people in and start working with management and with employees who are indicating symptoms of severe stress. Anger, whatever it is that's going you've got to deal with that, and we're not all trained in how to help people get back in touch with a more normal kind of behavior.

Rachel Salaman: Now you talked about the need to get back to productive working practices, what's the best way to balance the needs of employees with the need to return to work without being insensitive to any trauma that might be going on?

Kathy McKee: I think to look at it in phases: first, if there is a situation that requires helping employees deal with a situation, that's going to be pretty much mitigated within the first week or so of the event. There may be some employees who have difficulty coping and there the one-on-one counseling or even putting someone on leave, but if they continue to, say, act out in the workplace – the program the we had put together at First Interstate was one of modeling off of the progressive discipline approach where you sit down and have a counseling session, the manager with the employee around the ability or inability to get the job done and then we would refer the people back to employee assistance, and then they'd come back to work, and if the behavior still didn't improve after time, then we would begin to warn them about their behavior, and ultimately, if somebody really couldn't get the job done, we would terminate them. I mean, there's only so much that you can do, and if the employee isn't able to respond and isn't able to perform, then they need to probably go someplace else.

Rachel Salaman: Well most people realize that they should have a plan for disasters, but as you said at the beginning, a lot of people don't get around to making one. Now your book is really useful for them, as well as for serious disaster planners, because it suggests a few steps that anyone can take in just five minutes, which might make a big difference in the event of a disaster. One, is to connect with your internal partners, can you explain what that means?

Kathy McKee: Yes, a lot of times if you have a plan or don't have a plan it's ideal to touch base with a variety of functions within the company. For example, information technology, things change rapidly and you may have an idea of how you're going to mitigate the disaster, recover from it, but you haven't touched back to find out what changes may have been made in the area. There may have been changes in policy; there may have been changes in the way that you plan to communicate and so you keep in touch with your internal resources such as IT, such as communications, safety and security to see what's new and what thought have they given to perhaps something that's different that's happened in the environment, so it's something that's really important in any event, but it's the idea that you can take five minutes and get yourself up to date.

Rachel Salaman: Another very useful tip is refresh your records, how do you go about doing that and why?

Kathy McKee: Well let's use one example of records. We should know how to contact our employees at any time, and you may have to contact somebody at three in the morning because something has happened and they need to know it. You've got to have up to date employee records. You may have to update other kinds of records: accounting records, payroll records, and it's just being able to have up to date information. You should have some information regarding employees at home. Managers should have contact lists at home because you may have to contact a manager and say, “Look, we need you to contact everybody in your department because we're not going to be able to function tomorrow," so you have telephone trees. It's very important to have up to date information. Media lists, and you may have to contact the media and if you have out of date media lists, your contacts on it today it just takes more time and time is of the essence.

Rachel Salaman: You also suggest building a just in case inventory of emergency supplies, what are we talking about here?

Kathy McKee: Well, the rule of thumb these days is that we should all be prepared to be without, let's say, power or the ability to get from home to work for 72 hours, so what do you need at home that can keep you going sustained for 72 hours? So you need a gallon of water for each person for each day, canned or dried food. Figure that you won't have any electricity and that you won't – you'll have frozen foods melting or meat turning bad, so what kind of supplies might you need? You might have to go to a shelter, so have a grab and go, what we call here a grab and go pack. What is it that you have to take with you? Blankets, jackets, your passport, photos, a whole variety of things; how to get in touch with healthcare, but if you're at home it's having first aid supplies, having water, having packaged foods that are available, games for the kids, pet foods, whatnot. Very important and most of us don't do that. Every Red Cross agency will tell you to have things in your car like power bars and an extra pair of what we call tennis shoes and blankets, and a little bit of first aid just in case.

Rachel Salaman: So are there one or two things that everyone in a company should have front of mind in the event of a disaster to make things go as smoothly as possible?

Kathy McKee: The first thing that comes to my mind is leadership that I talked about, that you have self-control and dispassion and that you inspire confidence in others. That is really important, and if the company hasn't done leadership training it's something that they should be doing any way to ensure the health and vitality of the organization, but leadership is important. Being, obviously, and it's probably trite to say, but being prepared. Everyone knows what to do. Every employee, no matter where they are in the organization, knows what he or she needs to do in case something goes wrong. Where do I go? Do I shelter in place? Where's my assigned station? I know how to get in touch with my family. My family knows how to get in touch with me. Those are the things that come to my mind right away, and then of course making the plan operational.

Rachel Salaman: Kathy McKee, thank you very much for joining me today.

Kathy McKee: Oh, you're welcome.

Rachel Salaman: There's more information about leading people through disasters at the book's website: www.leadingpeoplethroughdisasters.com.

I'll be back next month with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.