When a crisis hits, leaders need to take ownership: which means communicating clearly and with empathy

Every time I read the news and see yet another stock standard impersonal quote from an anonymous spokesperson, I grit my teeth.

These quotes have always driven me nuts, both when I was a journo and now that I’m a media trainer. For starters, they rarely resemble genuine human speech: instead, they’re bureaucratic and bland (and heaven forbid they reflect genuine emotion that might reflect well upon the spokesperson, much less their organisation).

They’re often defensive or deflective, and even if they do apologise, they’re delivered in such a rote way they lack all conviction.

Journalists include these quotes when they can’t get anything better, but no-one actually expects readers to pay them any attention. Instead, readers see them and scan past, knowing they’re meaningless. 

When a crisis hits, the public wants whoever is responsible to care about whoever is affected. And I mean genuinely care. We want someone to take ownership rather than deflect, to feel remorse rather than parrot some anodyne line that sounds like it was drafted by a legal intern, we want to know a grown-up is in charge. 

I don’t blame the spokespeople for wanting to be anonymous, btw. Hell, I’d want to be anonymous too if I had to spout the same bullshit. But that’s not what’s in the organisation’s best interests, much less the audience’s.

And while I’m on my high horse, I might as well take aim at the bland and unrealistic quotes I’m also seeing in press releases. 

Press release quotes have always been something of a joke, as everyone knows they probably weren’t even written, much less said, by the person they’re attributed to (and if someone did actually speak like that, they’d need therapy rather than media training).  

In the past, these quotes would have been stuck in the purgatory that is the media release section of most websites. Now, however, AI is actually looking at these sections, while journos are more likely to use these quotes as editorial standards drop even further (and if journos don’t start getting real quotes, the media is just going to continue its freefall. No business or AI model can save it otherwise). 

This is why I keep a bottle of tequila on my desk. 

It’s funny how the comms and media industry loves to think of itself as rapidly evolving and adapting, yet releases are still written in the same crappy way they always have been, filled with jargon such as “delivering genuine value” – and spokespeople in interviews still seem like robotic deer caught in the headlights.  

The copywriter David Ogilvy once said you should treat the reader with the same respect you would treat your family, your friends and your partner. Yet these poorly-written press release quotes and public statements don’t respect anyone. They assume either a reader is stupid or naïve enough to believe them, or that the reader is so cynical that they know the quotes are bullshit from the start and are just going to scan over them anyway.  

Which, of course, they do.