Crisis Comms: Sydney Swans

If you are leading a team right now, in sport or in business, I’d be pulling out the crisis comms plan and having another look at it. Because the Swans have just set a pretty high bar for how quickly people expect you to front up, communicate and act.

Five days on, here’s how I think the Swans handled one hell of a communications crisis. Spoiler: Daisy Pearce turns out ot be the hero of my story.

Firstly, Matthew Pavlich. I know his first press conference has been heavily criticised. I’m going against the grain here. I thought he did a great job. It was not perfect, but crisis comms aren’t perfect. By their very nature they come at a time when you are highly stressed and pulled in different directions. Everyone always thinks they could have done a better job in hindsight. He didn’t disappear for three days while lawyers, boards and communications people word-smithed a statement to death. Pavlich fronted up. He told us what he knew. He made it clear there were limits on what he could say. He set the bar there and then.

But saying the players had “found themselves in this situation” was the wrong language. That was a mistake. They didn’t accidentally wander into a situation like they’d taken the wrong exit off the freeway. Crisis communication is messy but a clumsy sentence shouldn’t undo everything else you got right. The bigger mistake was not mentioning the women. The criticism of that mistake is fair, he should have said something.

He faced the cameras early, he told the story he could tell and promised more information when he could. I’ll be showing Pavlich’s first appearance to my clients. Not as an example of perfection. As an example of fronting up when you don’t yet have all the answers. It’s what good leadership looks like.

And then the club did exactly what Pavlich said it would do: it came back with more. Five players banned for the rest of the season, including finals. That’s not a small call for a club sitting second on the ladder. And importantly, they did it quickly. Sitting on a footy club board myself, I can only imagine the crisis meetings held to get to that point.

Behaviour is more important than football. Community expectations were met with this decision. And good on the brave people in that boardroom who decided on this.

The Dean Cox and Callum Mills presser was interesting from a comms point of view. Full disclosure, I’ve had a soft spot for Dean Cox since a media trip to Africa together many years ago. But purely from a comms point of view, that doesn’t earn him immunity here.

Cox started shakily. The doorstop at training looked like a man who was tired, uncomfortable and would rather have been almost anywhere else. And the beginning of the press conference didn’t convince me either. Reading prepared words about respecting women felt exactly like someone reading prepared words about respecting women. But about 44 seconds in, he stopped reading and started talking, I believed him. That’s something I bang on about constantly in media training: stop trying to deliver the words and start communicating the thought. He answered what he could pretty well after that.

Callum Mills. Calm. Clear. Measured. Human. An extraordinary media communicator and an enormous asset to that club right now. I suspect a few TV executives have already put his name in the “call when he retires” file.

And then came the questions. My favourite was the beautifully blunt: “Were you in the room?” Good question. Clean question. Clean answer from Cox.

Journalists had plenty of opportunity to ask what they needed to ask. And yes, I think blind Freddie knew why the players drove back to Sydney, but we have to ask. And that’s what a press conference should allow: enough time for journalists to test the story, ask the uncomfortable questions and follow up. But every press conference needs someone (not in front of the cameras), prepared to wrap it up, and 12 -13 minutes was a fair hit. Good on the media team here for calling it at what seemed like the right time. A polite “Thanks very much, last question”.

That media team would have been under enormous pressure all week, fielding hundreds of calls, many from journalists they know well, while trying to keep the process and the story on track. That’s not an easy position to be in, and from the outside, they handled it well.

So no, I don’t think the Swans handled every moment perfectly. But they kept communicating. And they acted.

And that’s the bigger lesson here for every organisation, not just football clubs. Community expectations have changed. Protecting the bottom line, the brand, or even a shot at a premiership, can not come before doing what is right.

There are still serious questions to be answered and no one should be conducting that investigation on social media. I hope the players involved get the support they need. Someone in the footy world said to me this week, “Imagine how pissed off their teammates must be.” I asked if he meant pissed off with the club for ending their season. “No. Pissed off with their 5 mates for letting them down.” That distinction stayed with me because it says a lot about how this has landed.

More importantly, I hope the women involved are surrounded by good people and given the privacy and support they need while this plays out. Behind the headlines, the press conferences and the football consequences are women whose lives have been pulled into something enormous. What happened to them is bigger than football, and I feel it’ll be something they will carry with them for a long time. That should sit pretty heavily for all of us.

Which brings me to Daisy Pearce. She stripped away about 97 pages of crisis-management strategy and reduced it to “Be a good human”. There it is. The best crisis communications strategy of the week. Actually, probably the best crisis prevention strategy too. Be a good human. Hard to improve on that.