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I received an email congratulating me on being named the Most Iconic Voice in Corporate Reputation Defense 2026.

For about four seconds, I sat up a little straighter.

Then I noticed that McKenzie and Chad were also CC’d. Word for word. Same award. Same publication — Enterprise World Magazine, which I’d never heard of until 9:07 that morning. Same $2,000 price tag for a 10-page cover story going to 350,000 ‘C-Suite Executives.’

We were all the most iconic voice. That’s quite a crowded podium.

This is a textbook vanity play, and it works constantly on smart, successful people. The formula is simple: flattery so thick you could spread it on toast, impressive-sounding reach numbers nobody can verify, a price tag just low enough to feel like ‘why not,’ and just enough urgency to prevent you from thinking too hard about any of it.

I had a client who would have jumped on this immediately, then complained about two thousand dollars out the door and a day wasted. Don’t make that mistake.

Here’s what’s actually interesting about this scam from a crisis communications perspective: the mechanism it exploits is identical to the mechanism that destroys leaders in real crises. Both work on the same vulnerability — the instinct to react to flattery.

When a crowd is angry at you, the temptation is to react to the fear. When someone offers you praise, the temptation is to react to the ego boost. In both cases, the right move is to pause, assess reality, and respond deliberately rather than instinctively.

Don’t let ego write your checks. That’s advice for vanity awards, and it’s advice for every crisis you’ll ever face.

Nine people are dead in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. Population 2,700. The kind of town where the mayor says he probably knows every one of the victims by name. Parents dropped their kids off at school. Some of those kids didn’t come home.

There’s nothing adequate to say about that. There shouldn’t be.

What I know from experience is what happens in the hours and days that follow, beyond the immediate tragedy. There are people in leadership roles right now who barely slept. Not because they were in Tumbler Ridge. Because they’re responsible for schools, campuses, public spaces, and communities of their own. And this morning their phone is ringing.

School superintendents are hearing from terrified parents: could this happen here? What are you doing about it? Principals are trying to find the right words for Monday, knowing there aren’t any. Security directors are being asked to explain protocols to boards and executives who are suddenly, urgently paying attention. Municipal leaders are being asked ‘what’s our plan?’ and not being sure they have one.

These people aren’t in crisis. But they’re standing at the edge of one. And most of them are navigating it alone.

The challenge of being adjacent to a tragedy — of leading an organization that isn’t the story but is now being asked to respond to it — is one of the most underappreciated leadership situations there is. You can’t claim the grief of those directly affected. You can’t be dismissive of legitimate fear in your own community. You have to walk a line that requires genuine empathy and genuine competence at the same time.

What people on that edge need is someone who has been there before. Not a binder. Not a protocol. A person.

She’d spent 10 years building her food company from farmers markets and weekend craft fairs up to national distribution. Early mornings, late nights, cold calls to retailers one by one. Then her 16-year-old son ended up on video at a fast food restaurant making genuinely offensive, racist remarks to the employees.

The video went on social media. Within hours, local accounts had identified him, identified her, and connected him to her business. Her phone wouldn’t stop.

She called me in a panic. ‘What do I do? I didn’t raise him this way. But I can’t exactly go on TV and say my kid is an idiot.’ Trust me — she wanted to. She was furious with him, mortified by what he’d done, and genuinely sickened by his behavior.

Here’s what we actually did. First, we created a place for her to speak directly, human to human. She didn’t have a personal social media presence, so we set up an account specifically for her to respond — not as a brand, as a person. Second, she posted a genuine apology. Not corporate speak. A mom, mortified, saying: this is not how I raised my kids. He will be making a personal apology. We are committed to doing whatever we can to make this right. Third, we reached out to every retailer who carried her products before they saw it on Instagram. We showed them the statement, explained what happened, and made sure they heard it from us first.

The response from retailers? ‘Sometimes kids can be idiots. Thanks for doing the right thing.’

No boycotts. No products yanked from shelves. Sales untouched.

She called the penalty flag on herself before the crowd could. Speed, honesty, and transparency won. In a world obsessed with cancellation, the leaders who take genuine accountability first still come out standing.

A message arrived: ‘A crisis? We’re an annuity development company. What kind of crisis would we have?’

I hear this a lot. The assumption that crisis is something that happens to airlines, hospitals, and oil companies — to ‘high-risk’ businesses. Not to quiet, buttoned-up financial services firms. Not to companies where nothing very interesting happens.

Let me share 10 crises I have personally been involved with that are completely agnostic to your industry:

• a senior executive gets arrested;
• a longtime employee files a harassment lawsuit and goes public;
• a disgruntled client posts a viral takedown on social media;
• your CFO gets investigated for fraud even though they’re innocent;
• a data breach exposes customer financial information;
• an employee dies on company property;
• your CEO’s old social media posts resurface;
• a regulator launches a surprise investigation;
• a key partner gets caught in a scandal and your name is attached;
• a family member does something incredibly stupid on camera and it goes viral.

None of these require you to be a high-risk business. They require you to be a business — with employees, customers, partners, and a reputation you’ve spent years building.

Great leaders aren’t born in good times. They’re great because of how they’ve handled the awful moments. A crisis doesn’t require you to be reckless or to operate in a dangerous industry. It requires you to have people in your organization who are human, and it requires you to have built something worth protecting.

The companies that survive these moments aren’t the ones who thought it couldn’t happen to them. They’re the ones who knew it could — eventually — and decided to be ready.

I’ve watched executives deliver technically accurate statements that somehow made everything worse. Not because they lied — because they reached for the same tired phrases everyone uses when they’re scared and stalling.

Three phrases do the most damage, and they’re everywhere.

The first: ‘We take this very seriously.‘ Every company says this. Every single one. It has become the corporate equivalent of ‘thoughts and prayers’ — words that fill space without conveying meaning. Your customers don’t want reassurance that you’re taking it seriously. They want evidence that you’re actually doing something. Show the work, not the sentiment.

The second: ‘At this time, we have no evidence that…‘ The moment you say ‘at this time,’ people hear the hedge. They know you’re building yourself an escape route for when more information surfaces. They’re right to be suspicious — this phrase exists to protect the company legally while technically telling the truth. The problem is that ‘technically true’ and ‘genuinely trustworthy’ are very different things.

The third: ‘We apologize if anyone was offended.‘ That little word ‘if’ carries enormous weight, and none of it is good. You’re not actually apologizing — you’re questioning whether the other person’s reaction was even valid. It makes the recipient feel worse.

What works instead is simpler than most leaders think. Acknowledge that the other person’s questions are the same ones you’re asking yourself. Tell them specifically what happened and what you’re doing about it. Tell them when they’ll hear from you again.

That’s empathy, specific action, and ownership without conditions.

The phrases that build trust in a crisis are almost always the ones that lawyers want to soften and executives want to avoid. They feel risky because they’re direct. But direct is what people remember, and it’s what they believe.

Your hotel has a crisis plan. It probably won’t save your general manager’s career.

Here’s the problem: most hotel crisis plans are built around one assumption. When something goes wrong, escalate to the brand. ‘Marriott will handle it.’ ‘Hilton has a process. Let corporate take the lead.’

But while your GM is waiting for guidance from brand headquarters, five different audiences are already staring directly at him. His own staff, wondering what to do. Local regulators, asking what happened. Emergency responders, needing information now. Guests and media, looking for someone in charge. And the brand itself, watching how he handles it.

None of them are going to wait for corporate to call back.

The crisis plan says ‘contact Hilton.’ But the front desk employee, the local news reporter, the fire marshal standing in the lobby? They’re not asking for Hilton’s statement. They’re asking your GM what’s going on right now. If he doesn’t have an answer, he doesn’t look like a leader. He looks like someone waiting for permission.

The brand will survive. The big chains have survived worse. The question is whether your GM will still be running that property six months from now, and whether the team around him still trusts him to make decisions under pressure.

Crisis communications training for hotel general managers — real training, not a memo — is one of the most underinvested categories in the hospitality industry. The brand provides the playbook. Nobody provides the practice. And when the fire marshal is in the lobby at 2am, the playbook is the last thing your GM is going to reach for.

Train the person, not just the plan.

A child drowned at a waterpark. That’s devastating. What the general manager said next made it much, much worse.

‘No comment.’

He said it three times in a single press scrum. Reporters were asking about supervision, about lifeguards, about where the parents were. He didn’t have answers yet. So he gave them nothing.

By the end of the day, the narrative wasn’t about what happened. It was about what he must be covering up.

He wasn’t covering up anything. He just didn’t know what to say. But here’s the problem: when a leader says ‘no comment,’ everyone hears the same thing. ‘I’m hiding something.’

‘On the advice of counsel, we’re not going to comment further’ isn’t much better. It doesn’t matter if you’re genuinely waiting for legal sign-off. It doesn’t matter if you truly don’t have the facts yet. The audience has already written the story, and you just handed them a villain.

Here’s what he could have said instead: ‘I don’t have all the information yet. Here’s what I can tell you. We’re taking this with complete seriousness. I’ll be back with more as soon as I have it.’

That’s not spin. It’s not a promise you can’t keep. It’s just presence — honest, human acknowledgment that something terrible happened and you’re not running from it.

The world is always looking for a villain in a crisis. ‘No comment’ doesn’t protect you from that role. It hands it to you. ‘No comment’ is a vacuum. Vacuums get filled by people who don’t have your best interests in mind.

If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. And you won’t like their version.

The CEO called me in a panic. ‘We might have to recall $8 million worth of meat in the next 48 hours.’

His company supplied a major food brand. Something had gone wrong in production. The brand was already nervous and asking hard questions. One wrong answer and they’d pull the trigger on a recall that would gut his business. He had about an hour before the next call with their team.

‘They’re freaking out,’ he said. ‘What do I tell them?’

Here’s the thing about moments like this: the instinct is to stall. Buy time. Wait until you have all the facts before you say anything. But the brand doesn’t need all the facts. They need to know you’re not hiding from the problem.

I told him to walk into that call with four things only: what you know, what you don’t know yet, what you’re doing right now to find out, and when you’ll update them next. That’s it. No spin. No deflection. No attempt to minimize the situation before you understand it. Just clarity and forward motion.

He made the call. The brand didn’t initiate the recall.

Not because the problem disappeared — the investigation was still ongoing. But because they trusted he was on top of it. They trusted he wasn’t managing them. They trusted that the information he had, he was sharing, and that when he had more, he would share that too.

Trust is the thing that prevents a business problem from becoming a reputational catastrophe. And trust in a crisis is built in exactly the same way it’s built everywhere else: by being honest with people, including when honesty means saying ‘I don’t know yet.’

I was in a community center with fifty angry people — upset parents, skeptical neighbors, everyone who’d lived next to the chemical plant for decades. Environmental reports had come out. The news wasn’t good. They were terrified. And they were looking directly at my client.

He said: ‘Well, let’s be clear. I’m not giving you cancer. You’re saying the factory is giving you cancer.’

You can cringe now. I did.

This wasn’t a stupid man. He’d built a successful company, navigated complex deals, led hundreds of employees. You may remember a similar moment: BP CEO Tony Hayward, in the middle of the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history, with eleven people dead and oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, said: ‘No one wants this over more than I do. I want my life back.’

Both were intelligent, accomplished people. Both said exactly the wrong thing at the worst possible moment. Here’s why.

When threat hits, your amygdala — the survival part of your brain — takes over. Fight, flight, or freeze. Your prefrontal cortex, the part that thinks strategically and chooses words carefully, effectively goes offline. You operate on instinct. Layer in the cognitive overload of an active crisis — lawyers, media, employees, regulators all demanding attention simultaneously — and your brain runs on defaults just to keep up. Add a public accusation that registers as an identity threat, and the instinct to defend yourself overrides the instinct to protect your audience.

The chemical executive didn’t mean to be cruel. He’s an engineer. He wanted logic to protect him. The room needed humanity. Tony Hayward was exhausted. His brain let slip what he privately felt when the moment required empathy.

This is why you can’t do this alone. You need someone in your ear who isn’t flooded with adrenaline — someone who can pull you back before you say the thing you can’t unsay. And you need to rehearse the hard moments before you’re in them.

Folks — I’ve seen things. And what breaks my heart is when the lawyer gives you bad advice. Not about contracts. Not about liability. About what to say.

When crisis hits, legal’s instinct is to protect you in court. ‘Say nothing. Admit nothing. Wait for the facts.’ It’s an understandable response from people doing their job. But here’s the problem: your lawyer is trying to protect you in their arena. You’re not on trial yet in a courtroom. You’re on trial in the court of public opinion. And that court moves at a completely different speed.

You can measure response time in that court in minutes, not hours or days. While your lawyer is on the phone drafting careful language, your customers are writing your story. If you’re not your own spokesperson, someone else is telling your story for you — and it is not the story you want told.

I’ve watched legal teams essentially hand organizations reputational catastrophes while technically doing their jobs perfectly. The advice was sound from a litigation standpoint. It was catastrophic from a public trust standpoint. Because trust doesn’t wait for depositions. It’s decided at the speed of social media, and it rarely reverses.

The solution isn’t to ignore legal counsel. Legal needs to be in the room. Their job is critically important. But crisis communications counsel needs to be in the room too, and their job is different: keeping you credible and trusted in the eyes of the public while legal keeps you protected in court.

Sometimes those two objectives are in tension. When they are, you need both voices, not just one. The best crisis response I’ve ever seen? A CEO who said: ‘I don’t have all the answers yet. Here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t, and here’s what we’re doing right now.’ Simple. Human. Fast. Good lawyers loved it. The public trusted it.