A former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, famously quipped that “a week is a long time in politics”, a comment he made during one of the UK’s crises in the 1960s.
Sixty years on it seems like a day is a long time in politics in the UK.
On Wednesday the Home Secretary1 resigned (or was pushed).
Later that day the Prime Minister, Liz Truss, bullishly insisted at Prime Minister’s Questions “I am a fighter not a quitter”.
That evening, senior members of the Government were accused of manhandling hesitant MPs as they voted on a Government motion to do with fracking.
Within 24 hours the Prime Minister had resigned as Leader of the Conservative Party (after 6 weeks in office), which accords her the dubious distinction of becoming the shortest-lived PM in UK Parliamentary history.
Today, a Prime Minister. In a few months, a piece of pub quiz trivia.
I provide some further commentary on the crisis below – and the lessons I draw for crisis management. I also give a follow up to my piece in Issue #20 (a piece that drew parallels between conducting an orchestra and running an in house department) – having had the privilege to see Sir Mark Elder in rehearsal (and then in concert) yesterday.
First, another in the series of guest pieces by senior in-house lawyers (or distinguished former in-house lawyers) on leadership through crisis.
This week’s piece is by Julia Chain who has had a fascinating career that has ranged from being first woman Managing Partner of a (UK) City Law Firm to being GC of T-Mobile, and now Chair of the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Julia’s views are, as always, both illuminating and highly practical.
As always, please comment and contribute to the debate by posting direct on Practical Counsel. Also, please write in with your unique people issues to me (practicalcounsel@substack.com) - I unequivocally undertake never to reveal your identity and will change key details of your situation so as to preserve your confidentiality and anonymity (unless you don’t want this). I also undertake to write to you personally with my own thoughts and comments on your situation and am always happy to follow up with a call on Zoom or similar.
GC Expert ‘Take of the Week’
Julia Chain is former General Counsel of T-Mobile, a telecoms corporation that merged with Sprint in 2020 to become one of the world’s largest mobile networks. She is now Chair of the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and is a past Deputy Chair of the UK’s Commission for Racial Equality (a forerunner of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission).
Dear Jonathan
Many years ago when I was a new GC working at T-Mobile, a large mobile phone provider, I was asked to organise a series of crisis management workshops for our senior teams so that we would be prepared in case a disaster precipitated the closure of the whole telecoms network.
The sorts of questions we needed to consider and rehearse were as follows. Who would have access to the special network, which was only turned on in an emergency? Who could come into work and who had to stay at home? Who would speak to the security services? Who should communicate with our customers and how?
I duly organised some sessions with an excellent company who taught us a lot. However, the feeling in the room was that the exercise was a bit ‘doom and gloom’. My team felt that the whole thing was interesting, even rather fun, but irrelevant.
Fast forwarding … we then experienced the horror that was 2. The phone network was closed down temporarily as the unthinkable happened and bombs exploded on the London Underground and over ground. Everything we had learnt now in the ‘classroom’ became essential to managing what was an acute – and unforeseen – crisis.
Today as we emerge from two extraordinary years of pandemic into a world that looks different and rather frightening in many ways, it’s worth revisiting our approach to crisis management. We may not be able to prevent a crisis from happening, but we can try and anticipate it and to a large extent control our response to it.
The following is, to my mind, as good a template as any, for everyone. Whether you are a Managing Partner, a GC, a senior leader or just manage a small team the basics are the same:
1. Identify the risks. What are the main risks to your business or your group? Think about the day-to-day risks as well as the big picture. Would, for example, failure of technology or lack of public transport be a worry? Do you have key people whose absence would be a problem? What is business critical? And always consider reputational risk. Planning your response now will, in extreme circumstances, be the difference between survival … and failure! Never be worried to consider the unthinkable; someone did put glass into baby food on supermarket shelves - it happened and it was the company selling the baby food that got the headlines!
2. Make an action plan. Keep your plan fluid so that it can change as circumstances require; the most effective plans shouldn’t rely on any one person or thing, but rather be a series of decision trees – if A then B ; if C then D.
3. Establish a crisis unit. A crisis unit is a small group of sensible and unflappable colleagues. They may not have detailed knowledge of the business but they will know who to ask and they will be the people able to make calm and rational decisions. This unit needs to be led from the top; this is not the time for senior management to be missing in action! You need to take charge and set the agenda but you also need to listen to those team members who understand the day-to-day operations best.
4. Designate and train a spokesperson. Effective communication is key (I’m saying this in bold!). You need someone in this role who can think on their feet and deliver messages, both positive and difficult / challenging, clearly and effectively.
5. Define the messages you want to transmit. See above. Having the right messenger is important, but delivering the right message is absolutely crucial! We have had some very good examples of how NOT to deliver messages in the last few weeks. I was struck by reading a report into a recent Hospital Trust scandal (in the UK’s National Health Service) which concluded that there had been abject failures in communication between doctors and nurses; between nurses and admin staff - with words and phrases such as ‘arrogant’, ‘self-serving’ and ‘lack of respect’ being used. Honest and transparent internal communication is every bit as important as good external comms. Decide what you want to say, but don’t promise what you can’t deliver. Be honest but be kind – the message might be difficult for people to hear. And never be afraid to say you are sorry!
6. Check on the culture. Organisations which have a culture of respecting individuals, of being kind and empathetic, of being fair and enabling, of being inclusive and diverse are strong and durable, and are far more able to withstand crises than cultures which encourage unnecessary hierarchies, which condone or facilitate bad behaviour, and which ignore or stifle complaints.
7. Make time for crisis management. Crisis management is not an ‘optional extra’. Crisis management in today’s world is real and necessary. No need to panic but essential to have the plan ready and regularly reviewed. It is no good making a plan and filing it away in a drawer – it needs to be a living document, periodically reviewed and redrawn.
8. Stay positive. Remember that you are the role model for your team, or your company, and so lead from the front! Be clear, be honest and be prepared!!
Many crises come out of the blue, but by following the above template / advice, I honestly believe that your readers will be better placed to face the unexpected.
Best wishes
Julia
Jonathan’s ‘Take of the Week’. “Going, going, gone ….”
When I was growing up, Prime Ministers seemed to come and go in Italy with a regularity unknown to British politics. The resignation of a Prime Minister in the UK was, by contrast, a rarity. I vaguely remember the day Harold Wilson resigned. I was 8 years old at the time. I didn’t really understand what was happening, but knew it was something very important and a ‘big deal’.
Like the UK currency, the value of political resignations has plummeted in the last few weeks. Just these last 7 days first a Chancellor of the Exchequer resigned, then a Home Secretary, and finally a Prime Minister.
Gone, gone, gone.
I agree with every word of Julia Chain’s excellent piece above. I am struck by the sharp contrast between the impeccably orderly transition between the late Queen and HM Queen Charles III, and the utterly botched transition between the 55th Prime Minister (Boris Johnson) and the 56th (Liz Truss).
True, the Queen’s death was hardly a bolt from the blue. But there was an awful lot that could have gone wrong. Operation London Bridge – the code name for the plan that would be activated upon the Queen’s Death – was worked and reworked with military precision, and was a masterpiece of planning. I am quite sure that there were plenty of unforeseen circumstances that required tweaks to the plan – but almost every eventuality had clearly been mapped out and worked through in meticulous detail.
What more to say of the complete shambles of the past few days. I provided a number of thoughts in last week’s issue of Practical Counsel, but have a couple of further reflections in light of the events this week.
First, one point I failed to make last week was that the current crisis was very much of the Prime Minister’s own making. This series has concentrated on crisis management and leadership through crisis, but it is equally important to remember to do some basic things that will prevent you from facing a crisis in the first place. This Prime Minister failed to heed the consensus of independent expert advice (namely that her economic agenda was doomed to fail). As Julia points out above, always listen to those who know better than you – and overturn the orthodoxy at your own peril.
Second, you are highly unlikely to navigate your way out of a crisis with a disunited or dysfunctional team. I have the slimmest slither of sympathy for Liz Truss trying to lead a bitterly divided team – the process of her own selection saw her elected by the majority of members of the Conservative party, but lacking the support of the majority of her Members of Parliament, who had backed her key leadership rival. She was trying to square an impossible circle, and while the speed of her departure is perhaps surprising, the fact of her departure is not.
This chimes with Julia’s point above about checking on – and attending to the culture – of your organisation. If that organisation is riven with division it is unlikely to face off or weather a crisis. Given that the Conservative Party (and its parliamentary faction) is fractured in a number of ways – principally around the fallout from Brexit but also on a number of other issues – it is hard to see this Prime Minister’s successor having much more success negotiating the crisis than the current incumbent.
I mentioned in the introduction to this issue that I had the privilege of watching Sir Mark Elder in rehearsal this week, and then conducting the Hallé Orchestra in concert. Some readers may recall that I interviewed Sir Mark in issue #20 of Practical Counsel and we spoke about some of the parallels between leading a legal department and conducting an orchestra.
I’m certainly not going to stretch the lessons learned from Sir Mark to the topic of leading through crisis. But what a remarkable contrast between the disorder and chaos this week in Parliament and the orderly precision – and lucid communication – of Sir Mark’s orchestra.
I was struck by the minute attention to detail in rehearsal – the reworking of a phrase, Sir Mark checking back with his Assistant Conductor to ensure that the audience member would hear precisely the right balance between different sections of the orchestra.
In the second piece, Shostakovitch’s 5th Symphony, I counted around 75 performers, all playing in absolute harmony. When the violas and cellos were playing at one point it sounded just like a magnificent organ, the sound was so blended.
If Liz Truss has a bit of a downtime when she steps down as Prime Minister next week I’d recommend her sitting in on a few of Sir Mark’s rehearsals. She could learn a lot from someone who truly understands how to communicate and how to get the best from a disparate team.
Key Takeaways
1. This is the fourth in a series of issues about leadership through crisis.
2. In the first issue, Jonathan introduced the series and shared some initial thoughts about the best ways for senior in-house lawyers to show leadership during a crisis.
3. In the second and third issues, David Moskowitz, an ex-DGC of Wells Fargo, and Martin Wilson, Chief GC of Phillips shared their views, emphasising the critical importance of managing key internal relationships and relationships with the Board, incorporating risk perspectives beyond pure legal risk, developing influence with both non-legal corporate partners and key external parties and responding appropriately to a crisis – maintaining a cool head but also deploying behaviours and mindsets commensurate with the crisis.
4. In this issue, Julia Chain, a former GC of T-Mobile, provides a template for crisis planning and management, arguing that it is crucially important to plan in advance for a crisis, and that crucial elements of this include identifying key risks, making an action plan, establishing a crisis unit, having a competent spokesperson (and ensuring that the spokesperson has clear messages to deliver), attending to culture, making time for crisis management and staying positive.
5. Jonathan Middleburgh comments further on the ongoing financial and political crisis in the UK and provides an update to his previous piece on parallels between conducting an orchestra and leading a legal department.
And now …….
Contribute to the debate and write in with your comments and observations. Also write to Jonathan with any other people issues you face as an in-house lawyer.
Jonathan can be reached by email at practicalcounsel@substack.com
A note for you picky lawyers; and a plea for tolerance
I am a British lawyer by background and went to both school and University in the UK. So my English is British English. I have taken a conscious decision to write this newsletter in British English, but to try to avoid phrases that aren’t common outside the UK. Sometimes, though, I’ll use a phrase that isn’t commonly used outside the UK, without realising that it is a Britishism. I also endeavour to use the vernacular spellings of my contributors (e.g. to use US spellings for a US contributor), but won’t always get this right.
My plea is for you to tolerate the British spellings and grammar and the occasional Britishism. And to focus on the substance of the newsletter rather than the occasional (to you) annoying turn of phrase, bit of grammar or unorthodox spelling, or the occasional inconsistency in spelling as between, for example, UK and US ‘standard’ spellings.
Thank you and best wishes,
Jonathan Middleburgh