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Mark Ragan
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27
You work for the most popular airline in the world. Your customers love you, and you have this zany corporate culture that reporters love to write about. Everything is fine with the world.
Then one day the crisis strikes. In one 24-hour period you get slammed with 500 media inquiries because the FAA says your airplanes are “unairworthy.”
Nightmare you say? Not to Ginger Hardage, senior vice president for corporate communications at Southwest Airlines. Hardage told a packed crowd of IABC communicators how her company responded to the media onslaught on March 12 when Southwest grounded 8 percent of its fleet.
Last week I promised my eXchange blog readers that I would cover the event.
Here is the story I am running on the front page of Ragan.com today.
Hope you enjoy it.
Ginger Hardage, Southwest Airlines Interview
A couple of points I did not make in my Ragan.com article. I feel they are really only pertinent to the IABC Chicago chapter.
I have known Ginger Hardage almost from the day I started at Ragan in the early 1990’s. She is one of the best in our business. What can you say about someone who flies from Dallas to Chicago to make a 45-minute address to roughly 50 colleagues? It’s the kind of commitment to our profession that all of Southwest’s communicators demonstrate.
I mentioned in a previous blog that I have been criticized for praising Hardage and Southwest too much. But I don’t know how to get around this: Her company really does practice good internal and external communications. Does Southwest always make the right moves? Of course not. It stumbled two weeks ago when it came out swinging, accusing the FAA of misleading the public. But even that mistake was handled well. The company quickly trotted CEO Gary Kelly before the press to apologize.
Communication is messy all of the time. It’s really messy during a crisis. It’s how you handle that mess, how you correct your mistakes, and the speed with which you do it that matters.
What do you think?
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