Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, it's Steve Indig at Sport Law. Leave me a message, I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
Hey, Steve, it's Dina. You aren't going to believe what just came across my desk. We need to chat. Give me a call.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Welcome to the latest episode of Sportopia. We are so excited to share our knowledge and have conversations about healthy human sport.
[00:00:48] Speaker C: Today we're going to talk about crisis, how best to navigate it, and how these issues might be converted into opportunities for connection. The word crisis comes from the Greek word cry, which means to sieve or to distinguish.
So in a real sense, a crisis invites leaders to pause, name the desired outcome, implement policies, and manage the situation in alignment with values.
My favorite word, Steve. In our experience, it's about how leaders rise to the occasion. Now, before we get started, we always like to ask, what's coming across your desk this week? So, Steve, over to you.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Remember Dina? Well, you weren't here, but in 2005, no, 2003, 2004, when I started here, I would say to myself, how many bylaws can you actually write?
And of course, I always thought it was a minimal number, and I think it's an infinite number. But I do have a couple, couple calls this week to continue supporting organizations and governance, particularly. One call I have in a couple days is about transitioning their board structure from, you know, what they currently have to a new board structure. And how do you do that? One thing we always try to do is recognize and reflect and respect somebody's current term. Maybe not their portfolio, but at least their term.
And then applying a bit of math to get from a board of eight on one year terms to a board of nine on three year terms.
How do you do that? So it does take a little bit of math to figure out who we want to elect when.
But yeah, the, the governance work continues to evolve. I also have another call tomorrow about the enforceability of trademarks and, and the ownership of trade names or logos and, and organizations or other people borrowing them without permission. So always something to do every day here. What's going on with you, Dino?
[00:02:52] Speaker C: Oh, I love the borrowing.
It's. What is it that, you know, sometimes couples like to say to each other? It's better to ask for forgiveness. Forgiveness than ask for permission, beg for forgiveness, ask for permission.
So on my end, it's actually governance as well. But it, I like to think of governance as, you know, a means to an end. So helping organizations and the people better reflect. Like, where do we, where do we want to go. Who do we want to be? And then what are the values that we're going to use to make these decisions, guide behaviors? And the structure becomes an enabler to help you achieve that. But too often I've been, especially these days, Steve, people get entrenched and stuck into the minutia of, in this case, the bylaws that are the, the. The. It's the language of the structure. And when you go to change something, what we know about human behavior is that we tend to this and say, what are you taking away from me?
So I've been in a project now for about 10 months with a client, and they're now ready to be talking more specifically about membership and specifically members and what the. Who are the members? How do we expand beyond the original design?
In what ways can we help the members see that what they have may not be helping them in the long run?
So the work that I do is akin more to an architect. Right. The architect really wants to understand from the client, what's your desired vision for the project?
And then I'm going to help you ensure that it's going to stand. You know, we're not going to build a house of. Of cards.
So I think that right now there's a lot of organizations, and you've echoed this, that are pausing to reflect, look back on the structure that many of them started to design in the 70s, 80s, 90s, when the world of sport was a lot less complex, and the expectations aren't what they are today. So that's some of what's coming across my desk.
So, Steve, we want to talk about crisis. And it seems like everywhere we turn, there's fires to put out. And I'm curious, what are some of the things that you help clients reflect on when they come to you and say, I'm in the middle of a crisis?
[00:05:17] Speaker B: My favorite place to start, of course, always is, what does your policy say?
You know, for years, we would try and solve complex, complex questions or crises with a quick, well, what's the right answer? And a lot of times, just coming up with the answer is not necessarily the right thing to do. It's about the process, the procedure, the communications.
But of course, I want that policy there as a reflection of a guideline that we can follow to implement. It wasn't something Steve and Dina made up in the heat of the moment to make a decision that may or may not work out in the end. So I always, of course, ask for policy if there's some guidance there to supply to Supply to help us, guide us through the process.
And the other thing that coming from a lawyer, Dina, we could kind of laugh about is, you know, there's the policy side, there's the legal side, and then there's the people side. And a lot of times that doesn't always necessarily align.
And maybe this isn't a crisis situation, but we talk about employment law and we talk about termination of employees. And from a legal perspective, we don't really want to get into the why or the previous performance of the employee. We just want to talk about the end date and the package that they may be offered in the case of a without cause termination. But of course, the individual who's being terminated, who had been there for 2, 3, 4, 10, 20 years, wants why, what happened.
And putting those two together from a legal perspective and a humanistic perspective is very complicated. And I think you have to see the same lens when we talk about crisis. It's about, you know, managing people, managing the reputation of the organization. And a lot of times those things might not align.
So it takes a very cautious approach to do that. But depending on what the crisis is, may require us to do it very quickly.
So it's super, super complicated.
Dean, I'm going to turn around and ask you the same question, is, you know, how would you manage getting a call this afternoon on a crisis and what would you be asking or recommending to the client?
[00:07:39] Speaker C: Well, I really appreciate, you know, your, your thought, Steve, and you and I usually, this is what we do best, right? We kind of connect and collaborate together because you're going to see the world a little bit differently than I do. Where we tend to meet is we, I think both of us will think about how do we want people to feel in the midst of the crisis? Because we know from Maya Angelou, she says people aren't going to remember what you said or did. They will remember how you made them feel. So one of the very first questions I ask clients is how do you want people to feel as you're navigating this situation? And if you can start from that place that informs then your legal commitments, you have these obligations, these duties of care that you must attend to.
And when you are sourced or inspired by the more people side of the experience, that people can look back on it and feel really good about not what happened, but certainly how they managed it. So some of the things that I do is the first thing I like to do. I create, I've created like a stepped approach because of course, I've made a career out of helping people navigate sticky situations. So the first thing I do is I help them gather the facts and the evidence. So I will invite them to create a timeline. And I can't tell you enough, Steve, how much we refer back to the timeline, especially when something starts and we think it's going to be over in two weeks. And you and I know sometimes eight, nine months a year goes by and we're still sticky, we're still dealing with the sticky situation.
So I think that's the first thing I do. And then we assess the level of risk.
How probable is this? And maybe it's almost certain because it's happening right now.
But what's the impact? What's the consequence now that this is coming to pass? If it's catastrophic, then as you said, the sense of urgency, immediacy gives us less time to be able to be more deliberate and thoughtful and engaging our people. So I think that's the first thing. The second step, I always advise my advice to clients when we're doing proactive risk management and crisis management is to have a roster of experts that they can turn to to help them sort through these things.
So keep a list of who's my go to people.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:52] Speaker C: What's my, what's my crisis management bench strength to share it differently.
The third thing is to measure trust. And that brings home, I think your point around people. If trust is low within an organization, both internally, their members, their staff, their board, how they're going to go about navigating this crisis is going to be vastly different than if it's high. And the same question is for external members of their community. If the trust is high, then we can, in our communication, we can at least make an assumption that are going to receive the message the way it's intended. When trust is low, we have to slow down. We have to do a lot more face to face and we have to like move at the speed of trust, if you will. So I think that's another step that we, we have to measure and then we want to, you know, understand what are your current practices like if you, if a crisis happens, you want to go back to your policy. But what if your policy, wait for it, Steve, is outdated or what if you don't have a policy? Then you're making things up, you know, as you go along. I want to PA there actually, before I continue with the steps because I think you probably have lots of stories to share around that very point. There's no policy or the policy is outdated.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: Well, there are Certain scenarios where organizations may have an outdated policy or no policy, or they're relying on the PSO or the TSO or the NSO policy, but that policy doesn't specifically speak to managing a club issue.
And what do we do in that situation? And depending on what the scenario is, and let's call it a situation, 7, 8 or 9 out of 10 where the right thing is to remove a person from sport in the scenario, but we don't have policies to do that. I think in those situations you have no choice but to do the right thing. And if a judge or an arbitration panel says you have to take them back, then I think we take that on the chin. But I do think in some scenarios there is the right thing to do, regardless of policy. But again, I think we have to act cautiously. And when I say that, Dean, I'm thinking again about the legal perspective versus the public perspective. Let's go to the public perspective where there are scenarios where most organizations, when they end up in a crisis, what's the first thing they do? They call their lawyer and they say, how do we manage this? And the lawyer may take a day or two or three or four, depending on what's going on in their lives to provide an answer. But the public expects corrective action immediately. And there's lots of public cases where senior staff have lost their jobs because they haven't managed the crisis to the public perception quickly or correctly as it should have.
So there's this, you know, this tension, this tension between what's right for the organization and what's the public perception. And that doesn't always align and that creates a very complicated situation. And of course, being a lawyer, when an organization has a crisis that we want to assess and ascertain a timeline and gather evidence, that does take time, but the public doesn't see it that way. They say you need to fire that person or they need to be expelled.
That's hard.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:20] Speaker C: You're raising such a good point, Steve. And I think that that's why we recommend proactive plans in place. That's why we recommend leadership development. That's why we recommend risk management processes and policies. That's why we recommend crisis management plans in advance, so that when something happens, you're not having to invent the process as you're navigating the crisis. Right.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: What does your policy say?
[00:13:49] Speaker C: What does your policy or what does your plan say? I love it. So beyond the reviewing of the situation, and I know we're going to get into some case studies, I like to always say, what's your communication plan? So who needs to know what by when, how and why? What are your key messages? Who are the audiences you want to communicate to? And there's a priority to the audiences.
[00:14:11] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:11] Speaker C: The board wants to find out well before the.
Its front page of, you know, some.
I was used to say front page of a newspaper, but nobody's reading newspapers these days.
I still do. I still get a hard copy of the newspaper. So I think we really want to understand what is our communication plan. And again, the more you can do this in advance, the more planned and prepared you are, the easier it will be. And we want to ensure that the, you know, to your point earlier around the must do, what are the legal expectations and requirements? There is a felt sense of what we ought to do. And public, public perception has opinions on what we ought to do. And they may not be informed on what the must do is. That's the stickiness of the situation. That's why, you know, if we're prepared, it's so much easier to navigate these things. So alignment with values is to me very. Is critical.
I think, you know, that on what people fail to do, Steve, is so the crisis is happening. They may issue an initial statement and then there's radio silent.
And that's when the grumbling start to happen. That's when people's patience start. Starts to tank. That's when people start making assumptions. So we have to keep the line of communication. Transparency is key. And this intentionality that you spoke to at the beginning. So those are three things that are really important. It's not just the first announceable. Ongoing communication is really an, a strategic imperative when you're navigating crisis. I also want to talk about apologizing.
I know as lawyers, you know, there's often a, oh, we can't apologize. But you correct me if I'm wrong. In Canada, an apology is not an admission of guilt. And I can't stress enough how the acknowledgement of we could have done better, we should have done better. Here are the things that we're doing to mitigate these issues and the authenticity and the, the, the genuine like nature of offering the apology or the acknowledgment of we can do better to me, in my experience, created more space for the different parties to come together towards that solution. So I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.
And then, you know, the, the ongoing nature of here's what we've learned, here's what we're learning. Ongoing communication. And then One thing that people fail to do is so instrumental and they do this, I'll give you an example with the aviation field. They have debriefs, so they have these critical situation reviews where they review what were the steps that we took, what did we learn, what are we going to change so that this never happens again. And I would say in sport, we do a really good job post Olympic and Paralympic Games where we have these post, you know, event debriefs. But I would say around critical incidents, we're not there quite yet. So those are some of the steps that I help our clients navigate.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: One of the things I see often, Dina, and maybe not on what we'll call crisis communications, but more on complaint management is I'm complaining that you used vulgar language against me and I file that complaint and then I don't hear from the organization for two, three, four weeks.
Well, now I'm not really mad at you anymore. I'm mad at the organization because you didn't reply to me and manage my issue and in a timely manner or at least, you know, get back to me and then to your point, communicate. And you know, we see that the complaint evolve into far beyond the intended issue and that's always something we don't want to see and that's why we recommend timely intervention.
You know, you mentioned the Apologies Act, Dina. So that's a piece of legislation that I believe is based on provincial or territorial jurisdiction. So there is one in Ontario that allows you to say I'm sorry without being construed against you for a claim of negligence or intentional misconduct. And yeah, saying I'm sorry and acknowledging probably can go a long way to healing, but I think I'm not, you know, I think it depends on the situation, of course, being, being concerned from a legal perspective, but I think if we tie that back to open communication is going to, is going to go a long way.
You know, Dina, I like to make things that three foot level and real, so maybe we can talk about some situations. I know you've dealt with at least two in the last two months, that maybe we could start molding what that would that looked like for our client without getting too specific into the details.
[00:18:52] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you, Steve.
I would say, well, that one of the most recent one, and it's one that always, you know, is so hard to help clients navigate, is the death of, of an athlete or the death of a trusted volunteer, the death of someone who's part of their community.
Excuse me. And you know, in a, in a more recent situation, I was contacted because a very young person had died, 16 years old and, and died by suicide. And so I raise that because I think it's really important for us to understand that there are certain crisis that really require specialized care and intervention. And we know that suicide death is a stigmatized form of death and can create all kinds of unnecessary and harmful reverberations inside the community. That's trying to be really helpful. So some of the things that I do for the leadership is to remind that the first step is always to ensure that the parents, in this case of the child are the ones that get to control the narrative. And that takes immediate pressure off the leaders to have to figure this out. The second thing is I have them slow down because if it's true that the parent or the person who's responding on behalf of the parent and the family gets to control the narrative, then it gives them more time and space to not to have these knee jerk reactions.
Right. And so one of the things that I've noticed is in sport, we are doers. So we want to create a GoFundMe immediately. And I can't tell you how many times that's backfired on people because that wasn't the wishes of the parents, for instance. And so we really. Or there's competing GoFundMes, believe it or not. Steve. So it's just really helpful for us to remember as a principle, a fundamental principle is to ensure that the parents or the family are able to have voice and choice in the matter, which relieves the pressure off the leader. Then we just want to navigate the situation. So there is some communication that goes out that speaks about how sad we are as a community.
Information sharing. So here's what you need to know. Here are the funeral details, for instance. Here's ways that you can contribute. So if there is a GoFundMe or ways that you want to memorialize this person, then there's the gathering. And so what often I do, because I have specialized training in this space, is I help people gather. So beyond the funeral, we know that, you know, all trauma carries grief. Not all grief is traumatic. So what that means is for in a case like this, we can expect that for the athlete's teammates, this death will be traumatic. It's out of order. It's death by suicide. It's sudden. So those are three examples of things that might be more triggering for young people in the community.
And so what we did in a more recent gathering, the approach was to inform the parents. Because you can imagine, Steve the parents were like fish out of water. What do we say to our children? What don't we say? And again, because suicide is so misunderstood and stigmatized, there's a fear that this is contagious. And what we know through research is what young people need is caring people who are going to speak truth to them and not shame them into silence or avoid the discussion. We also know that peer to peer is more likely going to be the way that people are going to make sense of this. At the ages of 16, 17, 18, they're less likely to talk to their parents.
So we created a gathering for the parents where they could come and ask questions. We also, in that space honored the young life, right, that had died. It wasn't just like an information session. I can't stress that enough. And people were really emotional, as they should be because they had come to know and care about this young athlete. Then we did a gathering for the athletes. Now, because many of the athletes were young, we, we needed to incorporate the parents too. And the feedback from the client was that was really great. But some athletes would have wished that the parents weren't there. And I would say true. And yet because of the age of the children, you just need to ensure that they have that supportive environment. And it's the parent who has the authority, if you will, to ensure whether or not their child should be alone navigating this or, you know, they were comfortable in, or they weren't comfortable in having their child participate.
So from deliberate communications to these gatherings, to supporting the coaches, maybe that's the last thing I'll share before I invite you to get, you know, give your thoughts.
A lot of the times the forgotten people in this are the coaches. Because the coaches of the athlete are also affected by this situation. And because adults feel that they have to be stoic, this is what we tend to reward writ large in our society. They don't feel that they can express their emotions or talk about the pain that they may be going through. And what we know from research is the children are going to be looking up to the adults to know what is permissible and what isn't.
So I tend to work with the coaches to talk about when you first come back. So the return back after everybody knows. And it's not a long, drawn out affair. Often it could be a very intimate five minutes, I let the coach know, take a knee so that you're eye level to the athletes, bring tissue so you normalize this. If you feel the upsurge and grief arise, allow that to Be part of it.
Talk to the athletes about how they may want to commemorate their teammate. And. And then you. You can feel like, less alone and isolated and the pressure to have it all put together, you know, so from my experience, I've. I've had to navigate several different things, from murder of. Of people all the way to death by suicide and in between. And I would say, Steve, you know, sport builds resilience and community and connection, and you see that come to life when. When people have to navigate a tragedy like that.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: Thanks for sharing that, Dina. I'm. I'm curious.
I don't really have anything to add. I want to actually revert back to you. We talked about crisis communication plans being prepared.
A lot of what you just spoke about. How do you prepare for that? Is there's no policy for that, there's no steps.
[00:25:42] Speaker C: Well, I would say back to our earlier conversation, Steve, we can put forward in our risk management plan the death of an athlete, death of a coach, death of a staff person. So we can actually plan for that scenario. And, you know, way back in my previous life when I was working with the Canadian Olympic Committee, you know, we had to navigate some pretty big things, including the death of, you know, the. The fiance of an athlete right before the Games.
So this is, you know, not planning for it just makes it harder. It doesn't prevent the bad thing from happening. So I would say get this into your risk management policy and your risk or your risk register, because what it will do is it forces the leaders, it invites the leaders to be a lot more deliberate about, well, how do we want to navigate this?
Then we get it on paper, and we know, again, back to those steps, Steve, where. Oh, we know that Steve can be our lawyer, and Dina has expertise in this, and there's a few. There's only a handful of us in Canada that have expertise, I would say, in this kind of trauma work and especially grief work. So knowing who your people are is such a. Is so helpful. The last thing I'll say on this is another client recently, and. And I'm going to invite all of our clients now to do this.
It's the first one, to my knowledge. They came to me because there was an issue, a crisis, and they wanted to create a crisis communication plan. And what we did, instead of creating, like, a standalone plan, we referenced the risk management policy.
And why that was so critical is because the real risk wasn't what happened. The real crisis was the dysfunction in the board was the way in which the board had opinions about how this should be managed was the conflict of interest that was arising because people weren't maintaining confidentiality.
So I would encourage everyone who's listening rather than create a standalone piece. Your crisis communication plan, if it's nestled under your risk management policy, embedded in your risk register, you can outline all of these scenarios that are keeping you up at night.
Document your current approach, brainstorm with the help of people like our friend. Jason is our lead expert in the risk management space, and him and I are collaborating, actually, on this very topic where he's doing the risk management work, and I'm being brought in to help with the proactive measures around how to manage this once the risk comes to pass. So I think those are a couple of anchoring points, Steve, because, you know, we can't affect what happens in life. The only thing we can do is affect how we choose to navigate the situation once it arises. And it really helps if we have a policy and we have a plan.
[00:28:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Where my mind's going, Dina, is that I've said this before on the podcast. You know, being a sport leader, being a sport board member, is hard these days. We used to come in, our job was to create a schedule and make sure there was equipment there and a coach there and an umpire there, and we played.
And now it's far more, far more sophisticated, including this heavy topic. So I think to our listeners, it's not about knowing the answer. It's about knowing when you don't know the answer and asking for help.
And that help is out there. So I encourage everybody, whoever wants to be proactive in their crisis communications, to reach out to us or others in the space that can support, support and to make. Make the right decision proactively and reactively.
Any final words from you, Dina?
[00:29:33] Speaker C: Well, I just appreciate the chance to have this conversation, Steve. You know, even if it helps one of our clients, our listeners, get a handle of this often, you know, I have a slide deck on. On this. It's not enough just for the national organizations to have their you know what together. In my opinion, most of them have some form of a risk register now, a policy. It's becoming a requirement through Sport Canada. Where the real source of risk is, though, is in community sport. 95% of sport at the community level is driven by volunteers. Right. Who are so well intended, but often in over their head when it comes to managing all of these things that we've just spoken about.
So I would say the next level up from this, if you will, is once the national partner has their.
Their proactive measures in place is to socialize this with their provincial territorial governments. Right? And then to encourage that to be the the the way of being for the storefronts, these people who are out there trying to do good work and often in over their head. So that that is also true that I often get engaged to help support the people in the community who are often in over their heads when something like this arises.
So be prepared, be planned and and make sure that you're keeping the people at the front of your your mind. Those would be my final thoughts.
[00:31:00] Speaker B: Thank you Dina. Thank you to our listeners. In the episode notes below you'll find some Sport Law blogs where you can find more information related to our conversation today. Thank you to so much to our listeners. We are so grateful to share our vision of Sportopia with you and to continue to elevate sport.
[00:31:19] Speaker C: As always to have your say in Sportopia. Email us@hellosportlaw CA to let us know what you want to hear about next. We hope you have a wonderful week and we look forward to connecting again soon.
[00:31:37] Speaker A: It.
