Communication

My many years of public service have provided me opportunities to practice my communication skills with multiple types of audiences in a variety of circumstances.

Communicating with the Media

Since 2007, I have been deployed as a public information officer to statewide disasters as part of the Command Staff for Texas Task Force 1 (TX-TF1) Urban Search and Rescue.  In that position, I have interacted with print and television media on multiple occasions.  The on-camera interviews and other interactions required me to represent TX-TF1 and the state of Texas emergency management community in the most positive light and provide accurate and timely information about ongoing search and rescue operations.  These interactions often happened under austere post-disaster conditions, often in remote locations, where I lacked complete information of the situation and was asked to answer many questions.   The prevalence of news media outlets at the incident site and the 24-hour news cycle required me to interact constantly for 16 to 18 hours a day during the first four or five days of the incident.  It was imperative that the response efforts of TX-TF1 be communicated to the media so they could understand how our team was assisting citizens in the affected population.   Our teams were often deployed over wide geographic areas, and it was common for me to conduct an on-camera interview with a Houston TV station and then a phone interview with a Beaumont Newspaper.

The weeks of experience interacting with the media and responding to interviews from local, state and national media outlets have prepared me to think quickly on my feet, control my reaction to ambush media questioning, and develop a tempo and cadence for keeping interviews clear, concise and usable for media outlets.  Over time I have learned to control the interview by setting ground rules, determining what the interviewer wants and the angle of their story.  By learning the motivations and hopes of the interviewer, I can better control the discussion and meet their needs while also making sure the message I wish to convey is told.  Influencing the narrative of a disaster response must be accomplished within the first 24 hours so as to encourage and establish the positive aspects of the response instead of the negative.  I have had significant experience to direct the media narrative towards the discussion of positive outcomes.  This experience has served me well when faced with multiple television news crews at a federally declared disaster or disaster incident site. I have been able to provide a unifying voice for the federal and state government when others were not present or able to provide such interactions.  

future business executives an opportunity to learn critical communication skills they will need to utilize during a crisis or disaster at their company.  These lectures have provided me an opportunity to polish my instruction and presentation skills for graduate-level professionals from Fortune 500 companies located in Houston. The MBA students are a challenging group of inquisitive professionals who require precise, actionable and relevant information they can use.  A very rewarding testimonial came from one of my former MBA students: a British Petroleum employee who found himself assigned to a remote area of the Louisiana coastline immediately after the Deep Water Horizon oil spill. He was tasked with organizing and deploying fishing boat captains to drag oil soaking booms into the Gulf of Mexico to aid with cleanup efforts.  As an accountant working for British Petroleum, he was not assigned media interaction responsibilities. On the first day of his assignment, however, he was ambushed by media outlets asking him to comment on his company’s cleanup response efforts.  My student used the information he learned during my lecture to successfully interact with the media and provide a positive interview.  His management later congratulated him on a positive media story, one of only a few the company was able to supply in the first weeks of the disaster.