When Someone in Your Org Is the Story: Internal Incidents and Misconduct Communications
About this course
A practical, self-paced course for the moments when the story is about one of your own people: an employee arrested, an officer accused of misconduct, a leader under investigation, a recording nobody expected to become public.
Most crisis training assumes your organization is on the right side of the story. This course deals with the times it isn't, or isn't yet sure. When someone inside the organization is the subject, every ordinary communications decision gets tangled up with personnel law, active investigations, union contracts and the uncomfortable fact that you know the people involved. The instinct to protect colleagues and the obligation to be straight with the public can feel like a direct collision, and the communicator is usually standing in the middle of it.
The course works through that collision the way it actually unfolds. It covers why internal incidents behave differently from every other crisis; what state records law, investigation rules and union agreements really allow you to say, which is often more than organizations assume; how to tell staff before they read it in the news; how to handle reporters and records requests while an investigation is open; what to do when leadership wants to say less than the public deserves; and how to rebuild trust once the process is over.
Every lesson draws on real, documented cases, from Minneapolis, Louisville, Chicago, Memphis and Seattle to Fort Hood and London's Metropolitan Police, and ends with something to draft or check for your own organization. The Internal Incident Response Kit gives you holding statements for eight common scenarios, a staff note and supervisor briefing, a media inquiry log, an accountability test and a recovery tracker, ready to adapt with your counsel.
Who This Course Is For:
- Government and public safety communicators who may one day have to speak about a colleague's conduct, which is most of them
- Communications leads who advise chiefs, managers and elected officials when an internal matter becomes public
- Solo communicators who will be the organization's entire response when it happens
Read a sample from this course
The call that changes the shape of the day
It's a little after six on a Tuesday evening and you're halfway through a routine social post about a road resurfacing project when your phone lights up with a text from the deputy chief. Need you in my office. Don't say anything to anyone yet. By the time you get there, the door is closed, the city attorney is on speakerphone, and someone from HR is holding a folder they clearly don't want you to read. One of your own people has been arrested in the next county. Or accused of something on video. Or named in a lawsuit that a reporter already has a copy of.
Every communicator knows how to handle a building fire or a water main break. The playbook exists, the templates are ready, and your organization is, in most cases, on the right side of the story. It's the one doing the helping.
When someone inside your organization is the story, that footing goes. The subject is a colleague: possibly someone you've worked alongside for years, possibly someone you like, possibly the person you report to. The facts are incomplete, contested or legally restricted. The people asking you to communicate may have personal and institutional interests in what does and doesn't come out. And the public is no longer asking what happened? It's asking what did you do, and are you going to be straight with us about it?
Standard crisis training rarely covers this, partly because it's uncomfortable and partly because the answers are messier. You're working at the point where personnel law, active investigations, union contracts, media pressure, public accountability and your own professional integrity all meet. Getting it wrong has consequences in every direction: for the public's trust, for the fairness of the process, for the person involved, for the colleagues who reported it, and for you.
This course is about getting it as right as the constraints allow. That starts with understanding why this kind of crisis behaves so differently from every other kind you'll handle.
What you'll learn
Course Curriculum
Full access upon enrollment- 1.The call that changes the shape of the day
- 2.What changes when the subject is one of your own
- 3.The first account is the one that gets tested
- 4.Four kinds of internal incident, four different jobs
- 5.What your job is, and what it isn't
- 6.Try this: map your first hour before you need it
- 7.Silence is a statement too
- 8.Sources & further reading
Course Resources
Available after enrollment
Course details
- Self-paced
- Certificate of completion
- Lifetime access
- 6 lessons · 48 sections
- 2 downloadable resources