In the February and March of 2024, Logos Institute for Crisis Management & Executive Leadership Senior Fellow Katie Garcia was a guest instructor for two sessions of an advanced elective in crisis communication taught by Logos Institute executive director Helio Fred Garcia, in New York University’s (NYU) master of science program Public Relations and Corporate Communication (PRCC).
This course, structured as six full day sessions, is focused on the business decisions, management processes, and leadership skills necessary to anticipate, plan for, manage through, communicate about, and recover from crises affecting corporations and other complex organizations.
Katie organized and led the second and sixth sessions of this semester’s course.
The second session of the course focused on how to recognize patterns of crisis and crisis response, and how crisis play out across different industries. Katie lectured on the predictable patterns in a crisis and crisis response, as well as recapped core principles of effective crisis response that the students learned in the first session of the course.
The class was then joined, virtually and in-person, by three guest speakers who shared examples of how these patterns played out in different types of crises across different industries. The guest speakers were:
Rick Pietzak, Director, Crisis Communications and Public Relations, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Rick discussed the challenges of high-visibility mass casualty events.
Larry Kamer, CEO, The Kamer Group, and professor, University of San Francisco and Carnegie Mellon University. Larry discussed how to manage crises caused by a determined adversary who is trying to hurt your organization.
Carmella Glover, Vice President, Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Page Society and graduate of NYU PRCC program. Carmella discussed the challenges of crises involving DE&I.
Katie moderated the interactions with each guest speaker and led students through a reflective exercise to identify the core insights shared by the speakers.
The sixth and final session of the course was designed to help students deepen their understanding of the core concepts of the course and practice applying those concepts. Students were divided into groups and taken through a simulated crisis, escalating in intensity over the course of the day. As the simulated crises evolved, students were asked to use the techniques and tools learned over the previous sessions to respond to the crisis, and then received feedback by Katie and their fellow classmates on the effectiveness of their response.
For more than 17 years, Katie Garcia has helped leaders and emerging leaders across industries to improve their ability to lead and to communicate effectively. She is a contract lecturer at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Columbia University, where she teaches classes on communication and navigating difficult conversations. She has also guest lectured on strategic communication, crisis communication, and effective feedback at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the College of Mount Saint Vincent.
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