UnitedHealthcare CEO Murder Sends Shockwaves

Hello and welcome back to Communication Breakdown, a new podcast from the Observatory on Corporate Reputation. Thank you for joining us. I'm Steve Dowling in Silicon Valley. And I'm Craig Carroll in New York City. Each week we analyze how companies navigate the stories making headlines and how they sometimes fail to stay out of them. This week we turn to an unsettling and tragic story that is rock the corporate world, the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson in Midtown, Manhattan.

Thompson, the leader of the country's largest health insurer, was murdered outside the company's annual investor meeting. While the public focused mostly on the week-long manhunt for Thompson's killer, the health insurance industry seemed to start taking security precautions, presumably for fear of copycat attacks. United Healthcare, Blue Cross Blue Shield and CVS, which owns HETNA, pulled the names and photos of its top executives from their website.

In a statement following the shooting, United Healthcare said the company was "touched by the huge outpouring of kindness." But social media audiences were not so sympathetic. Mocking Thompson's murder, laughing at the company's post on Facebook, and railing against the corporate health care system. Andrew Whitty is the CEO of United Healthcare's parent company, United Health Group.

He called Brian Thompson one of the good guys, who had a positive impact on American healthcare, and Whitty encouraged his 400,000 employees to tune out the negativity, which he said does not reflect reality. But he also laid out the company's mission in a way that drew out more criticism when his remarks were leaked to investigate reporter Ken Clippenstein. Our role is a critical role, and we make sure that care is safe, appropriate, and is delivered when people need it.

And we guard against the pressures that exist for unsafe care or for unnecessary care to be delivered in a way which makes the whole system too complex and ultimately unsustainable. Craig, we cannot lose sight of the fact that this man was murdered in cold blood. His family and colleagues are grieving.

I think that a lot of people, when they heard that an insurance executive had been attacked, immediately assumed that the motive was probably linked to discontent with our healthcare system here in the United States, something everyone is aware of and almost everyone has firsthand experience with, which is why Whitty's comments about unnecessary care landed poorly.

But it's hard to think of another public figure whose death was met not just with cynicism, but apparently approval or at best in difference from so many commenters and not just on social media. So today we're going to talk about the crisis communications, both internal and external that we've seen in the wake of this terrible attack and also the changes we might see in the coming weeks and months, not just in the insurance industry, but possibly across corporate

America. You're right, Steve. The lack of empathy here in the public reaction is chilling and really speaks to the disconnect between large companies, particularly in industries like healthcare and the general public. And it's almost as if the humanity of these leaders gets erased in the broader frustration with the systems that they represent. But this isn't just about public perception. It's also a challenge for corporate communicators.

How do you craft a message that honors a tragedy like this while still addressing the underlying anchor that people are feeling towards your industry? And how do you do that without exacerbating the very divisions that can be putting your leadership at greater risk? This isn't just a PR issue. It's a reputational and operational crisis that's going to have long term implications for how companies and a number of contentious sectors apply or approach safety, transparency, and communication.

Well, let's start with the operational part. We count on communications leaders to be cool headed in these moments, which means simultaneously dispassionate about the situation so they can make rational, well informed judgments, but also sensitive to the gravity and humanity of the moment to balancing that rational calculation with a real honest sense of compassion. Or if it helps, maybe you think of it in the reverse, you start from the compassionate point of view thinking about the victims.

And you make sure you are able to check yourself from a more detached point of view. And honestly, I think in these situations, when and out, you air on the side of humanity and compassion. I think this is a challenging moment. I think it's one that has some potential to set presidents for public communications and other things tied to the business and the public and society at a greater scale here. For me, I know this moment requires empathy and humanity.

And I can't just imagine what the Chief Comps Officer is discussing with the CEO either before the statement or during the statement or right after because this isn't to me just about the humanity in recognizing that the company needs a moment to grieve. You've still got to deal with the operational issues. I mean, the immediate pain of the family, yes, that's huge. The immediate pain of all the other employees and the people that are surrounding the CEO, yes.

But at the same time, there's a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt among their customer base, among their partners, among their peers who are thinking, hey, maybe this could happen to us.

And also at the same time, there's people that are just not going to be as human here and are thinking about it purely instrumentally in terms of what does this mean for the rest of the world? Yeah. I think that is what is remarkable, maybe unique, about this situation for United Health Care is is how they have had to navigate this really mean.

I would say callous lack of sympathy from such a broad swath of the public, at least online, but also on television and in print, to make an announcement like they had to on social media, on Facebook and have 77,000 people click the laughing emoji. But there is no playbook for dealing with that. I read their statements and I wondered if they were trying to address it a little bit on day two, which was a more emotional message, thanking people as you mentioned for an outpouring of support.

I think it was an attempt to find some light in the darkness that they really descended on this story because of this uncharted, I struggled to find the words for mocking anyone who is murdered like this. We live in this age of hot takes and it's not serving us well in situations like these. Right. Right. I think this is the part where we have to recognize that there are several things at play. Number one, this may not have been their channel choice to post something on Facebook.

Right now, there is also a lot of concern about whether or not companies or the media should even be involved on Twitter or X. But the reality is people are there and audiences are there. Some of their customers might be there as well as all these antagonistic voices. You may not be speaking out, sharing your point of view, but you need to be aware of some of the people you care about are there and you need to be in tune with what they're thinking.

Even with the grief right now, I think the dangerous part is that it would be very easy to either... I wouldn't say run and hide, but you are grieving and you're recognizing that there's a lot of callous voices out there and it's very easy to tune them out or to discount them for their callousness and their insensitivity.

And I think as communicators, this is the part where we have to say, you know, look, we may not be responding then right now, but they are speaking and they're saying something antagonistic against our purpose, against our values, against what we're about and yet we're operating in the same public sphere here. We don't need to hear them out so that they feel better because now they've expressed their point of view.

We need to know what their point of view is and we need to understand why they'd be willing to put aside their humanity to speak so outrageously here and let that tip over into such callousness. And okay, figure out, okay, what do we need to know that we maybe we weren't paying attention to or weren't aware of that is now more public? I think they took the right approach in focusing on their employees first in these situations.

The internal audience has to get top priority. The CEO is almost always the highest profile person in the company, even if they don't know him, everybody knew of him, hopefully respected him, had a level of familiarity with him and those closest to him, whether it's 10 or a thousand people, they're grieving. They are feeling raw human emotion and that needs to be acknowledged. The loss needs to be acknowledged.

So I agree with you taking notes to the extent that the industry needs reinforcing as to why customers and the general public are frustrated with them. But I also think that in a situation like this, everybody needs to recognize that we're in a window, a time window where there really, there aren't any appropriate comments except about the tragedy and the people who are affected by it.

And maybe now, a week later, maybe that window is starting to open or starting to close rather that it could be the time to start talking about broader issues. But I don't feel it. And especially since there has been so much negativity. I think honestly, the people who would have really benefited from taking a pause are the critics. The hours and days immediately following an incident like this, which are filled with grief and emotion, that is not the time.

And some really high profile people got caught up in this saying things like violence isn't the answer, but people can only be pushed so far. And those comments were walked back. But people, they're getting caught up in the moment. And we should point out that this was Senator Elizabeth Warren who made that answer patient, that's what's significant about this comment. She later just said there's never justification for murder, violence is never the answer period. So people know this.

They're just getting caught up in it. And that's why I think it's important to have just that little bit of detachment, as a comms leader when you're calling the shots or giving advice. It's a balance that we again, we count on, comms leaders to make. Yeah, but here's the thing. Even though I agree to you that there is this window and now is not the time, nevertheless, here antagonists took advantage of that window and they inserted themselves in.

And even though the dust may settle a week from now and then we can calmly respond to these things here, the reality is for most of the public, they will have already moved on. And they're going to remember seeing and hearing what what your critics had to say. So part of it here is, yeah, okay, they're not responding fairly. And it's very true that the industry probably knows everything that they're saying. They don't need to respond.

Everything that they're saying during this window, yeah, been there done that. We've heard all these critiques before, but it's very possible that for the larger public that this is a moment where they are becoming a little bit more aware. So it's it, you know, it presents the situation to where for the public for other audiences that are, you know, they really don't have a dog in this hunt, right? They're really not paying attention.

They saw a CEO was shot, murdered on the streets in New York, right? And then they're hearing the repressed reports about the degree of pushback on social media, countering the company. So now there's two greater voices out there. And you know, that's part of news is the reporting of controversy. But now the public has two major voices out there, the company and these critics.

I'll make the strategic argument, which I feel a bit callous doing, but here you have an industry that is under attack for being insensitive to human needs, to human emotions, to people's health. And in this moment, I think it makes sense to stay focused on the humanity to do that. But I was saying earlier, default to the compassionate position because I would never suggest that it be used opportunistically.

But if you are in an industry that is being criticized for being inhumane, showing your humanity is not a bad thing. Yeah. So let's circle back to the league statement from the CEO, right? Where he then addresses these critics. How then do you respond as a communicator knowing that your CEO has made a statement that we even though it's leaked, it's now out there in the public discourse.

And now you're having your respond to a statement that both touches on the humanity of the situation, but also might be perceived as a little callous tenant of itself. Well, this is, I think this sort of reinforces my point because he said a lot of things in that statement to employees of video, which was leaked. It was not intended for external consumption. That's another thing that we should probably reinforce.

But he said a lot of things in there about Thompson, very complimentary things, but the thing that the critics, that the external audience and I would suggest the press were primed to pick up on was his defense of their business model effectively. And so I think that that again shows that this is like now is not the time to be talking about this. There is this old saying. There's a time and place for that. And you know, it's not a time or place for two things.

One, this calling out your critics and two, talking about your business models.

That fair? Yeah, I think engaging on that topic is not only insensitive to the grieving family and employees who have just lost their leader, but it's clearly not a winning message is not something that the public is looking to be sympathetic to you about it. I'm not saying that that's what he was looking for, but as it's presented, the first thing that people pick up on is the way he phrased it, preventing unnecessary care or whatever.

That type of messaging just is not a good look in this moment. Yeah. So there's so many different directions to go with this from here, right? But let's start off with what are the implications here for other companies and what are some of the adjustments that you see that other companies will likely make at this point? Well, I think tighter security is going to be a given.

I think the other issue in the future as you're pointing out is it's going to be interesting to see if the industry starts to change how it's communicating with customers, the healthcare industry, communicating with customers and the public about its role. And I know we talked about this earlier, but pulling the names of executives off the website and taking the pictures down. But that's a knee jerk response that we understand why a company would do that.

Just as there were security alerts, I think at the headquarters of the company, those are either going to have to go back up in a different way or companies are going to have to figure out how they are presenting themselves to the public while balancing the security risk.

I think the two things that we've got to be concerned with tied to the knee jerk response is maybe over responding or maybe even pushing the narrative further about the divide between senior level leadership and your employee base when they see you taking so much, so many precautions, so much expense for the senior leadership team, right? I think it just further pushes that narrative of the divide between employees and customers.

And to the other about the websites, yeah, look, the photos have got to go back up there, you know, and we've already seen so many other companies that have started to take their photos down.

But you know, the thing is that does affect transparency to small signal, but it is a, it's a behavioral indicator that that matters and these small things affect perceptions of equity or perceptions of, you know, caring for your employees as much as you do for your senior leadership and also just basic perceptions of transparency.

Well, and especially in this industry, which deals with people's health, deals with people's lives, you want to, you want to make sure people know that you care for lack of a better term like you and maybe that sounds right, but what better way to demonstrate than by showing that your company is run by humans. You know that if you're taking the names and faces of people off the website, I'm not saying, I'm reluctant to find fault or take issue with any of these decisions that they made in

the immediate aftermath. But as a long term proposition, it just, you're right, it's not sustainable to not show the human beings behind this company that deals with decisions of life and death. It's hard to predict what the messaging decisions will be, but I would not be surprised at some point in the not too distant future for the industry to try to take a different tack.

But it's going to be hard to make that impactful if you still have, you know, lots of people who are coming away from experiences, feeling like they or their loved ones were denied coverage for procedures that they expected, you know, to be taken care of by their ensure, to whom they play. But pay premiums every month.

To your point earlier, there are operational factors here that go well beyond communications, but I'm sure that there will be communications efforts and it will be really interesting to see how the industry approaches that. There's a few things here that I see out of this for other companies. Number one is, I think the danger of being too narrow and how you think about your stakeholders or the groups that matter to you and the groups that you matter to them, right?

This is not just about customers, it's not just about your employees, it's not just about your supply chain or the communities where your employees work. Right now, in real time, they are getting a taste of the wider range of voices that are paying attention. This is the story now of national significance and we have so many harsh voices out there and we've already addressed them.

But people who may not be paying attention anymore to the tonality or to the criticisms might remember some of the points, right? Even though Senator Elizabeth Warren walked back her statement and recognized as that was a little harsh, I don't think her policies are going to change.

I think being aware of the policy implications for healthcare in this country or for the fairness and for this case, being held up as a case study or a lightning ride for other things for the discontent between main street and wall street, if you will. Yeah, my main takeaway for comms leaders, comms practitioners at any level is that a situation like this in any situation, but especially in a crisis. The comms team, the first instinct is to project stability, continuity, whose successor,

reassure people, any operational disruption will be minimal. But all those messages of themselves are tone deaf in the face of someone's tragic deaf murder. So there needs to be this balance I was mentioning earlier and you need to make sure you're messaging with humanity, we're all human, we can all understand hopefully intuitively, but if not, then maybe with a little nudge to remind us that there's an impact here that goes beyond business.

So my my high level take on this is don't rush or don't be afraid to pause to collect your thoughts and really read the room usually a little extra time costs you nothing, especially if you are at the center of it, the press and the public they're waiting for you and they will wait if you stretch it too long, you may pay a price, but in general, I think as a rule of thumb, you probably have more time than you think and that that defaulting to the sympathetic,

compassionate human voice tone point of view is the right way to go. You said two things that are really important one is the balance and two is the recognizing that you don't have to do everything right now, the timing, the timing of it says like we need to put first things first, we got to make sure your exercise here is balanced and moderate and you're giving proper attention to both at the same time and not one at the expense of the other.

I'm with you except let's just broaden our definition of of at the same time because as I said earlier, I think there is a there is a window and you have to navigate by feel on this. Yeah, but there is a window in which I think as a company, you really don't have an obligation to address any of that criticism certainly not this strident and call us. Okay, that's the part I want to explore right because it's not about the addressing, I agree.

This is not the time to be speaking and challenging them. Well, whether it's direct or indirect, I'm just saying as a topic, I think, but over over time, I think you're right that you do need to balance these things out, but there will be a time and place for that debate over the role of insurers and whether their profits are too great or whether they're treating people with sufficient compassion, but I would argue that now is not the time. I'm going to push back just a little here, right?

Because I understand you don't need to respond to them. You don't need to address or concerns now and that's not the time for you to be speaking, but operationally, communicatively, this is the time to still be listening and that's

the part. Well, for sure. No, no, absolutely. And that I think is part of the sort of dispassionate, rational point of view that we depend on communications leaders to play, but I think it's in, you're in listening and collecting mode right now and then you have time to make decisions about how you're going to address that indirectly, directly, communications, operational policy, whatever it's going to be. But I again, go back to now is not the moment to make those decisions.

Well, not the moment to make the decisions, not the moment to address. There are some decisions you do have to make sure with just the listening side that you stay at the table, you know, you may not be responding to them, but you need to be cataloging their thoughts and being prepared to respond later. That part, you can't decide to do that later because once the moment's gone, it's too late.

Everybody, it'll already be a part of the psyche of everyone else is paying attention and it may not be the moment that you care to respond at that moment. It may not be in your top five, but you will have to recognize it was in the top five or everyone else. You've heard it even if you weren't paying attention to it, but I want to circle back on the balance metaphor a little bit more.

So the idea of the strength training here and dealing with both a communicational and operational at the same time is to say true. We won't be engaging from a messaging perspective, but communicatingively, we will be responding from a listening perspective and being aware of what's going on.

But here's the opportunity, I would say we have now, Steve, is that we're so focused on talking points and understanding the issues and having our point of view out there and getting people on board with our point of view. The opportunity that I see here from an operational standpoint is to make better communication channels for listening throughout the organization.

I don't mean just to your employee base, but getting all of the connecting the pipes across the different functions of the business to make sure that whatever intel that they're gathering, whatever voice is that they're hearing from, that we might not normally have caught, but we know that material is coming in.

I know it's already information overload, but the timing is such that from a crisis planning perspective, from a resilience perspective and preparing for the future, there's a lot coming at you and anything that you can do to improve your ability to capture it and even if you're responding later. I of course think that data collection throughout this is important. I just, I'm making an assumption here, but I feel pretty confident in making it.

The complaints and the criticisms are not going to be news to these companies. They've got to be aware because they've heard it before. I think what makes this moment powerful in a very unfortunate way is that it seems to be a galvanizing moment for the critics and where that goes, we don't know. It is a galvanizing moment.

It's a lot stronger now, but the part that the danger of just relying purely on tonality of been there done that hurt at all before is that right now there are ripple effects. Right now it is a cascading through other networks. It's cascading through other sectors of your stakeholder base through your communities and through Washington, through your supply chains of being aware of the degree that it is galvanized right now.

I think the danger is recognizing when you start to have new voices at the table to the point that it can affect future safety, the legitimacy or the relationships that your company has, both among its customer base, but also with Washington. But also I'm going to say from a generational perspective of like being a fair and responsive corporate citizen in this country. The question I guess then is does this galvanized anger actually advance the cause of the critics?

I'm not entirely sure that it does. If there's a benefit, if you will, to the critics, it's just awareness. It's just an awareness that people who are frustrated with insurance companies are not alone and that it could possibly draw them together. It's hard for me to get away from the notion that a lot of this is happening for the wrong reasons and that's because a man was killed.

You know what I'm curious about, Steve, is why in light of companies speaking out on so many other social issues, why companies are not speaking out about the instability of the moment? I think that it's entirely appropriate. It's interesting to look at the other voices. You set aside United Health Care. They're dealing with grief. But would it be appropriate for others to say this is not the way we're going to settle our disputes? I think that would be a really good approach.

Again, there's got to be some indication that it's genuine and that there is a willingness to hear people out and at least explain in a more human sense and show the benefit that these companies feel they bring, which Witty was trying to do. He told his team to be proud of what they do. I think this is to a point we just touched on briefly earlier. It's most powerful when you can say the same thing internally as externally.

I think for Witty, that would have meant maybe moderating the comments about unnecessary care or whatever and being a little more considered on the value that they believe the company brings. I know we're close to the time here. I just want to think about some other things that we could add here. I'm just wrapping up, being very clear about things that companies could be doing or learning from this moment or what many of them are already doing.

We know that many are putting a focus right now on heightened security protocols and whether it's increased security offices or shareholder events. That's certainly real. I think it closing. I don't know. I just think we're going to be looking at in the future is this going to be held as a case for or an exemplar for how we think about just segments of society having a growing distrust in corporate institutions, particularly in industries like healthcare.

The second thing is just understanding what are the potential, cultural and societal implications here? I mean, one thing I can already see just in terms of the voices that have played out on social media and news reporting with these other voices is that this is eventually going to be a case study on the further divide between Wall Street and Main Street and the divide between senior level management and the rank and file of their employee base. Is a really difficult topic.

It's going to take some interesting turns. I think we both have a lot of sympathy for everybody that's affected in this story this week and appreciate the conversation. That is our show for this week. We want to thank Sean P. Neal and the people forward network for making our podcast possible. If you'd like to tell us what you think or if you have a topic you'd like to suggest for our show, we would love to hear from you. Our email address is podcast@ocrnetwork.com.

Communication breakdown is a production of the Observatory on corporate reputation. I'm Steve Dowling and I'm Greg Carroll. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]