3 Ways to Make Controversial Decisions Less Controversial
Maintaining the status quo of either your organization or your industry is often the course of action most easily digested and most easily defended. But from time to time it becomes necessary to break the status quo. When these decisions are made, they are often controversial and it is often forgotten that to most controversial decisions there will be controversial reactions.
This doesn’t need to be a bad thing.
But it can be.
Not long ago, Marissa Mayer, relatively new CEO of Yahoo! decided to change the company’s telecommuting policy. News outlets and employees portrayed that decision as quite controversial and CNN’s front page had a different story and opinion piece about it each day. Marissa Mayer drew fire for the decision, and when the face of the company is under fire, so is the company.
Before making any sort of potentially controversial decision, organizations need to decide how they will:
1. Tell their side of the story
2. Tell others why the decision needed to be made
3. Tell others why the decision will benefit the organization
People inside and outside of your organization catch your organization’s vision when they hear your side of the story first. These same people will be less critical as they understand why the decision needed to be made. You will also keep investor confidence high as you explain how the decision benefits the company.
Public relations professionals need to discuss these strategies with lead management. With firm strategies in place, negative consequences can be minimized. In some cases, these controversial business decisions can even lead to positive effects in the court of public opinion.
What do you to strategize before your organization announces a potentially controversial change?
New Leaders, New Opportunities
When an organization chooses a new leader for whatever reason, it has the opportunity to redefine, rearticulate and reinitiate their organization’s objectives and focuses. All newly chosen leaders can do this, but many are too slow or too imprecise when it comes to defining their organization’s objectives. Most should take a cue from Pope Francis, who hopefully will prove to be one of the most effective leaders of the Catholic church yet.
Newly elected Pope Francis is a fantastic opportunity of a newly-elected leader who is making the best of his opportunities to affect his organization positively in this time of leadership transition. One specific example of his most recent announcements sticks out to me.
In what may well be one of his most cited statements to date, Pope Francis announced that it was not for the Catholic church to forget the poor. He has talked about how his name was chosen, in part, out of his desire to send a message to the world that the church had not and would not forget the poor .
Pope Francis, in this heartfelt and sincere statement, has made excellent use of one of the largest opportunities available to new leaders: the opportunity to define, to both internal and external publics, an organization’s mission statement for the next few years. If you didn’t know that the Catholic church had a vested interest in caring for the poor, you do now. If you were a leader within the church who was not making the care of the poor a priority, you surely are now.
Pope Francis isn’t just saying that it’s important to remember the poor and be simple, either. He’s making sure that this philosophy of simplicity is reflected in his ring and coat of arms.
Who Deserves Priority
Media relationships occupy the focus of many public relations professionals. These relationships rightly their attract interest. They absolutely deserve priority treatment. But, media relationships should not absorb their focus to the exclusion of other relationships. Shareholders and interest and advocacy groups demand just as much attention if the organization wants to remain an active presence in its sphere.
Shareholders affect the valuation of a company. If they lose confidence in the organization’s vitality, shareholders are likely to sell their shares and invest their money in companies they feel are more likely to succeed. If shareholders see their company as successful, the company’s valuation is almost certain to increase. Anything material to the longevity of a company and the realization of its mission should be shared with shareholders just as quickly as it is shared with the media.
Interest and advocacy groups often wreak havoc on the reputation of organizations. Communicating with these groups, valuing their input and notifying them of an organization’s activity pertinent to their focus firmly plants an organization in a position to prevent potential damage caused by these groups. An organization can avert destructive consequences with this formula. It can also garner deserved praise and trust, not simply with the interest or advocacy groups in question, but from many others. Following this formula, people will see that the organization is dynamic and responsive, two sure signs of longevity and success.
As noted in previous posts, it’s important to always be completely honest when communicating with any individual and any group of people.
Other groups that deserve attention include law enforcement, political groups and customers, among others. Next post, I’ll focus on how to communicate tailor your communication to fit the needs of each of these groups.
Reputation Management Through Honesty: The Only Way to Go Part I
Two things draw media attention and impact credibility almost more than any others: The fall of an angel from grace and the rise of an underdog against all odds. A falling angel disgraces their organization and can damage those with whom they associate. A rising underdog becomes the belle of the ball. Because people root for the underdog, they forgive his or her weaknesses and praise his or her successes.
I’ve been surprised with Manti Te’O's recent situation. How he lost his credibility is not uncommon. People in the public eye often inflate their achievements and try to hide their embarrassments, though rarely to any real effect. What surprises me about Te’O's situation is that he, with such a promising future and a record that spoke for itself, would still choose to hide his situation, ultimately leading to scandal and near complete loss of credibility. His is the story of a fallen angel.
Building a reputation the proper way is founded in the practice of honesty. Any effort to repair damaged relationships and to forge new ones has to start in the work place and in the personal lives of the management team. They must cultivate a culture of honesty in their organizations, in their families and in their interpersonal relationships. Honesty, even regarding embarrassing or unfortunate events, is always the right policy.
The temptation to be dishonest is real. The temptation to hide key facts or overplay an organization’s achievements is something that professionals face every day. But those that really are worthy of the term professional know that they would rather have their organization be known as the underdog who overcame the odds than the party that exaggerates and embellishes the truth.. They would prefer that people view their organization as the phoenix that miraculously rose from ruin than the angel whose fall was every bit as meteoric as its rise.
When honesty is the corporate and personal policy of an organization, that organization is positioned as reliable and trustworthy. When it overcomes its struggles and achieves great things, key people view the organization that much more positively.
The first step to reputation management is honesty. Who you’re honest with and when is every bit as important, and I’ll cover it in my next post.
—————————
Stephen H. Coltrin
Chairman & CEO
Stephen H. Coltrin, Chairman and CEO of Coltrin & Associates, has given strategic counsel and communications support to executives worldwide and been the driving force behind all Coltrin’s initiatives for over 30 years. His counsel has driven growth and revenue for companies including Nintendo, 3Com, Burger King, Salt Lake City Olympics, Smiths Detection, Bain Capital and others. Mr. Coltrin currently serves on the board of directors of the International Radio and Television Society Foundation, Quantum Leap Innovations and Clinical Ink, on the National Advisory Board of America’s Freedom Festival, and on the Advisory and Advancement Council of the Utah State University Journalism & Communication Department. Mr. Coltrin has received many honors, including the prestigious Chapel of Four Chaplains Award, the Leo Hindery Media Ethics and Values Speaker of the Year, and Honorary Vice Chairmen for Broadcasting & Cable’s Hall of Fame Awards.
Understanding Public Relations: A Core Fundamental in B-School Education
In the last fifteen years the business and financial sector has suffered through countless real world lessons on the necessity of trust-based relationships to maintain organizational reputation. From the Enron, WorldCom and stock analyst scandals of the turn of the century to the more current BP and Chick-fil-A incidents, one thing has become glaringly obvious: CEOs and other top executives need a better understanding of the role communication plays in building and maintaining relationships with the publics their organizations rely upon for survival.
Perhaps because of their previous success at “business by the numbers,” business schools tend to think they are perfectly well equipped to teach business communication, their one-course answer (and often an elective at that) to the communication disasters that have left more than one CEO with egg on the face. Typically, the course focuses on writing memos and reports, not the most critical contribution to learning how to build and maintain the strategic relationships that Golin Harris’ trust studies have shown to be crucial. In fact, the Edelman Trust Barometer, which annually measures trust levels among opinion leaders—those the rest of us listen to in forming our opinions—has charted a rocky ride for CEOs over the last decade when it comes to trust. From trust ratings in the teens (on a 100-point) scale in the early part of this century, CEOs as trusted sources of information have gained ground, finally surpassing the trust level of government in the last few years. (No surprise there!)
So why the emphasis on trust-based relationship building? It’s all about reputation—or as Al Golin would say, bankable reputation. The business leaders coming out of our business schools today may understand the importance of reputation, but they aren’t being taught how to build and maintain the strategic relationships that result in good reputation. A recent survey commissioned by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) found that American business executives “view recent MBA graduates as being under-prepared in the areas of strategic communication and reputation management” (PRSA, June 12, 2012). PRSA’s analysis of MBA programs found that only 16 percent offer a course remotely related to reputation management.
Enter the PRSA Business/MBA Initiative. The initiative is a long-term effort to advocate the importance of teaching communication as a fundamental in business education. PRSA is trying to partner with business programs across the nation to influence curricular inclusion of strategic communication and reputation management. The program is now being piloted with five MBA programs that are integrating a “turn-key” public relations course into their MBA curriculum this academic year. It certainly is a long-overdue step in the right direction.
PRSA (June 12, 2012). PRSA partners with five universities to advance public relations instruction in MBA programs. Retrieved on October 28, 2012 from media.prsa.org/article.
Laurie J. Wilson is a professor of communication at Brigham Young University and author of a widely-used textbook on strategic planning for communication. She has been heavily involved with PRSA and is often called on by various entities for her expertise in communications and public relations.
Why Management Teams Should Deliver News
Inc. recently published an article on who should deliver an organization’s positive news to the public. The author, to my understanding, postulated that someone who is not a member of the management team should deliver the news, saying that doing so would help to boost an employees confidence. Letting someone not from the management team deliver the news probably does help the employee, but it is disaster for branding and value communication.
Here are the reasons why all company news, including the good news, should be delivered by key members of the management team.
1. Leadership Branding
Branding your organization’s management team is essential. When investors, suppliers, customers, employees and other groups of people trust the management team, they tend to trust the company as a whole more. The company’s stock prices will increase. Worker productivity will increase. In certain circumstances, sales can even increase. If your organization makes a mistake, the public will be more willing to forgive it if it has a trusted management team. Keeping the management team in the public eye as much as possible is invaluable.
2. Value Communication
The company’s vision for the future is essential to its success. The management team is almost always the best at communicating that vision. They can articulate it in such a way that investors, customers and other important publics see the value that the organization will create. When publics see a united management team with a clear vision, they favor the company.
The value and respect for any brand depends on the positive visibility of its CEO and senior management. They should always deliver the good news and the bad. False humility ultimately adds little value to the company.
3 Ways to Project Your Organization’s Message Better than Democrats or Republicans
Both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions highlighted a great weakness of not only political parties but many large organizations: the inability to message a vision. What that lack of vision has done to the credibility of both political parties is not a mystery. This is a real consequence for all organizations, not just ones political in nature.
Vision is mission-critical for any successful organization. Communicating that vision both internally and externally is equally important. A clear vision for the future engenders trust and confidence and inspires others to work with an organization. The opposite is also true.
Both prominent U.S. parties are suffering from a classic case of presenting a cloudy vision to all inside and outside their organizations. Both parties have (and have had for many years) inconsistent messaging. This gives the impression that the organizations are weak, and not trustworthy.
This is not a crisis limited to political parties. All organizations, be they business, non-profits or otherwise can and often are affected by this crisis of vision. As almost always is the case, public relations professionals can rely on basic and well-known principles can solve this crisis in any organization.
1. Work with the Management Team to understand or identify the Vision
It might be that the management team has a well-developed vision for the future that simply isn’t being communicated, or that they lack that vision. Either way, public relations professionals can work with an organization’s management team to identify or shape the vision. This is paramount. If the public relations team does not know the vision, they cannot communicate it.
2. Appropriately Message Internally
Internal conflict is among the first red flags that investors, customers and other interested parties notice. Creating a clear internal vision unites an organization over time, leads to better productivity, and sends a distinct message to those interested that an organization is moving forward.
3. Appropriately Message Externally
Simply having a strong vision is insufficient. Interested publics must also be informed of this vision and believe that the organization in question is committed to it. As noted above, this will lead to trust, confidence and good relationships between an organization and other publics.
Why You Should Talk About Failures
On Tuesday, I wrote about how to position successes above failures. Equally important is positioning failures as stepping stones to success.
Why?
1. Credibility
Notifying the public of potential failures is good expectation management and a fundamental part of establishing credibility.
All organizations will have a moment where they fail to meet expectations. Admitting guilt and presenting a go-forward plan lets people know that the failure has been recognized and is being dealt with professionally. Not doing so will make for a painful process that strips layers of credibility away when either the media or a competitor brings that failure to the attention of the public.
Organizations are giving away opportunities for others to tear them down if they do not report their own failures first.
2. Opportunity
Dealing with failure properly is an opportunity to showcase a company’s positive points, especially when expectations were properly managed from the start.
Positioning failures as stepping stones to success requires thought about the lessons learned from that failure. The failure can then fuel future success, rather than forecast a discouraging future.
Similar principles apply for potential downsides to business decisions. All plans have downsides, and organizations that present those downsides in an upfront and factual manner take away the opportunity from competitors to blow those downsides out of proportion and attack the organization for trying to cover up the harmful consequences of its plan.
Historically, politicians are a perfect example of how not to present downsides. As an example, if a politician presents a plan on how to cut government spending by cutting the budget of a given department, they will often neglect to present how this might negatively affect the economy by raising unemployment rates from the employees that would inevitably be let go due to such a cut. This attitude and behavior has contributed to the wary public attitude towards politicians on both sides of the aisle, and will do the same to any organization.
Failures and downsides, when handled properly, can increase credibility and take away opportunities from a company’s competitors. When handled improperly, they do exactly the opposite.
3 Ways to Position Successes Above Failures
Success stories seem increasingly rare in today’s media-driven world. It might be that stories of failure have become so impressively complicated and dismal that they overpower the stories of success that do exist. It might be that in the increasingly complex world in which we live success is becoming rarer and rarer. Even in times past, more attention has been given to negative headlines over positive ones.
Successful people don’t always have the positive side of their story told. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is a perfect example. His work with the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games was spectacular, his dedication to those he worked with is the stuff of legends and his personal charisma is something that few people who have actually worked closely with him dispute. But that side of his story isn’t being told. It’s important to note that he’s certainly not the only one to have his success routinely omitted from the public eye.
How can public relations professionals avoid such situations and position the positive above the negative?
1. Know Your Client’s Story
What are your client’s positive points? Where did the company start? How did the company get to be where it is today? What were the difficulties? What were the triumphs? What is the vision for the future?
If all I know are about my client is what I see in the news, it’s difficult to positively position their successes. When I know my client’s story, nuances and background, I can position their successes above the negativity all too commonly expressed in top-tier and trade media.
It’s important to establish a trust-based relationship with the CEO and other members of the management team to understand the circumstances and nuances that set them apart from the competition.
2. Believe in Your Client’s Future
A few years ago when I was in Nauvoo, Illinois, I had the opportunity to go to a pageant put on by a church. What most impressed me about the event was the capacity people participating in the pageant had to captivate me with their words and actions. I realized that they had an incredible ability to draw their audience into their story because they believed in what they were saying.
The same applies for public relations professionals. We need to understand and believe in our client’s future to sell their story to the media. Enthusiasm goes a long way.
Today’s world promotes skepticism about corporations, and often rightly so. Public relations professionals should ask the tough questions and understand what their client’s missteps have been. Doing so, they can embrace their client’s vision within the context of their client’s history. I always avoid assumptions and make sure my understanding of the company and its story is fact-based and correct. The truth is your friend.
3. Tell the Story
Once I know my client’s history and believe in their future, I can finally tell their story, and tell it in a way that makes it stand out.
How NASA Managed Expectations with Curiosity
NASA did an impressive job of expectation management, unlike NBC did with Olympics.
As was well-publicized, NASA oversaw the landing of the rover Curiosity early this morning. The rover’s landing is a fantastic moment in the history of space exploration and a credit to NASA and those that worked with the organization.
While all involved cheered for a win, NASA was prepared (from a public relations standpoint) for the possible failure of the rover’s landing. The agency coined the term “seven minutes of terror” to describe just how intense and nerve-wracking the rover landing would be, and to make it clear just how likely failure was.
Stories about NASA’s gargantuan undertaking and the possibility both for total failure and for unprecedented success ran frequently at least a week prior to the event itself. People knew about the landing. They were excited about the landing. They shared a fraction of the terror and the excitement had by those at NASA. It was even shown on the giant screen at Times Square.
And it was a success. But had it not been, NASA’s impressive capacity to manage public expectations while keeping the promise of excellence alive would have minimized public backlash.
What’s the takeaway?
Honesty regarding the possibility of failure is essential to keeping the public on your side in the event of a failure and a reasonable level of confidence and reminders of the promise held by success makes the public cheer when you get it right.
—————————
Stephen H. Coltrin
Chairman & CEO
Stephen H. Coltrin, Chairman and CEO of Coltrin & Associates, has given strategic counsel and communications support to executives worldwide and been the driving force behind all Coltrin’s initiatives for over 30 years. His counsel has driven growth and revenue for companies including Nintendo, 3Com, Burger King, Salt Lake City Olympics, Smiths Detection, Bain Capital and others. Mr. Coltrin currently serves on the board of directors of the International Radio and Television Society Foundation, Quantum Leap Innovations and Clinical Ink, on the National Advisory Board of America’s Freedom Festival, and on the Advisory and Advancement Council of the Utah State University Journalism & Communication Department. Mr. Coltrin has received many honors, including the prestigious Chapel of Four Chaplains Award, the Leo Hindery Media Ethics and Values Speaker of the Year, and Honorary Vice Chairmen for Broadcasting & Cable’s Hall of Fame Awards.
