Too many businesses play reputational roulette when it comes to their public relations. Spin the wheel. Black: public relations is a tool to build reputation via media coverage. Red: public relations is a tool to protect a reputation by concealing the truth.
What a business wants people to think and feel about their organisation and how can they achieve this should be the key question to ask. Finding the right answer should not be a gamble. The recent revelations from the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry illustrate what happens when you misjudge this.
In a recent inquiry session, the forensic accountant Ian Henderson, whose company was brought in to investigate the Horizon software, was damning in his assessment that the Post Office was obsessed with protecting its brand rather than treating its people properly, in this case the sub-postmasters. He described former CEO Paula Vennells’ view that the Post Office had a reputation as the “nation’s most trusted brand with a history of over 400 years” and that, in his opinion, this contributed to a belief that its leaders “felt it was above the law”. In other words, they thought a good reputation would protect them from poor practices.
Of the many lessons to be learned from the Post Office scandal, the first is, as the businessman Sir Roger Carr identified, that “reputation is probably our most prized possession, hard won and easily lost”.
A good reputation requires strong foundations. Immediate business operations contribute but longer-term good governance, sustainable practices, workplace diversity, and employee welfare provide an organisation with a resilience when inevitable issues and crises emerge. A good reputation makes for a quicker recovery.
The second lesson is perfectly captured in a saying public relations professionals like to tell anyone that will listen: you can’t communicate your way out of a problem you behaved your way into.
Bringing your public relations team into the decision-making process when a crisis emerges is already too late. Addressing poor governance and weak practices is an essential step before you can begin focusing on your reputation through external communication. Attempts to do the opposite are not just ineffective but also unethical and liable to be nothing more than planned deception, rightly labelled as reputation washing. At a time when public trust in institutions is so low, these practices only serve to undermine the entire business community and the UK as a good place to operate.
The third lesson is the importance of having the right people with the right skills at the table. In the example of the Post Office, what emerged from the recent evidence was that senior management were happy to let their legal advisors guide their decisions rather than listening to expert public relations advice. If they had had this advice, and heeded it, they might have made decisions that avoided them digging ever deeper into trouble as the scandal unfolded.
A survey of business leaders by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) found that the majority identified a risk to their reputation as a top five concern. However, further research highlights the lack of professional expertise employed to manage that reputation, with half of FTSE 100 firms lacking public relations experience on their board.
Henderson spoke of the Post Office “sabotaging” his investigations. Instead of following what the evidence was telling them, senior managers concerned themselves with fending off the threat of litigation and apparently blinded themselves to any possibility of their own wrongdoing, rather than telling the truth and fixing their mistakes.
It is not clear from the inquiry what role public relations professionals at the Post Office played, but, from Henderson’s evidence and more generally, it appears an obsession with concealment and ‘protecting the brand’ prevailed. The consequences were extremely serious for hundreds of individuals.
And therein lies the fourth, and final, lesson. For public relations to be most effective it needs to be empowered within the organisation and involved in decision-making processes from the start. This means allowing your public relations team to have challenging conversations, and then listening to – and acting on – their difficult advice. If anyone had been listening to the sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses, heeding what Ian Henderson and his colleagues were unearthing in their investigations, or just taking a dispassionate view of what was going on in the organisation, the unfolding disaster could have been averted.
The bitter irony of the Post Office scandal lies in the fact that an organisation so obsessed with its reputation went to such great lengths to protect itself from accusations of wrongdoing that it ended up trashing its historically good reputation anyway.
Simply rolling the dice on your most precious asset, your reputation, is no longer an option. Your reputation may, given patient and consistent work, recover over time, but for some whose fates you gambled with, there will be no coming back.
Alastair McCapra is chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.
Image credit: Carl Court via Getty Images