Ethical reputation management: an oxymoron?

When people ask what I do, I often feel a slight sense of dread that the answer, ‘crisis and reputation management,’ might relegate me to the traffic-warden-turned-tax-collector end of the popularity scale.

Given partygate, the devastating infected blood and Post Office scandals, decades of abuse in religious institutions and children’s homes (I could go on), it’s hardly surprising that reputation management doesn’t exactly warm people’s hearts. At the centre of each of these and other high-profile catastrophes, it seems, lies a monumental cover-up to protect the interests of those involved.

You might even say that the ‘reputation of reputation’ has taken a nosedive.

So where does this leave the many communication specialists who value honest, ethical behaviour when attempting to mitigate the damage that a torrent of negative headlines can inflict on their clients?

The importance of reputation

Perhaps it’s worth reminding ourselves why reputations are worth protecting. ?

There’s no handwringing in the corporate world, where a good reputation is seen as a key component of a successful business alongside, for example, the need to balance inventory with orders or planning for growth. A 2021 study by the Berlin Institute of Finance, Innovation and Digitalization, The influence of reputation on shareholder value, analysed data from 147 companies, looking at share price, sales revenue and profitability alongside public perception. The study concluded that “reputation can have a significant positive impact on shareholder value. In this respect, all companies should regard reputation management as an integral part of corporate management.”[1] Of course, this also works in the opposite direction: to take a recent example, Boeing has seen its share price fall 30 per cent this year as it battles to navigate its ongoing safety crisis.?

For charities, a healthy reputation is critical to maintaining support and the operational ability to deliver services. If a crisis does hit, the consequences can be swift. Following a widely-reported safeguarding scandal in its Haiti programme after an investigation by The Times in February 2018, Oxfam’s 2018/2019 annual report attributed a drop in donations from ￡52.2m to ￡47m to the reputational fall-out of the coverage[2], a loss of almost 10 per cent.

As for the public sector, reduced trust and confidence arising from a poor reputation can directly affect operational effectiveness. In her 2023 review of the Metropolitan Police, Baroness Louise Casey chronicled the high-profile incidents that followed the 2021 kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer. Outlining the impact of falling short of the ‘Peelian principles’[3] that underpin the public’s expectations of the police, Casey said that:

“…if the principles are not being observed, public co-operation reduces, crime increases and greater force and compulsion are used, creating a negative cycle.”. Conversely, “adherence to the Peelian principles can play in gaining public trust and confidence”.

In other words, when it comes to the police, a good reputation is intrinsically linked to the operational effectiveness that comes with trust and confidence and vice versa. The same could almost certainly be said for hospitals, schools and any other service reliant on the need to recruit the most talented staff, the support of its local community and the goodwill of politicians.

Staying ethical

So if a good reputation is not only a ‘nice to have’ but also vital for operational effectiveness and even survival, at what point does the slope start to become slippery?

In my view, it’s when the imperative to protect a reputation becomes so strong that it:

a)???????? distracts from the need to deal with the problem that has led to the crisis

b)??????? overrides leaders’ empathy for the people most affected by it, and

c)???????? subsumes honesty, openness and accountability (assuming that these values were present in the first place).

The truth is that being honest, open and accountable takes courage.

It might mean admitting mistakes. It might conflict with the advice of lawyers or insurance providers. It might cast the person who appointed you in a bad light. It might result in further major developments such as newsworthy resignations or even a police investigation. Despite all this, doing otherwise and departing from your core values in an attempt to protect your reputation risks redefining your organisation and all the people in it in the most negative, humiliating and potentially catastrophic terms possible.

More often than not, I find that organisations with a safeguarding responsibility instinctively see their starting point in a crisis as one of wanting to do the right thing: there’s usually a strong consensus that the needs of the people who depend on them must come first. If that consensus isn’t there, then we’re not a good ‘fit’. And when a leadership team has the benefit of an external voice in what can become a crisis-induced ‘bunker mentality’ - someone who reassures them that they can safely weather the storm with the honesty, openness, and accountability that they want to deploy - the job of the ethical reputation manager is more akin to that of a common-sense ‘whisperer’. It can be as simple as taking a pause and stepping outside of the problem to look at it with a clear head. ??

So yes - value your reputation and don’t be ashamed of wanting to protect it when needed.? Just remember that this can only truly be achieved through communications that reflect, with authenticity, all the attributes that led people to trust you in the first place.

[1] Christopher Runge, Influence of reputation on shareholder value (2021) https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/pdf/2021/40/shsconf_glob2021_02017.pdf

[2] https://www.oxfam.org.uk/documents/107/Annual_Report_2019.pdf

[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policing-by-consent/definition-of-policing-by-consent