Defending your reputation:  assessing the risks to your reputation

Reputation is one of the most valuable assets of any organisation.  Your reputation moulds people's opinions of you and influences both what they think and what they DO.  It will encourage them to agree with your policies, donate to your charity or commission your services.

Your reputation rests on how people rate your performance, whether they admire your approach, whether they trust you and think your organisation is well run.  It also depends on whether they see you as ethical, and authoritative

Not surprisingly, a crisis can severely shake people's confidence in your organisation.  A crisis will damage your reputation.

You need to put in place measures to ensure that you both:

• Prevent crises from happening
• Can handle a crisis effectively if, against all the odds, you find your organisation is at the epicentre of a crisis.

A crisis is doubly damaging if it becomes a full blown media crisis.

What is a crisis?

It is impossible to predict every crisis - but here are some with the potential of damaging your reputation:

‘Accidents'

• Death or serious injury caused by your organisation or your people to a member of the public, customer, child, old person etc
• Damage to property caused by your organisation or your people - this can be especially damaging to your reputation if it puts lives at risk, or the damage is caused by something frightening (like fire, explosion)

Bad management or system failure

• Public is put in danger by something you have done or failed to do - whether by negligence or recklessness
• Your systems, or your oversight of staff, are not adequate for activities of your organisation eg Member of staff/someone else on your property assaults an innocent bystander; you do not have enough staff to cover a dangerous event.

Wrongdoing/scandal

• Suspicion of wrong doing (lying, cover up, shoddy work etc) that hangs over your organisation
• Sex, financial or other scandal
• Theft or other criminality

Threats to services

• Strikes
• Major staff cuts
• Electricity blackouts

Loss of credibility through failure to observe acceptable standards/values

• An industrial tribunal (or series of tribunal cases) where the organisation was found not to be adhering to its stated principles
• Strong criticism from a regulator or establishment figure
• Allegations of torture against defenders of democracy; school buildings collapsed in China earthquake
• Whistleblowing

Catastrophe

• Public catastrophe that happens on your watch, involving your service (eg TfL - terrorist attack on tube)

Internal dissent/low morale

• Major, damaging differences of opinion in your organisation
• Disgruntled employee (or job applicant) makes complaint
• Controversial appointment of senior figure

Rumour/careless remarks

• Rumours about the health of your organisation
• A careless remark by a spokesperson which undermines your credibility (eg Gerald Ratner)

Your involvement with others

• Your organisation sponsors an event that goes wrong
• Your organisation is involved with an unpopular client group (eg paedophiles) and something goes wrong

You may need to step outside your own views and see the world as others see it in order to predict crises - even if you don't think an issue is serious, it is if it matters to other people.

Two things can really exacerbate a crisis:

Low staff morale - if an organisation is going through a difficult time and morale is low, crises are more likely to happen and more likely to be handled badly

Schandenfreude (how are the mighty fallen!) can really deepen a crisis.  Any organisation that has attracted jealousy or has been seen to be arrogant in the past, or has been critical of others, may suffer from this.  There will always be critics who are happy to see your organisation or your senior people brought down a peg or two!

What journalists will be looking for

Your crisis is meat and drink for a journalist - many journalists go into journalism for the excitement of investigation and ‘righting wrongs'.

In many of the above crises, you will find that journalists will be looking out for:

• Your failure to protect the public eg failure to put in place health and safety procedures
• Your lack of investment leading to accidents or poor performance
• Your failure to check the suitablity or training of your staff (eg child abuse checks)
• Your complacency e.g. failure to investigate or act on past allegations
• Your failure to recognise a problem as a problem

The Centre can help you put in place

• Risk assessment
• Risk management procedures
• Measures for handling a media crisis

We can also provide media crisis training.

Contact us on 020 7490 3030 or info@the-centre.co.uk.