05/19/14 – Crisis at Hand? The Reputation Doctor Will See You Now

What are the key elements that should be addressed in a crisis management plan?

Mr. Paul: It is always customized. The best practices approach to crisis management is flawed. I know there are a number of my contemporaries who think differently and that’s OK, but my experience has shown it is a big mistake. Every crisis is different, has different stakeholders. Some might be similar but they never are exactly the same. There should be different guidelines, rules and practices based on different cultures and locations. It would be similar to asking an attorney ‘what are the five rules to win a case’; he’d laugh at you. People are looking for a quick fix always, they would just love to write down five tips that would make everything go away. That’s part of the reason ironically that so many people and organizations get into crises in the first place. You have to do the hard work, not only to solve the crisis but to build a foundation to prevent a crisis from occurring.

Mr. Paul: I’m a counselor, not a publicist. I’m not just a consultant. In counseling you don’t just do what clients want, the job is to counsel back on the things that are most troublesome for them. It’s not different than being a therapist. You can’t analyze these problems without including the human element. When you have a culture in leadership of hiding and covering up and not fully analyzing the problem, that’s a big deal. Or someone who has reputation for being angry and making people jump in meetings and people being afraid to speak up, if I don’t know that and recognize that before my first meeting as part of my strategy to deal with the problem, we’re going to have problems.

Are these human factors often overlooked, and what is the peril of neglecting them?

Mr. Paul: I see fear as an underlying emotion and anger as an emotion often on top of that fear. I spend a lot of time working with men who struggle with emotional intelligence. That’s very important. In problems that are written about every day, the best-practices approaches within so many different disciplines don’t mention it and many analyses think it’s tangential. But it’s at the core of the problems that we’re called in to help solve. If we don’t discuss them the root is never pulled and the crisis only continues.

How do you overcome resistance to exploring these emotions?

Mr. Paul: I had dinner with a chief executive recently who was with his wife and he told her when he first met me he was very impressed with my track record in counseling clients and decided he was going to use my firm. After our second day of meetings he hung up with me, called me the N-word and told me he never wanted to see me or talk to me again. Then 36 hours later he called me back and was extremely humble and admitted to me he had never faced such fear in his life when I discussed some of the issues, and would I accept his apology and could we meet next day to continue where we left off. I said yes.

His wife asked how I was able to handle that and why did I even agree to work with him after he treated me that way? My response to her was it’s part of the business. I had prepared myself for the worst-case scenario that my advice might be traumatic to those that heard it but I knew it was the right thing to do from an ethical and moral standpoint, even at the risk of being chased out the door or hung up on or called names.

What is the role of the CEO in reputation management?

Mr. Paul: The CEO’s job is to be the conscience of the corporation; it starts at the top. There are many corporations and organizations that have very well-written mission statements and polices regarding ethics, excellent risk managers and compliance officers and legal departments who are told to follow the written guidelines. I would say the top 20 companies or corporations that have been in the news with major crises just in the past year all have the same. The question then is what’s wrong? The answer is corporations are not just buildings and guidelines, they’re people. And what people stink at is picking people to work and sometimes lead corporations. We see human resources as an aside even though we know it’s the most important thing. We speak as though it is but we don’t walk the talk.

Mr. Paul: We hear terms like empty suit often, we hear terms like difficult manager, we hear terms like amazing sales person, horrible people person all the time. We make exceptions, we make excuses, just like in our personal lives. When we do that in our professional, corporate lives there are major consequences. There are holes in the ethics and habits and behaviors of people and it’s very easy for the world to learn about them today, that’s why human resources is so important. Before we can talk about leadership, before we can talk about many of the other problems that we see happening within a corporation, if you don’t truly take stock of how you pick people and make sure they’re the right people and are willing to ask the difficult questions about their ethics and morality and decision-making, your organization will be in crisis.