Leaders, turn off your spin machine
from despair.com
by Susan Gosselin,
Vest Director of PR
Most people think that p.r. people are hired to cover things up, and “pretty up” the facts. CEOs, pr flacks and corporate talking heads have done a darn good job of proving them right over the years. Remember how Enron denied being in trouble right before the company crashed into financial oblivion? Even parsing the facts (Clinton saying “I didn’t have sex with that woman” comes to mind) has become rampant. People have always been able to spot a liar. But in today’s fully enabled social information age, there are hundreds of ways they can now call you on it…and publicly prove it. The most important thing you can do as a leader is turn off your spin machine. Here’s how.
1) Develop a “No Hype” policy. No one in your company can public statements to the media that are demonstrably false. The media and bloggers are now taking up fact checking with a vengance. National organizations have developed the “Truth index” that judges how factual politicians statements are, and the national media reports on the results. ABC’s morning news program “This Week” has now put up a truth meter that judges the factual truthfulness of the people they’ve interviewed. And with the “comment here” after any story now online means that anyone out there that can prove you’re lying, will be quick to point it out.
2) Stamp out lying among the staff. That means cracking down on corporate bullies, credit stealers, and blame-shifters. Call people out when they fudge their data. Train your managers on how to treat their people with respect, with professional HR trainers if necessary. Make integrity a part of your performance reviews.
3) Play it straight. If the company is in trouble, be clear about framing the challenge with staff. The key is how you say it. Just say this is the challenging environment we’re in; here’s how we’ve failed; and here are some of the things we’re aggressively pursuing to fix it. Then open the door to ideas from the rest of the company. Make people feel like they are part of the solution. Crisis can be an opportunity for people to feel like more of a team, not less.
4) When dealing with the media, it’s better to say nothing than to spin the facts. If you are a privately held company, you are under no obligation to speak to the press when the chips are down. I would avoid any kind of statement that predicts down sales for coming quarters, for instance. Just use the strategies I’ve mentioned above, talk about the present, and express your hopes for the future with the actions you’ll be taking. If you’re a public corporation, you’ll need to stay within the boundaries of the law, and have to disclose predictions. Just keep your focus on how you’re going to make things better.
The best PR people have always known that integrity is really the only real currency there is in life. Perhaps the this new era of communications will be what makes us all better…more real…more transparent…more participatory. One can only hope.
