MANAGEMENT FAILURES CONTINUE
TO CAUSE PR NIGHTMARES
By Richard E. Nicolazzo
I’m often
asked why crisis communications counselors are so busy.
One needs
to look no further than the management failures that recently occurred at
Rutgers University.
PR
nightmares at prestigious institutions continue accelerating at a rapid pace.
In the case of Rutgers, a number of administrators were involved in a decision
to “rehabilitate” (rather than fire) basketball coach Mike Rice whose
outrageous, abusive behavior was caught on video and leaked to ESPN.
Give
university president Robert Barchi credit for taking responsibility, but the
damage had already been done. “This was a failure of process,” he said at a
press conference. “I regret that I did not ask to see this video when Tim (now
the former athletic director) told me of its existence.”
Quite
frankly, it’s hard to imagine that an experienced university president would
not ask to see a video of this nature.
The PR
fallout from this episode was swift and damaging. Even the governor of New
Jersey got involved. Besides Rice, athletic director Tim Pernetti, interim
senior vice president John Wolf, and assistant coach Jimmy Martelli all quit.
Four careers permanently damaged for no good reason.
Other examples
of poor judgment abound.
J.P. Morgan
Chase & Co. CEO James Dimon had his reputation sullied when risk managers
didn’t do their job. A report by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations found that the bank’s top risk manager had called warnings about
trading losses “garbage.”
Due to
engineering failures, Boeing’s launch of the 787 Dreamliner turned into a PR
fiasco. According to a report in The New
York Times, when testing the batteries before production, engineers relied
on the same test used for tiny cellphone batteries to gather data about the
safety of the heftier lithium-ion units on the new jet.
The Jerry
Sandusky debacle at Penn State is another prime example of what happens when
senior leaders in key positions fail to use sound judgment. At a recent
Pennsylvania state senate hearing, a senator stated that the PSU board was left
“flat-footed” because former administrators such as Graham Spanier, Gary
Schultz and Tim Curley testified to a grand jury but most of the board didn’t
even know about it.
Maintaining Institutional Integrity
In a
disturbing, reoccurring pattern, we are seeing large organizations make
decisions that impact their institutional integrity. It’s as if they have lost their
moral compass. Despite the world of communications we ive in, senior executives
and administrators are not protecting the integrity of management and the brands
of their institutions.
How does
crisis management play into this dynamic?
Very
simply, top inside communications executives and trusted outside counselors are
usually not at the decision-making table.
Let’s play
out the Rutgers situation a different way. A meeting is held in the president’s
office and all the facts are laid out (including playing the video). A senior
VP of communications at the college or a veteran counselor from an outside firm
specializing in crisis management gets to opine on the matter.
Having been
in similar situations during my 30-plus year career, I’m hard pressed to
believe that the counselor wouldn’t warn about the need to understand that the
institution they represent is larger than one individual, and that serious PR
and reputational damage would ensue if the coach was allowed to stay.
Just think
about Joe Paterno’s behavior in the Sandusky scandal. For years, he thought it
was all about Penn State football and his legacy. When the story came out, it
was the institution that suffered the most damage.
Bad
decision-making at the senior management level is having an effect on crisis
communications. Increasingly, crisis teams are called into situations where operational
failures cause spiraling crises.
This
creates an environment in which senior executives call in the communications
team after the fact and ask them to “spin our way out of it.”
In my view,
spin is long dead.
People are
simply too smart to fall for lame excuses like the ones that Rutgers trotted
out. Anyone with sound judgment and values who watched the video would have
concluded that the coach had to go immediately.
While the position
of senior communications executive has been somewhat elevated in recent years,
there is still a long way to go.
Now is the
time for management to put the insights, perspective and street smarts of
communications executives to work at the decision-making table.
Right next
to the CEO would be perfect.
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