Why communications professionals should reach higher levels of company management
I recently sat at an event where the former CEO of a FTSE company addressed a room full of his peers about, among other things, a recent crisis that had badly affected his business. He said that while he had been well prepared for the crisis in operational terms, the scale of the reputational damage had taken him completely by surprise.
The ensuing discussion confirmed that most of the other CEOs and board members in the room agreed that managing corporate reputation was becoming increasingly difficult and important. Yet a quick spot check back at the office revealed the absence of communications professionals on the executive management teams or boards of the company chiefs who had spoken up.
If the communications function is so important, surely more PR professionals should have a place at the highest levels of company management? Here are three reasons why:
- The discipline is becoming ever more important as the speed at which information is disseminated increases exponentially via an ever-increasing number of channels. Company reputations can now be destroyed in hours and minutes rather than months and weeks.
- For someone to manage corporate reputation well they require all the information they can get from every angle of the business so they can understand the nuances and potential impact of saying one thing or another. A PR professional who has access to executive management meetings and who has the seniority and respect of other company leaders is in a much stronger position to do this.
- Senior PR advisers are more likely to stand up to the CEO where necessary. Even CEOs who are great at their own PR can be prone to errors of judgement because they are too close to a situation. A PR adviser has the benefit of being able to appraise a situation dispassionately and assess the likely outcomes of different courses of action. As external consultants, we have seen many CEOs bursting to launch into a passionate defence of their company against our advice. It is often only much later that the CEO realises that following their instinct could have been damaging, and a PR adviser who is in the CEOs inner circle has a much better chance of holding that instinct in check in the first place.
It won’t happen overnight, but the more companies that get burned by the failure to manage their reputation effectively, the more communications professionals I expect to see in the CEO’s close circle at the top of companies in the coming years.