For business leaders and communications professionals, it is easy to say the wrong thing in the worst context. How can professionals protect both their personal brand and that of the organisations they represent? Pete Carvill explores. This article is from Communicate magazine's print issue.

It was not until the final moments of the Zoom call with her staff that it all went wrong for Andi Owen, CEO of furniture giant MillerKnoll. The seventy-five-minute call was ending when Owen responded to a question about staying motivated around the issuing of bonuses. The most important thing employees could do, Owen said, was focus on what they could control.

But then an exhortation to go out and provide the best service, and to sell, went dreadfully, dreadfully askew. The rallying cry fell very, very flat. “I had an old boss who said to me one time,” said Owen. “‘You can visit pity city, but you can’t live there.’ So, people, leave pity city. Let’s get it done. Thank you. Have a great day.”

Wishing people to have a ‘great day’ did nothing to dissipate the sour note engendered by the ‘pity city’ anecdote. And the fallout was swift and brutal. A few days later, Owen issued an emailed apology to all staff. It read: “As a leader, I try to always pick the right words and tone to inspire and motivate this incredible team. I want to be transparent and empathetic, and as I continue to reflect on this instance, I feel terrible that my rallying cry seemed insensitive. What I’d hoped would energise the team to meet a challenge we’ve met many times before landed in a way that I did not intend and for that I am sorry.”

Owen is not the first major figure in an organisation to screw up so badly when it comes to communication, nor will she be the last. The risk, says Laura Perkes, founder of PR with Perkes, is in the unexpected moments when questions are being fired at them. She says, “This is where you are walking the tightrope. Everyone has their own opinion, but you need to put it to one side when you represent an organisation and focus on its mission instead.

"When we are caught off guard, rather than pausing and thinking of our response, we have an instant reaction"

“Many of us just freeze,” Perkes adds, “when we get a question that we haven’t prepared for, and we don’t know what to do for the best. When we are caught off guard, rather than pausing and thinking of our response, we have an instant reaction. That’s how public figures get caught out because it’s as if the mask has slipped a little.”

And it is easy for the mask to slip in the modern world. A spokesperson or a major figure does not even have to be giving a speech for them to cause a communications issue. In 2021, German politician Armin Laschet was inadvertently filmed laughing enthusiastically while visiting areas of the country hit heavily by flooding. Despite apologising later, the damage was done—the former state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, a candidate to follow then-chancellor Angela Merkel, swiftly fell behind in a race ultimately won by present-chancellor Olaf Scholz. Even a Twitter apology from Laschet did nothing to ameliorate the damage.

Laschet may be a politician, but when someone in the private sector blunders like Owen did, the ramifications will be felt throughout the organisation. Monique Zytnik is the author of ‘Internal Communication in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’. In previous roles, she worked within multiple organisations across Australia and Europe. In 2024, she consults with firms on how to improve and manage how they speak with colleagues. She says that poor communication from the top rattles down through the spine of an organisation. “It’s extremely distressing,” she says, “for employees to hear these things, even if they haven’t done anything wrong. They’re associated with the brand, and they’ll feel that it reflects badly on them.”

She adds: “When it comes to internal communications, leaders need to inspire and motivate employees, and help them to be a part of the organisation. The leaders also need to be good at listening and picking up on what’s happening on the ground. That’s why leadership communications are integral to internal communications. If you have a leader who is not liked or respected, they’re not going to be able to get their projects up and running.”

To stave off problems, Zytnik says that communications departments need to build up relationships with an organisation’s leader. This leads to a dynamic where that leader will be briefed, practised and rehearsed before any event, with all communications planned, reviewed, and approved by multiple eyes looking in the same direction. “These events,” says Zytnik, “should not happen in the first place. A lot of people have this belief that authenticity is a great thing. That is an idea I see bandied about everywhere, but it’s rubbish. Leadership is very deliberate and so is leadership communications.”

But if worse comes to worst, a good communications department will need a plan. “We are human, and we make mistakes,” says Zytnik, “but in terms of cleanup, there is a basic crisis communications plan that you need to follow. The first thing is to apologise quickly and unreservedly; people want to see that you can recognise your mistakes. After that, it’s having conversations with the right people to try and clean it up, followed by a statement from corporate communications. The final thing is to work within the organisation, with employees, to clarify what happened openly and honestly.”

That is a perspective shared by Anneli Lort, co-founder of the DAPS Agency. She says that the first thing to do is to know what happened and why. “What I say to all my clients,” she says, “is that they cannot lie to me. If they don’t tell me the truth, then I can’t help them.”

"Leadership is very deliberate and so is leadership communications"

Perkes takes a similar tack. She says that the worst thing an organisation can do in this scenario is to obfuscate. “You can’t try and worm your way out of it,” she says. “That’s when the rot sets in and the situation goes from bad to toxic. The employees will begin to talk amongst themselves, and many may decide that they don’t want to work with someone with those viewpoints.”

Recent events in the Middle East have inflamed tensions around the world, with many corporate brands oscillating between vocal support for one group or another. This has all the promise of major headaches for communications departments. It may be in 2024 that the smartest thing, when asked for an opinion outside the wheelhouse of a company’s mission, to answer: “we don’t have a view on this.”

Perkes thinks that such an approach would be courageous. “I don’t think,” she says, “that any public person or figure wants to say something that can be blown up or taken out of context. There’s a lesson there for all of us. The standard response used to be ‘no comment’, but that’s not good enough anymore. You’re letting people come to their own conclusions about what you believe. But if you say you don’t know enough on the subject, there’s no comeback to that. The conversation immediately gets shut down.”

Crucially, Lort says that if someone were to broach an unpopular opinion, it has to be one that they are prepared to stand by. “It’s not just you that you have to think about,” she says. “It’s also your staff and suppliers.”

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