Crisis Communications: Sorry seems to be the hardest word

At a strategic level, one of the most important responsibilities for anyone working in communications is to advise leaders on how to protect and promote their reputation. This requires a level of experience, instinct, commercial acumen and perhaps most of all, confidence to confront different internal viewpoints.

It is the case that many CEOs and other c-suite leaders decide to ignore advice from their communications team in favour of their own view or that of an influential aide – which is often based on a half-baked anecdote or naked self interest in not being ‘blamed’.

 Worse still, every other professional function seems to be on a permanent mission creep, claiming stake to shaping the communications strategy and output of an organisation. I’m afraid most of the blame for this goes to the lawyers.

When it comes to mistakes and poor behaviour, sorry really does seem to be the hardest word.

 Liability vs Credibility

There is an unspoken (and in some cases very much spoken) belief that admission implies guilt and confers liability. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know if apologising does confer liability.

But I am a comms professional, and I do know that avoiding an apology when it is so obviously owed, has significant consequences for an organisation’s reputation and brand. These can be quantified, particularly easily for publicly traded companies, which then tends to get the CFO involved.

Companies and institutions, like children, find it difficult to apologise. But the perception of guilt or responsibility is divorced from an apology – they need to understand this much more quickly. People are making their mind up anyway, so apologising only influences how they respond to your mistake or error and the long-term brand associations they start to build.

 The CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage this month got me thinking and reflecting on my own experiences of crisis communications and on how communications professionals should behave and respond in this kind of situation.

 Zoe Klienman, the Technology Editor for BBC News, provides insightful snippets into her day-to-day on LinkedIn. I enjoy these and if you’re interested in the nexus between tech, journalism, PR and society do give her a follow. Last week she gave a lengthy update on the CrowdStrike response to the global outage that affected millions of people worldwide.

 The part that stood out for me?

 “One thing that was missing from CrowdStrike’s statement, when it arrived, was any hint of apology. Perhaps a sign of awareness that this could prove to be an extremely expensive mistake, as people missed flights, trains, hospital appointments on a summer Friday -but already there are rumblings of a backlash that the word “sorry” was notably absent from CEO George Kurtz’s words.”

 The impact of this is not only the fact an apology was missing (they don’t even care about the impact on everyone!) but that this only serves to encourage journalists to dig deeper…what are you hiding? What liability do you have?

Acting Quickly is Best

In the political world, ‘getting ahead of a story’ is touted as a smart strategy. What does this mean in the commercial world? Being straight, candid and upfront about the situation. Tell everyone what has happened. Answer the question everyone is asking – why and who’s fault is this? And tell them what you’re doing about it.  

For the most part people don’t much care about punishing those responsible, it is more a sense of good old-fashioned responsibility and accountability, and it gives those on the receiving end of mistakes a sense of control.

I’ve worked on national crisis communications issues, where huge impacts are felt by millions of people in a sensitive sector and most of the national media outlets are ringing, emailing and chasing for a response. The temptation is to concoct the ultimate word jumble that meanders and slithers through the journalistic minefield ahead and results in an accurate, technical and but bland statement.

This is regarded by many professionals as a somewhat safe strategy. It’s ‘what is done’. I’ve been guilty of doing this, and in some cases there’s nothing wrong with this approach. But if you know your organisation should have acted differently in hindsight, whether your fault or not, it’s better just to apologise and own up to your part.

You will end up apologising eventually, so if you’re a CEO please listen to the counsel from your communications team. Get ahead of the story and prevent or mitigate the damage to your brand caused by dragging out the inevitable.  

CrowdStrike’s statement now begins “I want to sincerely apologize directly to all of you for the outage.”

There is a lesson there for everyone. The end result will be the same, it’s just a question of how much damage is done along the way.