Don’t let it get personal. Or you lose sight of the goal.
“Nothing rattles me,” the young executive routinely assures colleagues. Makes sense. That’s her job. She is the voice of calm and reason in the midst of the storm, and that lets her find solutions to clients’ problems.
Then the unexpected happened, and she lost it.
She’d just bought a new car 10 days earlier, and another driver slammed into her “baby.” Her sense of control evaporated.
She ran around the crash site apologizing to everyone in sight. To the father of the other driver for the inconvenience of having to come get his son. To neighbors for disturbing their dinners. At one point, she said she was sorry for saying she was sorry.
The one thing she never apologized for was causing the accident because she hadn’t. But the damage was done. The other driver seized on her repeated apologies to try to shift the blame.
Clients facing PR crises often have the same reaction.
They are too close and too invested to be objective. Whether it involves their company, their non-profit, or their personal reputation.
Like when a consumer claimed he found a cigarette butt in a bag of packaged food and told his story to a TV station. Despite advice that he not do it, the firm’s owner called the consumer directly and asked how much he’d need to pay the consumer to keep him quiet.
Or the executive who insisted the best way to settle a business dispute with Google was to sue it. The executive’s boss overruled him and instead embraced the advice of her lawyer and Crisis PR counselor to provide Google with a graceful exit that gave the client everything it wanted. Google leapt at the opportunity.
There’s a moral here: As soon as a situation becomes personal, the dynamics shift. No matter how prepared you think you are, you’re not. At least, not anymore.
For a deeper glimpse into our world, see our book on Amazon, A Lawyer’s Guide to Crisis PR: Protecting Your Clients In & From the Media.
If you don’t already subscribe, please sign up for our blog, Insights on High-Stakes PR.
You can reach Roger Gillott and Eden Gillott directly at 310-396-8696.
Gillott Communications is a Los Angeles-based public relations firm that specializes in high-stakes Crisis & Reputation Management with more than 50 years of expertise in strategic communications, corporate public relations, and working with the media.
Follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn where we share amazing tips on how to protect your reputation and mitigate damage during a crisis.
Wonderful piece. The idea that being gracious can be your undoing or being overly aggressive can produce the same result — — tremendous insight. Thanks for putting this in focus and emphasizing the need for an outside. objective view to keep things in perspective.