Every organisation has a reputation; the question is whether it’s the one its leaders intended.
People often ascribe reputation to PR and communications specialists, and while that is a valid and strategic role, the kind of reputation I’m thinking about is experienced before it’s communicated.
Obvious question: who experiences an organisation, or a brand, first? Obvious answer: the people inside it. They are the first to know when the things going on around them contradict the values they have been told drive their organisation. It’s blindingly obvious to them whether a business that says it puts customers first really does that, or not.
I once had to convince a client leadership team to stop talking about “internal values” and “external values”: a brand is a promise kept, and you can’t do that with two sets of values behind it.
Reputation is really accumulated behaviour. If that behaviour has been largely positive and consistent, an occasional let-down can be absorbed by people’s willingness to give that organisation the benefit of the doubt. It’s the difference between people saying “That’s not like them” and “Isn’t that typical?” which can then become the difference between customer retention and customer defection.
When we talk about behaviour, we’re immediately walking into a discussion about culture. What are the values and standards, how are decisions taken, how are the organisation’s priorities expressed through its reward systems? To go back to my point about internal and external values needing to be the same, it’s practically impossible to stop culture from leaking. What people on the outside experience is usually a fair reflection of the internal reality.
That internal reality might have elements of the organisation becoming ‘political’, or fragmented; or a fearful, inward-looking mentality might be emerging. Any of these issues would translate into problems in areas such as recruitment/retention, innovation, service quality, customer satisfaction. In other words, the internal weaknesses will directly affect reputational standing.
In turn, this betrays a fundamental problem which raises serious questions around strategy, operations and quality of leadership.
By the time an organisation’s reputation is coming under pressure, employees have probably been living with the causes for months or even years. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, that reputation has been build not by external audiences, but by the organisation itself.
Which is why I’ve become convinced that reputation is not something that communications teams create, or should be expected to protect alone.
Communications matter. But reputations are built much earlier: in meetings, in priorities, in reward systems, in the countless everyday decisions that determine whether an organisation keeps its promises.
A reputation isn’t really what people hear about you. It’s what they come to expect from you.