How to survive a scandal

In the corporate world, just like in life, the good, the bad and the ugly shine through the cracks.

There will be times when specific comments, past behavior and opinions may cause chaos among co-workers, customers or the public eye. Left unattended, those incidents times may turn into a scandal, leaving businesspeople to survive independently and use whatever resources they may have at hand. The truth is, the key to surviving scandal is a good communication strategy. It is crucial to have a plan in place with steps to handle these sorts of difficult situations.

Well-intentioned leaders are often ill-equipped to handle the communication complexities hidden beneath a scandal. What seems like the right move typically backfires, and lost ground cannot be recovered. Emotions may come into play during this time, and they are your worst enemy. When we are emotional, we cannot think clearly, and if we succumb to our emotions at any point, we will be forced to do damage control. That is when you need to stick to this golden rule: Ignore your feelings, and do what’s right. For example:

• If somebody sends you a nasty message, cool your heels before responding.
• When name-calling commences, be positive, or at least neutral, about the person in question.
• If you are hurt, write a message to the offending party. But before you send it, revise it until it is a message you would want to receive if the tables were turned.

To survive a scandal, you need a plan. Ideally, you would foresee when a crisis could occur and have a plan in the waiting. But usually, you have to spring into action as soon as you know an issue arises. In those situations, there is a strategy you can follow. This strategy includes immediate steps, planning steps, implementation steps and the final steps. All of these guarantee you will be able to survive the scandal.

Immediate steps

When a scandal hits you or your company, there are a few steps you can follow to assess the situation, know how to react, and decide what to do:

• Gather your team to assess the situation as soon as possible. This means legal counsel should be included when needed.
• Collect information and confirm as many facts as you can.
• Assess risks and opportunities, and consider every audience group that could be affected or not.
• Author an initial holding statement indicating you understand what is happening and are gathering the facts to make a more informed statement.
• Temporarily halt all advertising campaigns.
• Determine the level of response and how to respond. The worse the news, the more in-person you should be.

Planning steps

Once you have assessed the situation and gathered the facts, it’s time to act:

• Develop a communications plan targeting what you want each audience to know and do.
• Assign resources and establish deadlines and guidelines to measure the plan’s effectiveness.
• Author key messages based on facts, not speculation.
• Shape your comments to clearly demonstrate how you are positively affecting your customers, patients or community members.

Implementation steps

You have planned how you will handle the situation, and now it’s time to get started:

• Activate your communication plan, using outside consultants if needed.
• Monitor the media, including all channels, websites and social media platforms.
• Use your prepared key messages, acknowledging any questions you are asked. Always bridge back to your key messages during an interview or conversation. For example, say, “If that turns out to be the case, we will take action,” or “I can’t speak to all that. Here’s what I can tell you.”
• Maintain control of the interview by rephrasing any negative or misleading questions to create a positive and accurate understanding of the issue.

Final steps

Once the scandal is over and things go back to normal, you should assess the outcome:

• Debrief after the crisis passes to see how well you responded.
• Determine if you got the outcome you wanted.
• Create a positive publicity campaign to run after the scandal is smoothed over.

We all want to avoid scandal, but sometimes it is unavoidable. In any case, you must be prepared to navigate the situation as positively as possible. Communication is the key to surviving scandal, but it is essential to know how to communicate and what steps to take in order to get the outcome you are looking for. Assess the facts, prepare your message, deliver your information, and keep a positive and respectful attitude while doing so. This is what will get you to the other side.

Melissa DeLay is the owner of crisis communications agency TruPerception and author of the book “The Truth About Scandal: The Everyday Guide to Navigating Business Crises.” 

One Response to “How to survive a scandal”

Ronald N Levy says: July 27, 2021 at 7:55 am

Notice what’s obvious—who are the parties to the scandal—and what’s less apparent but what you should look hard and early to see: what’s at stake and how you can hold down your losses.

THE PARTIES to a scandal are obviously (a) the accusers, (b) the accused (your people) and (c) the public which will judge. Less obviously, your people are endangered by a fourth party (d): government officials and wannabes who may think of how they can make themselves look good by making you look bad and proposing to punish you for the alleged sin. The politicians are especially dangerous because unduly restrictive regulation can cost your company a fortune years after year.

Also problematic is that a politician’s pleasure from media coverage can keep the scandal in the spotlight longer because the more a politician berates you and proposes to punish you, the longer the politician’s media coverage continues. (They say not legislation to “punish” but legislation to “protect the public from this happening again.”)

WHAT’S AT STAKE in a scandal is not just the obvious, the embarrassment that someone screwed up. More importantly what’s at stake is what the public and government may DO to your company in response to the scandal.

At minimum you can lose sales and earnings. A big enough scandal can also cost you lost market value, reputational value, if investors judge your loss of sales and earnings may continue.

Less obviously at first, you also lose money if your competitors start looking better to the public than you do. Customers buy not only based on price and product features but buy partly based on who they like. A perceived bad guy is liked less and the goodwill loss turns into economic loss. Choice employees, the ones everyone would love to hire, may also be turned on or off by your scandal. Community legislators and police may become disappointed or even hostile.

WHAT YOU CAN DO. Fortunately there are many truthful, effective PR measures you can take to hold down your damage.

.1. Show “it was them, not us”—that what is alleged is attributable to individuals who are now gone from the company, not to the other 99.9% of your people who continue to serve the public importantly. (Don’t say your people did it which you may not know for sure, say “what is alleged.”)

.2. Show you have great people correcting the situation. Sometimes you can have a Name-of-Company advisory panel of professors from famous universities to oversee a program of correction and improvement. The respect people have for universities helps turn into public respect for your company because an endorser is part of an endorsement.

.3. Show how you’ve made things not just “good again” but better than ever. If the scandal relates to product safety or airline safety, saying “it’s fixed” can leave the public with some doubt and your company with a black eye. But if you say that your experts have worked to make it “the safest in the entire world,” you may actually get some benefit from the scandal-related media coverage. It’s promoting not forgive-and-forget but a good a reason to buy!

.4. Show public benefit, several ways the public may benefit—better value than ever—from the improvements management has made.

There’s much more as you know if you’ve taken some of the PR Daily courses on crisis management. What you learn there not only makes you able to do a better job than less educated PR executives but may also make you better paid. The pain of scandal often makes management more willing to spend bigger bucks on PR pain relief.