Empowering Leadership beyond Crisis Management

Corporate responsibility for articulating and managing social values is a pervasive issue. Discussion has exploded in the press and there is general sentiment that CEOs need to run to catch up with popular sentiment. Business advisory Brunswick Group reports fewer than half of S&P 500 and FTSE 350 CEO’s have a media presence and only a quarter have posted anything in the past year.¹

Brunswick classifies most CEOs as internet “introverts”, who prefer avoidance to engaging in online social activities. Data examples show most CEO online postings are evangelistic and/or communicate strategic information, developments and financial results to stakeholders.

Public interest virtually guarantees stakeholder demands for response to current political issues. Any response hazards social media storms that may threaten the company’s business and reputation. Traditionally, most companies delegate social media to a marketing/public relations function. In this new world, visibility, risk and politicization places social policy directly on the CEO’s desk.

Framing the Issues

Current media and stakeholder interest creates a sense of urgency. Negative social media experiences happen to everyone. Nearly every day, news reports tell stories of boycott, demonstrations and cancel culture initiatives. Employees respond to current political events by demanding executives take a stand. Executives in other companies request support for their own activist initiatives. Any position threatens to trigger bursts of comment. Waves of hate speech inherently upset everyone and no executive wants to be a target.

Conversations triggered by active social media storms limit coaching to listening and helping the client assess the situation. Things move too quickly and corporate leaders engage with “swat teams” of legal, public relations and strategy consultants. Opportunity lies in helping clients develop insights and strategy for positioning their company’s policy, culture, communication and processes to manage perceptions that may lead to future attacks.

Expect clients to show high anxiety around hate speech and demand prescriptive solutions. Several factors raise concern:

• Personal attacks
• Polarized and polarizing positions
• Illogical and premature perspectives
• No interest in negotiation
• Employee pressure to take activist political positions
• Multiple stakeholder engagement
• Outside advocacy engagement
• Media interest
• Expressions of violence
• Active demonstrations
• High probability for media attention

As in all difficult decisions, executives must balance their own and corporate ethics, morals and role responsibilities. These considerations often come into conflict. To move forward with confidence, CEOs must consider solutions that provide the best practical balance among these principles.

The Coaching Conversation

This cascade of concerns can be expressed in tones suggesting confusion, overwhelm and difficult decisions with classic fight or flight responses. Coaches should focus on fundamentals.

1. Frame the question

Encourage your client to step back and figuratively take a deep breath. Allow time to identify and discuss concerns. These are complex problems and the conversation may wander from observations to concerns and frustration along with judgement, pessimism and doubt.

Anticipate moral and intellectual conflict and allow time to find a balance. Help break the conflict down before raising the discussion from specific to general. In these discussions, there will always be some combination of tactical and strategic ideas.

When opportunity arises, help your client identify and bring forward thoughts about the impact and unfairness of social media storms. The term reflects violent weather and offers an opening to establish a taxonomy around specific threats in order to frame strategic and tactical responses. Classifying threats is an important step in finding answers.

Senior executives tend to be more politically conservative and younger highly trained employees progressive and activist. Work on bias and spend time helping clients balance personal, corporate and employee perspectives and behavior.

2. Find answers

Social activism introduces new stakeholders in the conversation. Social stakeholders is a new concept. The classical stakeholder definition embracing owners, employees, customers and vendors does not include political advocacy groups and the issues they raise. They can however be powerful influencers driving discussions of social responsibility.

Focus on the same questions used in customer discovery; “Who cares?” and “What outcomes do they seek?” Help establish the importance and impact of both internal and external voices. Most important, encourage your client to identify and separate logical, emotional and mission components. Frame this discussion around specific topics and the taxonomy developed in earlier conversations.

Proposed actions always lead to identifying who carries responsibility and accountability for leading discussions and response on topics of corporate responsibility. As new roles develop, open the discussion to consider desired outcomes in future time-periods. Help your client understand impact and scope, as first response is generally to add scope to an existing high function employee. Most important, recognize any advocate for the organization will bring their own perspective and bias.

When CEOs personally choose to manage social communication, ask questions that guide discussion of detailed tactical tasks, desired outcomes and the resources required to move forward confidently.

3. Evaluate solutions from wider viewpoints

The polarizing character of social and political activism challenges companies to make decisions with short-term actions and long-term consequences. The public character of social commentary requires forward looking and consistent positions. Help your client understand online statements made years ago will resurface. Encourage them to expand their viewpoints with questions focused on their vision of future company branding and image.

Help your client identify and characterize all stakeholder groups. Framing this discussion provides opportunity to recognize specific opportunities to change the dialog with the most impactful groups from the corporate viewpoint and separate noise from substance.

Activism always carries risk. Solutions must respect generational divisions in perspective and willingness to rush to judgement. Look for opportunities to talk about managing difficult conversations and help your client develop ways to listen and understand all stakeholders.

4. Strategic Implementation

Do not expect the conversation framed in this discussion to be linear. Return to helping your client develop a taxonomy for classifying social activities and stakeholder interest by stakeholder type. From this basis, encourage focused conversations on understanding and responding to specific classes of opportunities and threats.

Identify influencers among the most active members of any stakeholder group. Understanding their passions and process forms the foundation for effective response. Help clients identify the persona of employees that can follow major influencers and understand their perspectives. Be aware opening new information channels triggers discussion of organizational structure and response to change initiatives.

Dividing solutions into “response to current events” and consistent social communication resolves some of the overwhelming complication of developing appropriate strategy for dealing with political and social activism. Always return to the long-term vision – corporate and personal status at some future time. Social media storms are like hurricanes, destructive and traumatic when they happen but always offering opportunity to rebuild with new and more effective solutions.

¹ CEOs and Social Media: Too Much Evangelisation, Not Enough Dialogue – Commetric, April 8, 2021