You Can’t Spin Your Way Out of Bad Behavior

A colleague of ours, Don Etling, said it best:  You can’t spin your way out of bad behavior.

The Penn State situation exemplifies that.  Joe Paterno & Co. knew that Jerry Sandusky was abusing children – and they looked the other way.  They didn’t have a communications problem – they had a performance problem.

Volkswagen is in a similar boat.  Again, it’s not about what they say – but what they need to do.

While not generally well-known outside of the world of public relations agencies, one of the oldest and most-esteemed advertising agencies in the world, J. Walter Thompson, is facing three charges.

From one of the best crisis communicators in the business, Peter Sandman:

The charge the agency has responded to is that CEO Gustavo Martinez was guilty of a long string of racist and sexist remarks and behaviors, creating an environment in which the agency’s chief communications officer, Erin Johnson, felt she couldn’t do her job. The agency’s response is that it takes the charge seriously, has been looking into it, and hasn’t found any supporting evidence so far.

That might be okay if it weren’t for two other charges:

1. That many senior agency officials knew what Martinez was doing – both because they were witnesses to some of it and because Johnson raised the issue internally – and did little or nothing to stop it; instead they collaborated in retribution against Johnson.
2. That there is a climate of fear at JWT that prevents people from coming forward with what they know about Martinez’s misbehaviors.

A company might – just might – be able to conduct a credible internal investigation of its own CEO. But nobody can conduct a credible investigation of itself. So how can any company credibly claim to be investigating allegations that it ignored the CEO’s misbehaviors and retaliated against the whistle-blower? And how can any company credibly claim to be investigating allegations that it has created a climate of fear in which its employees are afraid to tell it what they know?

You can read the rest of the piece here.

We are crisis management and crisis communications specialists.  Every day, clients come to us to ask us what to say.  And quite often, it’s our job to tell the client it’s not what you say, it’s what you need to do.

We tell them they need to do the right thing — because you can’t spin your way out of bad behavior.