Why Reputation Needs to be Everyone's Responsibility

Earlier thus year, I had the honor of being invited to the University of Southern California to present the annual Kenneth Owler Smith lecture, which took place last week. In the course of my remarks, I was pretty tough on the in-house communications role, making the point that if in-house PR people really had earned the "seat at the table" we all talk so much about, they would have been consulted when decisions--private jet travel, off-site entertainment--were being made that had such negative implications for corporate reputation.

Later, I was fortunate enough to find myself on a distinguished panel that also included Phyllis Piano--who as chief communications officer at Amgen has the good fortune to actually have to operate in an environment I only pontificate about. And Phyllis made the quite legitimate point that corporate communications people can't be present for every decision; that in reality thousands of decisions are made every day in corporations without the involvement of anyone with PR experience--and many of those decision do impact corporate reputation.

A few days later, I came across a perfect illustration of the point: an employee at a Little Rock McDonald's stepped in to save a female customer from an assault and was shot in the chest for his troubles; now the company is refusing to pay his medical bills "did not arise out of, or within the course and scope of his employment."

It's a dumb decision, and one I am almost certain was made without reference to the company's PR department.

But just because the PR department was not consulted doesn't mean the PR implications could not have been considered. I have long argued that the second most important responsibility of an in-house PR department--after counseling the CEO and the senior management team--is making sure that everyone within the organization understands the importance of reputation, and the importance of thinking about the reputational consequences of decisions as well as their financial, operational and legal implications.

Whoever made the decision to deny this claim clearly wasn't thinking about the headlines that would ensue--McDonald's "essentially told him to be a hero on his own time," says the ABC News report--or the community outrage they would generate (not to mention the message the decision sends to other McDonald's employees). They should have been.

We live in an era in which one dumb decision by a mid-level employee can almost overnight undo all the good reputation building work the PR department does. Those mid-level employees need to understand their obligation to help build the company's reputation as well as to help build its bottom line.