During a crisis, companies often default to financial logic, rather than making decisions based on the organization’s values, Jon Goldberg said.
“‘Operationalizing values’ means getting an organization’s values — what they believe, what they say they stand for — out from where they’re typically hidden in the employee handbook, in the careers page of the corporate website, and putting them to use where people get the work done,” he said.
Goldberg, founder and chief reputation architect of Reputation Architects Inc., a crisis communications firm, was PRSA’s guest on May 28 for Strategies & Tactics Live. (Watch the full episode on LinkedIn here.)
For the crisis-themed May issue of Strategies & Tactics, Goldberg wrote a piece called “Why Culture Drives How Organizations Decide Under Pressure.”
Organizations often “treat values as messages to communicate, and relegate them to inspirational wall-art” or “fodder for townhall-meeting speeches … that nobody’s going to remember,” he said.
Conversely, organizations that embed values into their culture “see them not as communications assets, but as tools” to help them stay on course when waters turn choppy. During a crisis, an organization’s values “guide employees in their daily work, the thousands of decisions, collectively, people in an organization make every day.”
Not just for crises
When a company sets clear values-statements that are simple for people to understand, employees can ask themselves: “Is what I’m about to do consistent with our values? Is this email I’m about to send transparent? Is it what I would expect of an organization I were doing business with?”
Guided by a framework of values, “organizations will find themselves having far fewer crises,” Goldberg said. “Because you’re giving employees tools to make better, faster, safer decisions” that help prevent self-inflicted problems.
“By using values, you not only give yourself a framework for dealing with a crisis, but for keeping crises from happening in the first place,” he said.
John Elsasser, editor-in-chief of PRSA’s Strategies & Tactics publication and host of S&T Live, asked why some organizations might believe that values guide their decisions — until a crisis strikes.
Organizations tend to confuse values with messaging, Goldberg said, “because both tend to be written in the same kind of aspirational language. But they’re very different animals. Messages are designed to influence perception, a kind of external theater, if you will. Values are meant to guide behavior” and internal decisions.
In a business environment that rewards arithmetic, “values are like a foreign language,” he said. “When the pressure hits, people tend to default to the behavior that the culture has consistently told them they will be rewarded for: to maximize revenues, protect market share, et cetera. And that happens because values exist in a sort of no-man’s land between what leadership wants to believe about itself and what the system actually rewards.”
When a crisis strikes, “speed is everything,” Goldberg said. “The public’s not going to give the organization the benefit of the doubt and wait to see what the organization does before forming judgment. Their first impression, what they see and hear or don’t see and hear immediately, is going to set the narrative.”
Making a good impression soon after a crisis occurs “buys you some time to make the next set of decisions,” he said. “Values are a decision-accelerator so that you can be more certain in your decision-making.”
Here, Goldberg takes part in the S&T Live lightning round!
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