mportance of Being Earnest
Reputations of CEOs make
or break companies, says Weber Shandwick's Chief Reputation Strategist Leslie
Gaines-Ross
If globally 45% of a company's
reputation is attributable to its CEO, the number is as high as 56% in India.
It raises doubts on sycophancy and the idea of India where hero worship scores
over teamwork. Such were the findings of KRC Research and Weber Shandwick's
recent study entitled The CEO Reputation Premium: Gaining Advantage in the
Engagement Era, where 1,750 executives were roped in across 19 markets
worldwide.
The architect of the study, Leslie
GainesRoss, is Weber Shandwick's Chief Reputation Strategist and no stranger to
the science of reputation building. The author of two books on the subject,
Gaines-Ross was Marketing and Communications Director at Fortune magazine and
got pulled into the reputation game while tracking the `Most Admired Companies'
survey.
Though she believes that glorifying
CEOs is a dangerous trend, she is quick to reason it is perhaps owing to
India's affinity to family businesses that such a large contributor to the
overall company's success is attributed to the CEO. “Professional CEOs can be
fired in 12 hours, which often is not the case with CEOs of family businesses,“
she says, adding how CEOs were treated like celebrities in the west years ago.
“Today, that's not the case and their reputations are really built on being ethical,
credible, authentic and transparent.“
Gaines-Ross likens today's CEOs to
leaders of countries. As heads of states shape the reputation of a country, so
do CEOs for their companies. It certainly matters if the head of a company has
the strategy, foresight, entrepreneurial drive and communication chutzpah to
zoom ahead of the competition. Among the critical attributes driving CEO
reputation, Gaines-Ross ranks having a clear vision as the number one driver,
with communication coming a close second. Now, communication, of course, has
both external and internal threads. It's not just about moving employees in the
same direction but becoming advocates of the company at conferences and on
social media. And there is this `Great Places to Work' list as well. “Around
the world, when you look at such lists, they have just soared in importance and
everyone wants to be a CEO who leads a `Great Place to Work'....it has put a
lot of pressure on CEOs to communicate internally,“ she says.
To Gaines-Ross, the communication
piece is vital as she cites a Microsoft research that claims the average
person's attention span to be just 8 seconds, a second less than that of a
goldfish. For humans, it used to be 12 seconds in 2000. “So the CEO wants
everyone to buy his products and join his company but people don't have focus
anymore,“ she says. That's why CEOs need to communicate externally and
internally in the most effective manner. According to Gaines-Ross, CEOs who
communicate on social media are generally considered to be forwardlooking and
transparent, a far cry from her days at Fortune when she brought out the
Fortune 500 list and found herself at sea with more than half the com panies
refusing to share their URLs simply because they didn't have any. That's
certainly not the case today. CEOs like Jeff Immelt of GE have a very active
Twitter handle. GainesRoss believes reputations will be shaped by a multitude
of social media, face-to-face interactions and the good old word-of-mouth. In
order to be effective on social media the message has to be simple and
memorable. “Now that's a really hard thing to do and it gets harder to tell a
story across countries. That's the reason there are not many companies with
universal reputation across the world,“ she explains. “If you have one reputation,
you can own the world.“
If the mandate of the CEO is to be
an ace communicator, is there a need for such large corporate communication
teams? GainesRoss is quick to jump to the defense of the public relations
fraternity, saying that such teams complement CEOs by working closely with them
to identify where they should speak, what's the competition doing, how to talk
to investors, NGOs and fresh talent. “The CEO may be the channel and the one
that gets the attention but everything needs to be carefully cultivated,
curated and it has to have a discipline to it,“ she says. In essence, she feels
the world of corporate communica tionsand PR has only grown in importance
because of day-to-day crisis so visible with the osmosis of technology in the
business environment.
That said, Gaines-Ross is a big
believer in CEOs and leaders using their websites to communicate their
viewpoints.“Being visible on your company website with videos, speeches and
introductions on the careers page is really important because people go to
corporate websites first,“ says.Videos are a fantastic way to humanize the
leader who is seen to talk like a regular person instead of a drab press
release. However, there is still no substitute for the CEO to show up in
person--attend townhall meets, talk to investors and the media.
All that took a beating for many
financial services companies during the global finan cial crisis of 2008 when
Wall Street refused to listen to its stakeholders. The Street seems to have
wisened up since and picked up leaders with humility. In fact, Lloyd Blankfein,
the CEO of Goldman Sachs, has admitted that he never worried about what the
general public thought since the average person was not his customer. Later, he
realised that taxpayers and citizens were indeed his customers. That explains
why he has re-done his company values and vision based on building a more
reputable company.
Leslie Gaines-Ross usually gets
involved with CEOs in their first 100 days so that they can build up their
credibility quickly. And this is what she tells them, in that order--listen to
employees, listen to customers, surround yourself with the best senior
management and communicate with the board. But one word of caution--they should
never highlight their past successes because every company is different. “Those
are your credentials and background but you've got to prove yourself all over
again.“ CD moinak.mitra@timesgroup.com
CDET17JUL15
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