Provokeap: Confidence Lacking In Key Reputation Drivers

(MENAFN- PRovoke) SINGAPORE - Communications leaders must bring context and confidence to the fore if they hope to build more effective reputations for their organisations, heard delegates at yesterday's PRovoke Asia-Pacific Summit in Singapore.

The panel, which featured communications leaders from the financial services, healthcare and technology sectors, explored new findings from Sandpiper's 2024 Global Reputation Capital Index, which polled 2,700 CEOs, C-suite executives, and comms/public affairs leaders from 27 markets and 12 sectors.

The research revealed a lack of confidence among respondents in key corporate reputation drivers, including thought leadership, crisis management and employee engagement. Consequently, perhaps, only 67% of CEOs, and just half of corporate affairs leaders, feel a high level of responsibility for their organisation's reputation.

“I think anything that does not have a clear owner falls on our shoulders,” said GE Healthcare senior communications leader Junaidah Dahlan.“Yes, we are the gatekeeper of the reputation. We have strategies in place, we have knowledge, we have resources, but we can't be the only one who are responsible for reputation.”

Dahlan advises comms leaders to“push back” on the notion that they are solely responsible for an organisation's reputation.“I have the strategy - follow the strategy, and we'll face the challenges as a business. And when it comes to recognition, I think we also need to be able to stand strong. We are at the top of the Fortune 500 or whatever because of the strategy that we put together and we roll out as a company.”

Sun Life Asia head of communications Sarah James suggested that clearer strategy and insights are required for comms leaders to become more influential.“Part of our role is to be guardians of reputation, to have a seat at the table and to hold up a mirror or that external lens on how our stakeholders perceive actions when business decisions are being made,” she said.

“That's our role but you can't do that if you don't have insights and you can't do that if you don't have a clear plan,” added James.“So we've got a very clear plan which sets out what we want our reputation to be, what we want the attributes to be, what the drivers of that will be, how the different parts of the organization contribute, and we measure that and you need to make it visible and report back. We report that up to the executive team on a quarterly basis, how we're doing, how we're doing against our competitors, where the issues are - you're showing that top and bottom line impact and that's where influence comes from.”

Cisco communications director Puneet Pal Singh also professed surprise that while two-thirds of respondents have a crisis and issues management plan, only 44% are very confident of using it.“If you step back and simplify what we all in this room do for a living, it comes down to just one thing - building, enhancing and protecting the reputation of brands that we either work for or who are our clients,” he said.“So if you're not doing the protecting part, you are failing on one third of what your job basically is.”

“You have to be able to understand the context of the environment that you're operating in,” added Singh, suggesting that comms leaders leverage technology to remove the more mundane aspects of their jobs.“The only way to prepare for scenarios is to be aware of what's going around, talk to stakeholders, read more.”

Sandpiper strategy MD Michael Rinaman believes the research findings on crisis/issues reflect a recurring divide between strategy and action.“It's one thing to have a strategy in place, it's another thing to constantly be vigilant - looking at the landscape, preparing for the things that you can prepare for.”

“I think the X factor here is actually training the muscle of responding to an issue when it arises,” added Rinaman.“You can map every issue out there. You can know the ones that are most likely to impact your organization, but bar none, there will be an issue you're not prepared for, you had no idea was going to come up. And you need to have practised the response to that. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it is about engaging your team. It's about engaging the external stakeholders that an issue impacts. And the only way to do that is by training that response over and over again.”

Meanwhile, the research also found that 95% of leaders believe thought leadership is effective in building trust, but only 38% think that their organisation is viewed as a thought leader. Dahlan believes that thought leadership requires“clarity, consistency and credibility” to be effective, often calling for“much more work than people outside our industry would expect.”

“It's really crowded and competitive out there,” added James, noting that companies need to be aligning their actions around their thought leadership activities, rather than just focusing solely on content.“Once you've got the right topics, align your organizations activities and actions around that,” she said.

“We do a lot of work thinking about financial security, financial literacy, financial inclusion. So we're producing a piece of content on that. Then we'll look at how can we take those insights and help our advisors use those with clients? How can we take those insights and help our regulatory affairs teams show regulators how we're contributing to the industry? How can we take that and align our philanthropy activities to it? And then how can we take it and align our employee engagement activities to it?”

Singh further noted that business executives and clients often expect comms professionals to turn them into thought leaders, and can also be too focused on promoting their products. "It's people creating thought capital, they're not creating thought leaders,” he said.

The report also found that organisations are using 11.6 internal communications channels on average, deemed“way too many” by Singh, and that only 40% believe their comms and HR teams are highly aligned around employee engagement strategies.

Other notable findings are that only 29% have a climate communications strategy, and that 69% believe they are not engaging with the media enough in general. Only 39% believe they have a strong understanding of how generative AI tools are interacting with and influencing digital content. And, just 47% believe their organisation's value is well understood by investors, while 51% say they have been highly effective in communicating financial results.

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