The Human Side of Reputation Management

Cylvia Hayes

As someone who has been in the bulls-eye of a high-profile media-driven character assassination I know the importance of a good PR team. 

Shifting an out of control narrative, influencing SEO results, developing some friendlies in the press and building platforms for getting your own story out are all essential.   But I also know from painful first-hand experience, that while all of that external work is important, it’s the internal work that can make or break someone going through a public crisis.

There’s simply no way to be fully prepared for the emotional and psychological upheaval the first time you wind up being described in the headlines as someone you don’t even recognize. 

This is especially true for people who are unaccustomed to continuous media coverage. 

When it happened to me I was terrified and traumatized and went to places of deep despair.  Recovering took far more than SEO management; it took deep inner work. 

Over the next two years as the media assault dragged on, the personal, spiritual and professional evolution was profound.  In time I identified strategies and tools to help people harness such a crisis to break through instead of breaking down.  These experiences are the subject of my upcoming book, Shame on Me. 

I now work with people who are facing a reputation crisis and want to come out the other side healthier, clearer, more effective and empowered.  Below are brief overviews of a few client case studies.

Reclaiming Self-Value and Identity

One of my clients was a high-level elected official who had been in public service for many, many years with an unblemished record.  Completely unexpectedly he wound up in the middle of intense, politically-motivated allegations of corruption and eventually resigned.

His self-identity was firmly tied to being in an elected position.  The loss of such position shook his core beliefs about his value and ability to make a contribution to society.  In addition, he obsessively replayed the memory of events leading to his decision to leave office. 

My client’s PR rep was working to regain some control of the media narrative but was stymied by the client’s quasi-paralysis in taking any pro-active action.  We worked together to help the client begin to move forward. 

This client was a self-reflective person and I was able to work with that providing strategies for him to recognize he still had all the talent, experience, civic-commitment and charisma he’d had before.  The goal was to find the next vehicle for him to put his skills to work.   I also provided tools for him to recognize triggers that sent his mind on the obsessive memory-replaying loop and to be able to quickly recover and redirect his thinking. 

This man is now back in the arena contributing his expertise even more fully because he was no longer bound by the constraints and extraneous demands of the position he’d held. 

Moving Beyond Betrayal and Abandonment

Another client is a woman who was a well-known civic leader.  She had committed over fifteen years to building a well-respected community service organization.  After a series of anonymous allegations the woman was summarily put on administrative leave.  This kicked off a media circus and many long-time colleagues and friends pulled away. 

Even as the media storm died down and this woman’s private practice grew she was struggling with a sense of lost identity, displacement and abandonment.  We used strategies to reclaim and expand her sense of identity, release the attachment to the people who had betrayed her and reengage her public service.

Companies Too

The inner resiliency aspect of reputation management is just as relevant in the case of corporate crises as it is for high-profile individuals.

When a brand or product comes under fire the CEO, president and even lower level employees can face intense personal trauma.  Empowering the key people with strategies to heal and grow as individuals can enable the company not only to survive but thrive post-crisis in ways it wouldn’t have otherwise. 

I have worked with cases where early focus on the inner, personal coping strategies motivated organization leadership to choose calmer, more strategic reputation management actions that dramatically reduced the overall scale of the crisis. 

In the rapid-fire climate of crisis management it’s easy to focus the entire team on the urgency of reacting to media and each new development.  And certainly that’s important.  But in the center of the mayhem sits a human being, often deeply wounded.  That piece needs attention as well.  As Confucius once said, “We are so busy doing the urgent, we fail to do the important.”

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Cylvia Hayes is a new economy strategist, author, speaker and Empowerment Coach.  She is CEO of 3EStrategies and former First Lady of Oregon.  More information can be found at www.cylviahayes.com.