Dale Vince, founder of UK green energy provider Ecotricity, gives the impression he is bucking the trend of media-managed business executives. Decked in a keffiyeh scarf and piercings, he says he is embracing candidness.
Last year, he almost came unstuck. Vince was on national radio to discuss claims made by one British newspaper that, as a donor to the UK’s Labour party, he had pushed them to pledge a ban on North Sea oil and gas production. The interviewer asked Vince if he was in regular contact with Labour leader, Keir Starmer. The executive admitted they had spoken the previous week.
“It was only our second [ever] conversation and it was only five minutes, but The Sun that day and the next turned it into a headline of a ‘secret meeting’ revealed. My admission to 6mn people became a secret!” recalls Vince, who was once a New Age traveller and has always refused media training.
At a time when business communications are carefully managed, yet trust in leaders increasingly scarce, chief executives recognise there can be much to gain from a straight-talking approach.
“I don’t want to be a puppet,” says Vince. “I’d rather have a human, honest, genuine response to what is in effect a conversation.”
But transparency is not always straightforward. Executives must ensure their messaging matches their company’s conduct, swerves regulatory and reputational risk and does not cross the line to giving too much away.
In reality, fiduciary duties and boardroom protocols impinge on the freedom of chief executives to fully express their opinions.
“When people say, ‘Bring your whole self to work’, that sounds nice but it’s actually quite a tall order and I’m not sure if it’s completely reasonable,” says Alastair McCapra, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.
He gives the example of business leaders who found themselves being “shot down” after publicly opining on the Brexit debate. Many chief executives chose to stay neutral about leaving the EU in public, while they voiced deep concerns about the potential ramifications for business in private.
So how can executives strike a balance between candour and caution?
Ruth Warder, chief executive of PR firm Edelman in the UK and Europe, advises that being seen as candid is not just about what chief executives say; they must do it, too. “To have integrity, you have to have a real desire for transparency,” she argues. “It is about being very clear how you intend to follow through on the things you commit to.”
If executives can show their personality in the process, all the better, she says.
Given the complexity and scope of topics senior executives are expected to comment on, they cannot be on top of everything all the time, Warder acknowledges. Saying, “I don’t know” is a legitimate response; just as long as it is followed up with a promise of clarity. “CEOs have got much more comfortable with communicating with integrity and saying, ‘Well, we know these five things, but we’re working to discover these other two.’”
Importantly, an acknowledgment of ignorance is different from the traditional stock response of “no comment”. In an era of social media, keeping everything “buttoned down” is as impractical as it is undesirable, says Veta Richardson, president and chief executive of the Washington DC-based Association of Corporate Counsel.
“Most organisations have become more comfortable with the fact that ‘no comment’ is not necessarily the best approach”.
For Douglas Lamont, chief executive of Dutch chocolate brand, Tony’s Chocolonely, the broad principles of authentic communication are simple: know who you are, say what you stand for and ditch the “PR polish”.
Such an approach can get messy. Tony’s Chocolonely’s marketing, for example, makes much of its efforts to combat slave labour in the cocoa industry. But the extensive farm audits it carries out to enforce its standards sometimes — perhaps inevitably — bring infringements to light.
The Amsterdam-based chocolatier discloses such cases in an annual report, which in 2022 prompted a British newspaper to lambast its stated intent to “make all chocolate 100 per cent slave free”.
Lamont says the company turned what could have been a reputational disaster into a productive conversation about an ethical issue endemic across the industry. “That sense of owning up rather than being discovered I think is very empowering,” he observes. “So when the story broke, we were able to say the information was actually there in our report all along.”
The approach of setting out clear public commitments and regularly reporting against them is one way of gaining trust.
But critics say this essentially amounts to companies marking their own homework, with the inevitable temptation of omitting the bad and embellishing the good. One guard against this is to contract out the reporting to an independent third party.
Choosing appropriate metrics is also tricky. The aim of Vince’s Ecotricity is to “end fossil fuels”, for example, but the criteria for success are unclear.
Access to data can be a challenge — but offering a partial picture of progress can look like dishonesty, even if disorganisation is the cause.
And the stakes from getting it wrong are high. Think Gerald Ratner, the British entrepreneur who in the 1980s joked that his jewellery stores sold “total crap”. Sales immediately nosedived.
“You really don’t want a CEO coming out and saying, ‘You know, here at so-and-so company, we’ve got some of the most mediocre staff possible’. No one needs to hear that,” advises Simon Lancaster, a leading business speechwriter.
The complexity of honesty at work is something chief executives’ advisers are beginning to recognise. Long seen as the “Office of ‘No”, for example, legal advisers are now more adept at working with communications teams and others to craft what should be said, says Richardson.
Public relations advisers are also acknowledging that following an agreed script and trotting out pre-baked answers is no longer enough. Instead, many prefer to talk about “authenticity”. The more business leaders can open up and show the person behind the latest quarterly figures or investment plans, the more likely their listeners are to see a fellow human they can trust.
For Lee Woodruff, a US-based media coach, authentic communication boils down to conveying your personal values in a way that is relevant, relatable and, above all, genuine. But there needs to be a fine balance. Too personal can feel inappropriate; too remote lacks punch.
She argues there is another crucial point: business leaders must buy into the process themselves. “It can’t be their comms team dragging them to do this.”
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