When you hear the company name “United Airlines” what comes to mind?
When you hear the company name “Volkswagen” what comes to mind?
In both cases, you probably think of the well publicised and very damaging situations that have occurred, which have caused untold damage to these monstrous brands.
At the time of writing United Airline shares had dropped significantly resulting in a market capitalisation collapse of $570 Million.
While United Airlines was a very specific incident and Volkswagen was a very deliberate campaign of deception what they both have in common is that what occurred was not something that you could blame on “a” culprit in each company.
With United Airlines could you point the finger at the security guards who removed the passenger?
With Volkswagen could you point the finger at the engineers who were able to rig the emissions performance?
In each case, the individuals involved knew that what they did was okay with their bosses – why would they do such a thing otherwise?
In each case, their bosses knew that this was what they were expected to instruct their subordinates to do – why else would they give guidance like this?
In each case, their bosses, bosses had jobs to do and targets to meet and the expectation was that these must be achieved as a priority beyond all other objectives.
And so on up the chain of command.
The huge problem in large organisations is that very often something rotten is allowed to creep into the culture resulting in management and employees behaving really badly and eventually it just bursts through and shows its ugly face in a way that is quite extraordinarily shocking to everyone.
For example with United Airlines the initial reaction of Chairman Oscar Munoz was to apologise to other passengers for the “upsetting event” but went on to push the blame onto the 69-year-old victim Dr.Dao for being “disruptive and belligerent“!
If you ever wanted someone to confirm the rotten culture at the airline, Mr.Munoz did it in his next communication to his staff where he praised them and stood behind them:
“Our employees followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this. While I deeply regret this situation arose, I also emphatically stand behind all of you, and I want to commend you for continuing to go above and beyond to ensure we fly right”
In a strange way, he was 100% correct – they did what was expected of them in these situations and as a result, he applauded them!!
At this point in time, the airline’s reputation was in tatters and Oscar and his team started to frantically backpaddle and within three days their tone had changed and fresh press statements included grovelling apologies to Dr.Dao for the appalling treatment and a full refund to all passengers on the flight (what difference was this ridiculous gesture going to do for anyone?).
The best PR advice when something like this occurs is to come clean and apologise immediately with complete sincerity. The word “Sorry” if people genuinely believe those that are delivering the apology can go a long way to reducing the damage caused.
However, just like in the United Airlines scenario a genuine “sorry” was not possible because the culture was too rotten to even contemplate doing such a thing – the expression ‘not being able to see the wood from the trees‘ comes to mind here.
Your reputation ultimately comes from what you do and how you behave and while good PR professionals can help to lessen the damage from a bad situation, it cannot change the culture, which can often be the reason why these things ended up happening in the first place.
Could your culture end up costing you?
Tags: Cork, Crisis PR, Dr.Dao, Dublin, Fuzion PR, Oscar Munoz, United Airlines
Greg Canty Fuzion Blog 
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