A few days ago, as the CBI was imploding in real time in the most spectacular show and tell on how NOT to deal with a mounting crisis, I listened in bafflement to a radio interview with Paul Drechsler, who was CBI President between 2015 and 2018.
(You can listen here at 2.37 whilst the link remains live).
Mr Drechsler made a number of perfectly reasonable and defensible points, but he kept switching different hats on as he was speaking, in a way that I found unhelpful for the landing of his message.
He started off in comms mode, as if addressing an audience of professionals on crisis communications' dos and don'ts. Although I didn't disagree with the points he raised, something about his answers immediately jarred with me.
Asked how current CBI management could weather a crisis arisen from multiple allegations of harassment of female staff by senior colleagues, Drechsler said: "It's about being able to lead and manage in a very intense, fast-moving media challenge. So, they have to communicate brilliantly and tell the truth. They've got to be authoritative. I think Brian [McBride, the new CBI President] has been unambiguous in apologising about all that's happened to the victims. And first and foremost, this is a story about a number of people who've been harassed and what I think it will do, which is no bad thing, is to make us all think much more deeply about the situation."
Where to begin with this?
Drechsler wasn't being interviewed as a communications expert but as a former President, a recent former President I may add, of an organisation so reputationally compromised that it is now struggling for its very survival.
In this context, characterising the crisis as a 'media challenge' sounded clinical and almost callous. Brilliant and open communication while fessing up to ever more revelations of abuse might be what the comms crisis manuals tell executives to do. But as a (recent) former executive didn't he have anything more profound to say about how such a situation had been allowed to develop and fester? He made it sound as if the problem the CBI faces is not that it has been harbouring a toxic culture of abuse of its female staff but that it has now been found out.
Even in his nod to the victims being 'the story' he misses the point. The victims are victims. The story is how could the premier British business interest group, representing 190,000 businesses and counting (down), have been running such a shoddy operation at home.
Further, it's grotesque to even imply that the good news about the abuse is that we now will pay more attention to 'stuff like that'. Attention to the well-being of female staff in a 21st century organisation that speaks on behalf of UK businesses should be paid as a matter of course. It is a starting point, not a fortuitous outcome of exploitation and harassment coming to light.
Drechsler then abruptly changed hats - bizarrely via a citation from the gospels about those without sins casting the first stone - and spoke like an exec under fire. He reminded the presenter that "there is no shortage of organisations in the UK that have had multiple claims of sexual harassment - as many as 200 hundred in one org close to here, as many as 57 in the Houses of Parliament. So, we have as a nation a big sort of issue: the CBI has provided the perfect place at the moment for us all to vent our anger and frustration."
Drechsler the executive clumsily tried to minimise the problem ("Other orgs are as bad, if not worse!") and contextualise the abject failures of his former organisation by arguing that sexual harassment is as prevalent as heavy rains in April, so what is a chap in charge to do? His conclusion, casting the CBI itself in the role of the sacrificial victim, was tin-eared and frankly absurd.
Those are exactly the sort of remarks Drechsler the communications expert would have implored Drechsler the executive to avoid. Having the same person reply to questions wearing both hats was unconvincing and confusing and I doubt Drechsler's colleagues would have been grateful for his intervention.
Comments