Crisis Insider: What tips do you recommend for reputation recovery?

Montieth Illingworth: First, when you come out of a crisis, you really have to put in the time and effort to figure out what went wrong. And why. That doesn’t necessarily have to be [done in public], but the effort has to be put into it.

There are sins of omission and sins of commission. Companies that get into a crisis—there’s something in either their compliance or their culture, and every thing in between. It could be the business partner they just got involved with, they might not have known, and didn’t do due diligence.

Ultimately, it all rolls into tone from the top. It comes from the leadership. Any company that has a crisis, look at the top… and you can probably come up with the answer for what can be done better in terms of how top management, beginning with the CEO, models the kinds of behaviors and … actions necessary to deal with whatever occurred.

Now, if you do that, then going forward, that’s more than half the battle.

Also, central to regaining reputation is being able to convey to your internal stakeholders that you learned something. And, if changes were needed, that you made the changes.

Read the full article in PR News.