Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Entrepreneur essay sets three tests before a leadership team chooses silence
The author ran communications for a CEO on one of the president's business advisory councils in 2017, and now tells leadership teams to work through the hard scenarios at an offsite, before a reporter sets the deadline.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- In 2017, the violence around the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville pulled companies whose CEOs served on the president's business advisory councils into intense public scrutiny.
- The author of an Entrepreneur essay was leading communications for one of those CEOs, and writes that the company became part of a national conversation it had not anticipated almost overnight.
- Speaking would affect the company's relationship with an administration that played an enormous role in its business, while silence raised the question of what its own employees would conclude.
- The essay sets three questions to answer before choosing not to engage: whether the issue affects your people, whether it touches a value you have publicly claimed, and whether you can live with someone else's version of your position.
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Why it matters
- decision Running the scenarios at an offsite gets executive disagreement discovered on a schedule, and the choice available this quarter is whether to discover it while nothing is at stake.
- exposure Where no position is stated, employees, customers and advocacy groups supply one from what they already believe about the company, and that reading becomes the company's position for the duration of the story.
- constraint Any value a company has already claimed in public narrows what it can decline to comment on later, because the second question makes prior claims callable.
Media requests arrived before the company had answers, with employees asking where it stood, reporters asking for a statement and advocacy groups demanding clarity [3]. Every revision, the author wrote, "tried to satisfy one more audience, account for one more risk and anticipate one more reaction". Then: "With every edit, the language became more polished and somehow less certain." [5]
The author's conclusion from that week is about sequence. "The hardest part of a crisis isn't finding the right words. It's discovering whether you've already decided what you believe," the author wrote [6].
The three questions the essay puts in front of silence have a low bar. All three do not have to point the same way; if the answer to any one of them gives you pause, the essay says, silence deserves just as much scrutiny as a public statement [12]. An issue that affects your own employees clears that on its own, whether or not it touches a value the company has published [19].
Many leaders assume silence keeps them out of trouble, the author wrote, and "Sometimes that's true." [13] The condition attached is narrow and common: when the issue directly affects employees, customers or the business, people read the silence through what they already believe about the organization, or they let someone else define the position [13].
The account is a first-person recollection. The author does not identify the company or the CEO, and does not say how the episode ended [17]. The claim that consistency mattered more than the position taken is the author's own observation of organizations that went through remarkably similar controversies with different outcomes [14]. Entrepreneur runs the piece under its contributor line: "Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own." [18]
What the prescribed exercise costs this quarter is small. It takes a slot at an executive offsite or strategy session and a handful of realistic scenarios, with the discussion starting on "What do we actually believe?" before anyone drafts messaging [9]. The expensive part comes after, when the answers around the table are not consistent. The essay calls that work that needs to happen long before a crisis arrives [10].
The third question is the one with a bill attached later: if someone else defines our position for us, are we comfortable living with that version [11]. Stakeholders are quick to spot patterns, the author wrote, and people notice when leaders communicate one set of values internally and another externally [16].
What to watch
- If the company and the CEO were identified, the consistency claim could be checked against a known outcome.
- Whether leadership teams put the scenario list and their answers into minutes, making a rehearsed position discoverable in litigation or a leak.
- A second account of the same 2017 council episode from someone else who was in the drafting room.