The surprise announcement of a new Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, should be seen as significant for the business as well as the political world. The Australian Labor Party, seeing approval ratings plummet for previous PM Kevin Rudd, took swift and immediate action to alter the course of the media narrative that had turned against Mr Rudd thereby potentially undermining Labor’s chances in the forthcoming Australian General Election.
Margaret Thatcher
Business can learn a lot from this episode and could do well to watch how Ms Gillard performs in the coming months under intense scrutiny from her home and foreign media. The ongoing pressures on BP as a result of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill have demonstrated the importance of good spokespeople representing your company to the world. Clearly your messages need to be right but the way those messages are communicated can also make a huge difference to the management of your corporate reputation. It is rare for people to get to the top of large businesses without them also developing strong communication skills along the way, but there is also little doubt that the way BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward has been perceived in the media has contributed to BP’s ongoing problems.
As in politics then, changing your spokesperson can make a difference for external perceptions about your company. The second point more businesses should take note of is the role of women as figureheads in the media. Our training team at Fleishman-Hillard media and message train hundreds of senior business leaders from global brands every year. Training female executives is still relatively rare, although invariably they perform better than their male colleagues particularly in difficult circumstances. We find that female business leaders are able to illustrate key messages in more emotive ways; by telling a compelling story or by bringing a range of real life experiences to their performances. In a crisis it is essential that empathy is shown by a business; put simply female spokespeople are more successful at demonstrating this core competency.
A recent survey found women occupy only 242 out of 2,742 seats on the boards of FTSE 350 companies although the trend is for more rather than less women in the boardroom – recently Royal Mail appointed its first female Chief Executive for example – and our experience suggests that this will only help businesses to tell their corporate story more effectively. 50% of the world’s population are women meaning businesses are missing a trick by not using more women as their external spokespeople. 31 years since Margaret Thatcher became the UK’s first female Prime Minister, Australia have followed our lead. Mrs Thatcher grabbed people’s attention in the early days by using her experiences as a housewife to communicate often complex messages about economic policy in a way that was approachable to millions of families. Watching Ms Gillard in Australia will be fascinating and could well point the way for how businesses should manage their reputations in years to come.
