I run an exercise with clients I call the Reputation Pre-Mortem. It’s one of the most unsettling things I do \u2014 not because I manufacture drama, but because what we find is almost always obvious in hindsight and almost never examined in advance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here’s how it works. Imagine a journalist is assigned a profile of your organization today. Not a crisis story \u2014 just a profile. They do what journalists do: Google your name and your senior team’s names. Check your reviews. Read your last few press releases. Scroll your social media. Pull up old news stories. Call a couple of people who’ve dealt with you. What story do they find?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most leaders have never actually done this. They’ve assumed that because nothing’s on fire, everything is fine. But reputation problems don’t announce themselves before they become crises. They simmer in places leaders aren’t looking, until a journalist or a regulator or a plaintiff’s attorney finds them first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What does your Google search surface? What does your employee review page say about working for you? What’s the ratio of positive reviews to negative ones \u2014 and more importantly, how do you respond to the negative ones? What’s the most embarrassing thing a disgruntled former employee could say about your organization that would be true?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That last question is always the one that gets quiet in the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Pre-Mortem isn’t paranoia. It’s seeing your organization the way a stranger sees it, before the stranger is someone you don’t want showing up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You don’t need me to run this exercise. Open a private browser right now and search your own name and your senior leaders’ names. Read what comes up. Then ask yourself: if this is what a journalist found before making a single call, would you be comfortable with that story?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the answer makes you nervous, that’s the work. Better to find it now than to find it with a camera in your parking lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I run an exercise with clients I call the Reputation Pre-Mortem. It’s one of the most unsettling things I do \u2014 not because I manufacture drama, but because what we find is almost always obvious in hindsight and almost never examined in advance. Here’s how it works. Imagine a journalist is assigned a profile of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions\/130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}