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STEPPING INTO THE SPOTLIGHT
BY
Christopher Larter
Senior Consultant
Hill & Knowlton Egypt
www.hillandknowlton.com
CEOs in Egypt have traditionally shied away from the media spotlight, but this might not be for the best. The public is becoming increasingly distrustful of companies and management that don’t communicate with them. Highly visible CEOs are a natural starting point for earning the public’s trust.
We live in a world where companies’ CEOs are about as famous as celebrities with the general public heavily scrutinizing their every move. The increasing profile that the private sector has gained in Egypt over the past two years has only added to the public’s insatiable appetite for more information, not just about private sector companies, but also about the men and women who run these companies.
Traditionally, the handful of businessmen and women who seemed to enjoy the public attention while their stars were rising, suffered public disgrace when the cards came tumbling down: Fathi Al Rayyan, Rami Lakah and Alia El Ayouti, just to name a few. This unpleasant history made Egyptian CEOs wary of gaining too much public attention, preferring instead to work in the shadows and leaving the limelight to their company names. However, a quick look to our business partners in North America shows that what the masses really want are CEOs who not only can make the right business decisions, but can also exude confidence while addressing them. Those who do so will really gain the public’s trust.
North America saw a surge in CEO popularity during the 1990s as well as the fallout that resulted from a string of big business scandals. Surveys indicated that the public was even more interested in the CEOs when they did things wrong than when they did things right, often passing judgement on all executives based on a bad example set by a handful. While the luster of CEOs may have dulled in North America due to the misdeeds of a few, it would be a mistake to infer that they are not still the key to conveying the personality, character and strategic vision of a company to its stakeholders.
The key is finding balance between the CEO and the visibility of the senior executive leadership, then carving out a specific role for them that reflects their role as standard-bearer and team leader, rather than celebrity or superstar. This is particularly true in Egypt, where the public needs to see the CEO as a person leading an organization who shares the same morals and values as his team and organization, and the public as a whole.
The importance of the CEO in communicating the personality of the company is understandable. The more interested we are in the people, the more interested we are in the companies they run. It’s not just about the ease of communications through personality. The leadership of a company is crucial to its success and in most cases the CEO is the embodiment of that leadership. Leadership has to be about delivery – no amount of “smoke and mirrors” and keeping the “confidence” of investors through dazzling public performances can fill a substance gap, as many have found to their cost.
Communications is of strategic importance to all CEOs, as it is crucial to driving innovation, building a strong and distinct culture, managing risks and crises and building relations with stakeholders. It also helps CEOs develop their reputation in the market since it affects the way the general public perceives a company. The public is increasingly distrustful of companies and management that do not communicate with them. They often mistake this for an attempt to hide something from them.
It has become part of the CEO’s job to deliver the moral compass and ensure that ethical standards are being articulated and met. With transparency the buzzword in Egypt these days, companies and their CEOs are finding themselves increasingly under the microscope. The quicker that companies realize that it is the CEO who has to shoulder the responsibility for leading the company and function as its moral compass, the easier it will be to garner the public’s trust and support for what they do.
Moreover, the building of a relationship with the public will allow CEOs to take better control of the communication process, allowing them to go on the offensive and tell their side of the story first. It will allow them to turn the company’s good news into the public’s good news and may even allow them to turn a not so good story into a positive context.
It might be easier said than done. However, this is becoming increasingly necessary and good communications can help. It will, of course, require a systematic approach that starts with an analysis of stakeholders, their current perceptions of the company and their relative importance to the company’s success. It moves on to positioning, messaging and then packaging it all for delivery to all relevant audiences.
Herein lies the second challenge. It requires an approach to communications that goes well beyond the traditional press office. Silos among functional areas of the company need to come down. CEOs must implicitly recognize this.
In most western countries, this is an issue that politicians have learnt to deal with somewhat earlier and the comparison is instructive. They frequently have to communicate quite complex messages to a vast array of stakeholders with often very different takes on a given situation. They frequently have to communicate around “difficult choices” or straight bad news. The tactics used are often very simple:
1. they seek to speak directly to the voter – the medium is just a channel;
2. they try to keep it simple and, where possible, entertaining;
3. they take a stand and deliver distinct messages;
4. they seek to paint a picture in order to make complex topics more digestible.
As such, it might be instructive to look at a strategic corporate communications program as a political campaign, with the CEO as chief campaigner, as opposed to a candidate; and with support of corporate initiatives, policies, products and services as the endgame, as opposed to votes. In this kind of approach, the need to integrate communications – advertising, speaking platforms, Internet, media relations and the like – becomes exceptionally important.
In our world, integrated communications is not at all just a bundling together of a company’s communications activities. Rather it should be a mirror image of a company’s culture of interacting with its target audiences. The CEO is often best suited to be the driver for a company’s mission of delivering integrated communications. A key objective must be to ensure that all managers are on the same track; this will require a ruthless approach to eliminate silos as well as a serious time commitment of the entire senior management team.
Change needs to be driven from the top – the CEO needs to set the goals, drive the pace and, even more important, live up to the values. Those CEOs who understand this and act upon this belief, bolstered by a senior management team that helps share the visibility responsibilities, can help their company win the hearts and minds of key stakeholders.
If Egyptian business continues to bask in the spotlight for some time to come, CEOs might no longer be able to keep a low profile as they have done in the past. In any case, it’s high time the stigma of negative publicity that has overshadowed CEOs is effaced by a new, positive image of what a CEO is and does. The best way to do that is to take the lead and start communicating.
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