A Risky Business?
The 5th October 2022 represents the formal launch of River Effra to the outside world. After months of planning and pulling a business together I get to announce what a new reputational risk and crisis communications advisory firm looks like.
The focus of the launch is Leadership under Pressure. We will explore the behavioural biases of business leaders (with the support of Ed Coke, Repute Associates, who I have worked alongside to provide research and insights) when faced with extraordinary events, as we try to understand how they react and how to help them manage their reaction to achieve the best possible outcomes. We will also hear from Dr Matt Barlow, Performance Psychologist, who has worked with leading sportsmen and women helping them to know themselves better and manage the extremes that elite sport places on an individual. We also then have a presentation from Gabriella Braun, the author of All That We Are, and a leading business adviser and founder of Working Well, an organisation that supports teams in handling the psychological impacts of high-pressured professional environments.
It may seem odd for a PR person to be going this deeply into behaviours and professional understanding of individuals and leaders when all we are there to do is to communicate, yet that gets to the nub of what River Effra is about. Reputation is a consequence of the actions we take, communication can strengthen and build good consequence on the basis of good actions (and vice versa), but it can’t fundamentally change direction.
This is where risk methodology comes in. It is about mapping consequence and agreeing appropriate mitigation. In operations, finance and legal, this is done as a matter of course, but in communications and corporate affairs, we are often asked to work magic and wave away that consequence without recourse to real mitigation actions.
This is where better understanding comes in. At the level of elite sport, or when faced with real psychological impacts on people and teams, we look to understand behaviours, map them and manage them to deliver the best possible outcomes. Yet, while corporate coaches look at these challenges, leaders in business and other organisations, when faced with extraordinary pressures somehow have to pretend they are super human and are not impacted by events. Like the rest of us, however, they do exhibit behaviour biases and can be blind to better solutions because of them. The question is, how do we support them?
Firstly, through better understanding. Over the course of the next few weeks, River Effra will be revealing the outcomes of research that explores leadership biases, having garnered responses from 74 very senior business leaders. Watch this space…
The second is through having highly credible advisers, who have been there, done that, seen the crises, and come out the other side, but who also buy into the philosophy that reputation is built on actions, from which the words follow. This is where the River Effra Expert Panel comes in. Have a look on the website, but I believe they are an unrivalled team of experts, with a huge range of professional qualifications and experience of crises from so many perspectives. This team can draw on its collective memory and provide advisory support for leaders that can help them understand consequence, make better decisions and achieve better outcomes.
For this is the point, we want to help our clients achieve the best possible outcomes in the hardest of environments. That isn’t always easy, and often it isn’t what people want to hear. But constructively delivered, truth to power, with the support of leadership that wants the best advice, has to be the better way. And it means we work better alongside colleagues from legal and other advisory services. And in a world where the challenges for leadership get harder week in week out, from scandal, to investigations, culture wars, and geopolitics, and more – then knowing you have the best team on your side, that has to be a good thing.