10 Ways to Damage Your Organization’s Reputation (2025 Edition)

1. Manage reputation reactively. Wait until a crisis trends on X (Twitter) or goes viral on TikTok before responding. Never monitor social listening tools or online sentiment.
2. Treat reputation as a communications problem. Delegate your organization’s credibility—which drives up to 80% of market value—to a small PR team. Expect them to spin away systemic issues with press releases and influencer partnerships.
3. Never prepare for inevitable crises. Assume leaders will make perfect decisions under pressure, even without scenario planning, crisis simulations, or clear protocols. Wing it when deepfakes, data breaches, or employee whistleblowers emerge.
4. Ignore early warning signals. Don’t scan social media, employee review sites (Glassdoor), or stakeholder forums for brewing issues. Treat rapid change as unpredictable chaos rather than something you can actively monitor and prepare for.
5. Build reputation through advertising alone. Invest millions in brand campaigns while ignoring employee experience, product quality, and customer service. Assume external messaging matters more than internal reality.
6. Treat employees as expendable resources. View your workforce as a cost center, not as brand ambassadors whose Glassdoor reviews, LinkedIn posts, and dinner-table conversations shape your reputation daily.
7. Never consider stakeholder perspectives. Operate with shareholder primacy as your only lens. Ignore customers, communities, suppliers, and activists who can destroy your reputation overnight with a viral post or coordinated boycott.
8. Dismiss what you can’t easily measure. Ignore trust, culture, and brand equity because they’re “intangible.” Never invest in reputation measurement tools or track Net Promoter Score, employee engagement, or ESG ratings.
9. Treat ethics and sustainability as PR checkboxes. Issue glossy ESG reports while practicing greenwashing, paying lip service to diversity, or hiding supply chain abuses. Assume Gen Z employees and consumers won’t call you out.
10. Believe reputation doesn’t matter—until it’s gone. Dismiss Warren Buffett’s warning: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Learn this lesson the hard way when a single scandal tanks your stock, talent pipeline, and customer loyalty.

I would appreciate comment about this list.

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Online Training: Learn How To Mitigate Stakeholder Reputation Risk (Online) Stakeholder Reputation Risk is regarded worldwide as one of the most difficult risks to manage. Stakeholder Reputation Risk emerges when the reasonable expectations of stakeholders are not met. To adequately understand this dynamic, delegates need a thorough grounding in understanding both Stakeholder Management and Reputation Risk Mitigation processes. To create this training, I have combined key takeaways from my Stakeholder Reputation, Reputation Risk Management, and Crisis Management training masterclasses with the latest thinking from reputation risk management practices, strategic communication, risk management, ethics, community relations, marketing, stakeholder management, organizational behavior, sustainability, and corporate governance literature. The online program is designed to show business leaders and managers how to establish an excellent reputation with; and maintain positive, mutually beneficial relationships with stakeholders and minimize potential risk. An Organisation’s reputation is derived from how stakeholders perceive the organization, its communication, and behavior in the markets in which it operates. Risk emerges when these perceptions and tools do not fulfill their reasonable expectations. In order to effectively manage the interface between an organization and its stakeholders a number of issues and topics have to be taken care of, including: – Understanding How and Why Reputation Risk emerge; – Understanding how to profile stakeholders i.e. Who are our stakeholders and what do they want and need? – Being clear on what we want from and need from our stakeholders; – Understanding the strategies that need to be in place to mitigate risk and satisfy stakeholder needs and wants and create long-term collaborative relationships; – Understanding the processes that need to be put in place to enable the execution of strategies and minimize risk; – An understanding of the capabilities that need to be put in place to make these processes work; – Understanding how to mitigate both reputation erosion and reputation risk events if and when they occur. The workshop offers an integrated framework for managing stakeholder management relationships, as well as practical tools that can be used for developing and improving existing relationships, and mitigate potential reputation risks. It is also important to take a look at my standard Stakeholder Reputation Management Training Course‘s outline and learning agenda as I incorporate and weave most of that information into this training. Email me for more information and a registration form.

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Reputation Question to Ask at Meetings “Here’s a question to ask at meetings: What policies, systems, procedures, rules, regulations, actions and behavior are not consistent with our desired #reputation?” The answers will provide lots of insights about gaps and vulnerabilities and potential for improvement.

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Two interesting research studies results came out the past week.

The Reputation Institute (RI), released the results of the World’s Most Reputable Companies 2018 survey, the company’s annual Global RepTrak® 100 (RT100) rankings. The 2018 RT100 is  the world’s largest corporate reputation study of its kind. The RT100 is based on more than 230,000 individual ratings collected in the first quarter of 2018. It includes comparative rankings, demographic trends, and unique insights into the dynamics behind reputational impact.

The global study shows what drives trust and identifies supportive behaviors such as intent to purchase a company’s products, willingness to invest in, or even work for, the company.

The rankings drop for 58 percent of companies surveyed shows there has been a decline in trust and ultimately reputation. The results show that garnering support among stakeholders has become more difficult; that expectations have risen, making it harder to earn trust, attain benefit of the doubt, create consumer loyalty and entice investors.

I have a name for that – Stakeholder Reputation risk and defined it clearly in this post of mine.

The Reputation Institute researches the world’s most reputable companies. By tracking and analyzing stakeholder perceptions, they enable leaders to build better companies. The RepTrak® model analyzes the reputations of companies and is best known as the Forbes-published Global RepTrak 100.

Underlying the model is the RepTrak methodology, the global gold standard for measuring reputation. Learn more at: http://www.reputationinstitute.com.

On their website, the RI shares some key trending components worth noting as best practices for organizations aiming to boost their own reputation.

These include the need for the CEO to communicate authentically and the need to proactively navigate social issues, i.e the need for issues management will increase.

In another study, The Harris Poll RQ®; Amazon took the top spot. The 2018 Harris Poll Reputation Quotient Rankings identifies the 100 most visible companies identified by U.S. consumers and ranks these companies based on their reputation in six different categories: Emotional Appeal, Products & Services, Social Responsibility, Vision & Leadership, Workplace Environment, and Financial Performance.

The Reputation Quotient is “technically designed to understand how a company is perceived in modern culture.” The measure takes the top most visible companies (for good or bad reasons) and evaluates them across six dimensions of corporate reputation attributes to arrive at a corporate reputation ranking. If a company is not on the list, it does not necessarily suggest that they have either good or bad reputation, but rather they didn’t reach a critical level of visibility to be measured. While other models measure reputation in a vacuum, the RQ® starts fresh each year by surveying the public’s top-of-mind awareness of companies who either excelled or faltered in society.

Disney ranked high at No. 5, and Netflix, at No. 21, beat out fellow tech giants Google and Apple, ranked Nos. 28 and 29, respectively. Read the full release in PR Newswire.

The Weinstein Co., which has been embroiled in executive Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual assault scandal, and Takata, with its infamously defective airbags, came in last on the list at Nos. 99 and 100, respectively.

In the Forbes article – The World’s Most Reputable Companies 2018 the example is cited of Apple plummeting 38 spots to No. 58 on the 2018 RT100—a fall explained by various incidents involving ethical behavior, fairness, product value and transparency (alleged battery tampering, encryption conflict etc.)

The Forbes article has some clear and interesting advice for Apple on the matter.

Reputation impacts either positively or negatively in the minds of stakeholders, whether management likes it or not.

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Wikipedia defines reputational risk, often called reputation risk, as a risk of loss resulting from damages to a firm’s reputation, manifesting in lost revenue; increased operating, capital, or regulatory costs; or destruction of shareholder value, consequent to an adverse or potentially criminal event—even if the company is not found guilty.

Adverse events typically associated with reputation risk include ethics, safety, security, sustainability, quality, and innovation. Reputational risk can be a matter of corporate trust.

I believe that reputation risk should be defined in four different ways. Doing this is crucial so that you can decide on what mitigating strategies will be needed to prevent and respond to reputation risk.

Definitions create the lenses through which we look at the world. As the renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as a nail.”

I start every seminar and presentation with definitions to establish a common framework through which I can work with my audience. Various definitions describe reputation and reputation risk, each serving a slightly different purpose. These need to be further explored so that you can decide on how you will manage reputation.

The classic definition is that reputation is all that is generally believed about your character, respectability, credit, integrity, or notoriety (Latin: reputatio – reckoning). But it is not enough to guide us.

I also use these definitions to give it more meaning:

• Reputation is a state of mind – A set of memories, perceptions, and opinions that reside in your stakeholders’ consciousness.
• Reputation is the net result of interactions – All the experiences, impressions, beliefs, feelings, and knowledge stakeholders have about a company.

What then is reputation management? It is a consulting discipline that recognizes reputation as both an asset and a risk. The definition I work with says that reputation management is the building, sustaining, and protection of an organization’s good name, generating positive feedback from stakeholders and resulting in the attainment of strategic and financial objectives. This definition implies a clear financial link between reputation management efforts and the bottom line.

However, reputation is also the greatest risk that an organization can face. (Think of a run on a bank).

As Warren Buffet has said: “It can take 20 years to build a good reputation, and only five minutes to destroy it.”

We, therefore, have to consider the following definitions as part of our approach to building and protecting reputation:

Definition 1 (Stakeholder Reputation Risk Perspective): Reputation risk emerges when the reasonable expectations of stakeholders about an organization’s performance and behavior are not met. This has been listed in some surveys as the most dangerous reputation risk of all. It involves taking a look at each stakeholder’s needs and expectations, matching the drivers of an organization’s reputation, and minimizing the gaps that exist.

Definition 2 (Asset Perspective): Some studies show that reputation makes up between 55 – 73% of a company’s asset value. In this instance, reputation risk is defined as the loss of earnings that occur in a situation of negative public opinion. It normally results in loss of sales, share value decreases, and breakdown of relationships. Many crises have led to stock price decreases and impacts in other areas of the business.

Definition 3 (Incident Perspective): Reputation risk is the exposure incurred from unexpected incidents or from an unanticipated response to the institution’s initiatives, actions, or day-to-day activities. This definition implies that reputation risk is the risk that an activity, action, or stance performed or taken by a company or its officials will impair its image in the community and/or the long-term trust placed in the organization by its stakeholders, resulting in the loss of business and/or legal action. This is closely linked with the asset perspective.

Definition 4 (Compliance Perspective): Reputation risk can also be defined and viewed as the loss or negative publicity that can arise from failure to meet regulatory or legal obligations.

From the above definitions, it must be clear that essentially all risks and all related components of an organization potentially impact reputation. This implies that reputation needs to be systemically managed if an organization wants to extract maximum value from it.

Takeaway Lessons:

• Tip: It is essential that you define reputation risk in these four ways in your business, as each definition implies a different mitigation strategy and potential danger. My various training seminars explore these strategies in detail.

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The impact of Reputation Risk never ceases to amaze me.

I have never seen so many politicians, government employees, executives, managers and just generally run of the mill people so hell bent on destroying their own reputation and names in South Africa.

The utter destruction of carefully crafted institutional reputation by people focused on their own agendas and enrichment is shocking.

Saga upon saga plagued South Africa in 2017 resulting in currency downgrades, public spats, commissions of inquiry and cabinet changes. The phrase ‘STATE CAPTURE’, “Gupta” and “Zuma” dominated the Media, culminating in arrests, businesses closing and the appointment of a new South African president Mr. Cyril Ramaphosa.

People carried on with scant attention to their Reputations. But, just like Pride comes to a fall, Reputation Risk built up until houses of cards came tumbling down. In fact, many people now downplay their involvement in the “Gupta saga”. (The Gupta family have close ties to former President Jacob Zuma and have been accused of using the association to win state business and influence government appointments).

Some has called any association with the Gupta family. Association risk. Well it is just semantics, it is just another description for Reputation Risk.

Jim Rohn, the business coach once said that “There are two parts to influence: First, influence is powerful, and second, influence is subtle. You wouldn’t let someone push you off course, but you might let someone nudge you off course and not even realize it.”

I guess the Gupta influence was more like a sledgehammer than subtle, since so many stumbled.

A Lesson from the State Capture Saga

The lesson is clear – Be careful who you build alliances and relationships with. Who you make friends with, your business partners can be risky. I would recommend the utmost diligence and care. Remember how the late Jackie Selebi was tarnished by his relationship with a known gangster. In the same vein, understand the role and function of the Competition Commission.

Unanswered Questions

There remain many other unanswered questions and concerns.  The “State Capture” and distorted power and influence that the Gupta family displayed has brought the role and value of the Stakeholder Management function into question. In fact, I would wager that the Stakeholder function‘s reputation is in jeopardy.

This is the unit that are supposed to keep tabs on undue influence, power issues, new alliances, and they should be doing constant monitoring and profiling. They should keep tabs on the web of relationships that a company has with its stakeholders. Why? Read this

How come so many Government Stakeholder Managers did not pick up this misuse of power and influence? Or did they report and their messaging fell on deaf ears?

So, how do you measure or audit the Stakeholder Management function? Do you apply traditional auditing principles? How can you if you do not have a clear grasp of intangible factors and how they interact? This blog post and training will seek to clarify some of these questions.

With auditors, managers and other professionals’ reputations damaged by the damning reports of lack of professionalism, perhaps all professional service providers should read this post of mine – “What it means to be a professional”.

What really concerns me is that people make career limiting decisions because they just do not seem to understand that building reputation is a seed planting process. Seed Planting is a key process in thought leadership and reputation building. Every single day, every single interaction is a seed being planted. Just like this post.

Here’s an alternative question: Bell Pottinger. KPMG. McKinsey. What do you do when your advisers turn rogue?

Yet, I have been told countless times that leaders understand Reputation Risk, one of the three top risks in the world. I have been told that Enterprise Wide Risk Management systems work. I have been repeatedly told, we don’t need to attend your Reputation Risk Management workshops, we have a PR Department, we know what to do.

Do they? Can they define Reputation Risk in four different ways and describe the mitigating strategies and tactics to defend that which is precious?

Perhaps herein lies the problem. Is Reputation Risk a strategic risk or a consequence of a risk? Can you really address wrongdoing by issuing an apology like Bell Pottinger did? (Bell Pottinger was a British company that on 12 September 2017 went into administration (bankruptcy) as a consequence of acting on behalf of Gupta-owned Oakbay Investments. They had deliberately manipulated and inflamed racial tensions, stirred up racial hatred, and made accusations of “white monopoly capital“,^[14] using a large number of fake twitter and other accounts online, as part of a campaign portraying Oakbay and those connected to it as victims, apparently intended to deflect corruption claims.^[19][20] Bell Pottinger subsequently collapsed in the wake of the scandal.^[21]

KPMG has felt how hard the journey to restore trust can be. Not only did senior management depart but they lost key clients because of the dangers of association. Media statements such as KPMG South Africa leadership changes and key findings arising from KPMG International’s Investigation shows the danger of Reputation risk.

Slowly, more and more leaders are realizing PR is not the only skill required to manage reputation risk, but that the protection of Reputation requires a systemic, multi-discipline approach i.e. it requires knowledge of trust, ethics, governance, PR, OD, crisis and issues management, crisis communication, risk management and compliance and business strategy to design, develop and implements strategies and processes to safeguard and protect this vital asset.

Elsewhere the Spur Group saw turnover drop because of a poorly handled racially based incidents at one of their restaurants. The group learnt the hard way that lack of engagement & listening can be costly. H & M fared even worse.

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Deon Binneman presenting a Reputation Protection keynote at the BCI World Conference in London with the opening question: “Why is Reputation like a Burning Flame?” More information The BCI World 2017 was the world’s largest conference on Business Continuity.

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I am proud to announce that I will deliver a keynote on How to Protect Reputation on Day 2 of the BCI World Conference and Exhibition 2017, 7th & 8th November 2017, Novotel London West, UK. In my keynote, I will unpack for the audience not only WHY Reputation is a company’s most precious asset and most dangerous risk, but share some real lessons on WHY this asset must be protected at all cost. The BCI World Conference & Exhibition is an absolute must-attend event for any Business Continuity or Resilience professional. BCIWorld is organized by the Business Continuity Institute. Established in 1994, the BCI has established itself as the leading membership and certifying organization for Business Continuity professionals worldwide. More Information Check out what I bring to the table here.

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Protecting reputation tops business leaders list of priorities, ahead of financial achievements and business leadership, according to the world’s first benchmark of organizational resilience published by BSI.

The study found that reputation is seen as the most important element to the long term success of the business, even more than financial aspects, leadership and vision and purpose. Despite this, 43 percent of those interviewed as part of the global study, believed their organization was strongly susceptible to reputational risk.1,250 senior leaders of organizations across the globe participated in the study, which covered ten sectors across three regions: UK and Ireland, USA and Asia Pacific.

The magnitude of reputational risk was found to vary by geography. Globally 62 percent rate their organization’s current reputation as excellent or very good, but this figure rises to 75 percent in the US and falls to 55 percent and 56 percent in the UK and Ireland and Asia Pacific respectively.Out of the 16 elements that make up organizational resilience, the study found that the most and least important are:Most important

1. Reputational risk
2. Financial aspects
3. Leadership
4. Vision and purpose
5. Information and knowledge management.

Least important

1. Horizon scanning
2. Alignment
3. Community engagement
4. Culture
5. Adaptive capacity.

The study also investigated how these elements ranked in terms of perceived performance. It found:Highest performing

1. Financial aspects
2. Alignment
3. Leadership
4. Vision and purpose
5. Governance and accountability.

Worst performing

1. Supply chain
2. Innovation
3. Horizon scanning
4. Information and knowledge management
5. Awareness, training and testing.

Supply chain was perceived as the least resilient of the elements. The research found this to be largely as a result of senior business leaders feeling less in control of supply chain processes, as they reside outside of their organization.More details.

Source: Reputation is the most important element of organizational resilience: survey

Footnote:

In my Stakeholder Reputation Master Class training seminar I suggest to the audience in one exercise that if a supplier has for instance industrial action, that one way to protect the company’s reputation, is to second your legal and HR experts to work with the supplier. Thus, good supply chain relationship management can act as a buffer to disruption.

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And the fallout of the Gupta saga continues – Disgraced Bell Pottinger firm booted out of the UK Public Relations and Communications Association.

Bell Pottinger not only damaged the PR Industry’s #Reputation but it forced their hand – “Bell Pottinger has brought the PR [public relations] and communications industry into disrepute with its actions and it has received the harshest possible sanctions,” Francis Ingham said.

Just yesterday Bell Pottinger chief James Henderson quit ahead of this ruling on the race hate campaign.

It certainly makes a point that of what use is Ethical Standards if we do not apply or act on them?

Ethical breaches can far reaching impacts, and in crises like these CEO’s can depart.

Source: Disgraced Bell Pottinger booted out of industry guild

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