You've screwed up then gone into damage control. Alexandra Carlton wades the troubled waters of the ruined reputations and asks whether one can ever be revived.
Nick Jones* Gave Me Genital Warts”. Imagine your name substituted for the one in that sentence. And that sentence is on the front of a T-shirt. And those T-shirts are being worn by half-a-dozen members of the opposite sex at a nightclub where everyone knows who you are. It may be slightly embellished, possibly even apocryphal, but there were rumours that this happened to a notorious philanderer who was active in my social circle (some would say a little too active). The wearers of said T-shirts weren’t exactly painting themselves in the most flattering light in their quest for revenge, but the reputation of the wart-wielder was utterly obliterated.
A broken reputation is a terrible thing. How do you move on from the crash which follows that sort of fall from grace? How can the NRL’s Melbourne Storm ever expect its name to stand for anything great again after the salary cap corruption scandal that broke in April? How does James Hardie Industries, the company responsible for thousands of asbestos-related deaths in Australia, still attract business? The football team may still one day win a grand final; compensation may be paid in full to all the victims of asbestos-related illness. Hell, Wart Guy may have even started keeping it in his pants. But the stale fug of distrust and decay can never be completely erased.
Your reputation rules, says business mentor and image specialist Hannah Samuel. Even the most self-assured among us probably rely on it more in our personal and professional relationships than we like to admit. Samuel styles herself as “the reputation champion”, regularly conducting seminars around Australia and New Zealand to espouse the importance of safeguarding the way people perceive each other in the business world. In her ebook, Reputation Rules: Why Other People’s Opinions Count, she argues that reputation drives almost every decision we make. The clothes we wear are chosen to convey a certain image to the people we meet. We choose to see a film because it stars a certain A-list actor, which we figure lends the film a certain gravitas. And we avoid companies and possibly social contacts if their standing is less than pristine.
Unfortunately, reputations are as fragile as bubbles. You can destroy a good one – even a robust, well-earned one – in mere seconds. And the fallout isn’t always proportionate to the stuff-up. Years of money and dedication sunk into a restaurant can be obliterated by a single cockroach. A promising political career can be snuffed out with the revelation of a personal indiscretion. Some climb back (Robert Downey Jr, we forgive you for the junkie years because you’re so darned cheeky), while others are tarnished indefinitely (Mel Gibson made us cry in Braveheart, but no amount of blue make-up can cover up the ugly anti-Semitism).
So is there anything you can do to get your rep back on track if you find it looking more tattered than a pair of Lindsay Lohan’s leggings after a big night out? Possibly. Meet Rhiannon Rees, 43. She knows moreabout the idea of “rock bottom” than a starfish. In 2005, she walked in on her husband of three years (and the father of her one-year-old son) wearing her black lingerie and high heels. “I’ve always wanted to be a girl,” he confessed. It was a terrible shock. But Rees didn’t run – in fact, she did her best to support her husband through his painful process of self-discovery and steps towards gender realignment. But the stress and fracture to their marriage was too much and they separated. Rees was left virtually penniless.
For most people, this would be horror enough, but for Rees, the destruction was only beginning. Her spa business limped along, but she was saddled with debts and forced into homelessness. This lasted an agonising three years, during which time Rees and her son subsisted on rice, lentils and tinned tomatoes, and even camped out in a tent for a three-month period. When her business finally folded, the devoted mother, broken and hopeless, couldn’t bear to leave her son with carers to take on more work. She felt his world had already been shattered enough.
The physical hardships were horrifying. But the isolation and stigma that followed was the near-killer blow. “People who had been friends of mine for 10 or 20 years saw me as a loser,” she explains. “I felt utterly exposed and vulnerable. People stopped inviting me places, or calling by to check how I was. Some people even laughed. And then there were the ones who thought I must have caused my husband to become transgender – or if they spent time with me I might turn
them or their husbands that way too.”
Clearly, Rees is no Mel Gibson or Melbourne Storm. The injuries her reputation sustained were not self-inflicted, but the bite she felt as her status and sense of self-worth took a pounding was surely similarly painful. After years of grief, she gathered her courage and, through a series of life-changing events, turned things around, eventually becoming a wildly successful business coach. But the reputation was far harder to revive. “Even though I’m open about my story, people are funny about it even now,” she says. Her ammunition? Honesty. “I tell people my story pretty much off the bat,” she says. “Some think I’m stupid. Many don’t believe me. But honesty is the only way to go – try to cover it up and it will come out somehow. It was agonising to live through, but I’m strong enough now to know that I wouldn’t be where I am today if I didn’t go through what I did. And if people still want to judge me for that, let them.”
Kat Armstrong, 42, knows she made her own bed. At 18 years of age she was a pregnant heroin addict. Heroin is a greedy beast, and in her early 20s she found herself assisting in armed robberies to feed her addiction. She was jailed twice – for four and five years respectively – for the hold-ups, as well as for fraud. Her daughter, still a child, cut off all contact with her mother.
Upon release from her second stint behind bars, during which she had begun a law degree, Armstrong’s greatest challenge wasn’t staying off the dope. It was convincing the rest of the world that she was serious about improving her life.
“When I visited Centrelink and the bank, I was looked down upon like scum,” she says. “A friendly, ‘Hello, how can I help you?’ would turn quickly into terse, one-word answers when they learned where I had come from. Still, I held my head high and thought, I’m not going to be judged. I’ve done my time and paid my debt to society.” In fact, Armstrong managed to keep her head so high, she found the fortitude to start the Women in Prison Advocacy Network, which mentors and educates former female inmates post release. She also reunited with her daughter, with whom she now has a close relationship. Like Rees, she confronted her past head-on with guts and honesty and turned it into more than just a positive – it became the making of her.
Honesty, says Hannah Samuel, is your number one recourse when your name has a question mark next to it – whether it’s due to a business smear or something more personal. “The biggest issue for all of us is deceit and fraud,” she says. The anger many people feel about the child sex abuse claims levelled against the Catholic Church worldwide is as much about the way the church authorities covered up the crimes perpetrated by its priests and bishops as it is about the abuse itself. Former US president Bill Clinton didn’t face an impeachment trial because he had an affair with an intern, but because he lied about it. Both Rees and Armstrong turned their worst years into the foundation of their best by throwing them down on the table and letting the facts separate the friends from the “frenemies”.
Sometimes though, honesty doesn’t cut it. Late last year the National Australia Bank (NAB), one of Australia’s “big four” banks, decided to face up to the fact that Australians don’t like organisations that meddle with their money. Bank-bashing would already have to trump cricket, swimming and all football codes as our national sport. And the usual tactics to counter the public’s distaste for their standard customer-unfriendly practices – advertising, spin-doctoring, kiss-and-kick policies that remove one fee only to replace it with another – were only infuriating savvy consumers further. So NAB stopped stuffing around. “One of the things we believed we had to do to differentiate ourselves from our competitors was improve ourselves in the area of reputation,” says George Wright, the bank’s head of public affairs. “Often this sort of stuff is put in the social responsibility camp and parked off to the side. We decided we had to tackle reputation as part of our core business strategy.” So they wiped a whole raft of fees, including overdraft charges and most account-keeping penalties. No strings attached.
“The [overdraft] fees we targeted for abolition accounted for 70 per cent of complaints to the bank,” explains Wright, who admits NAB has already lost around $100 million in revenue due to the changes, but has also halved its customer complaints, seen a big drop in account closures and an upswing in openings. It should be noted, the bank is not doing it just to be nice − they want (and need) your business. But it wasn’t their “fair dinkum” attitude, as Wright puts it, that saved them. It was the concrete measures they put in place that benefited the consumer. Actions, in the end, spoke louder than words.
Of course, there are some smears that will haunt a person forever. First-degree murder isn’t exactly a trifle that can be shrugged off with an apology. The CEOs of Wall Street institutions that instigated the global financial crisis with their grubby, underhand practices will always have their immoral behaviour hanging over them. And Wart Guy may have applied some ointment and found a new set of friends, but his murky memory lingers. It is possible to resurrect a bad reputation – but you’d better be prepared to work harder than you did to get a good one in the first place.
*Yes, this is a fake name. The real guy’s reputation is tattered enough.