Why is it always someone else’s fault in politics?

We normally steer clear of politics in our blogs but we’ll make an exception this time! As the UK’s new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, celebrates (if that’s the right word) her first month in office, the UK is in the middle of several crises. It made me wonder whether we might see a new approach to national crises, particularly the acceptance of responsibility.

We increasingly exercise teams with scenarios involving their business and brand being affected by the failure of a third party that they have an outsourced relationship with. Our clients understand it is their business and brand in the spotlight and that it simply won’t wash to pass the blame to the supplier.

Compare this to the reaction of some of our senior politicians this year on both sides of the house where they appear happy to blame others or claim not to understand the rules such as in the various ‘Partygate’ events. Would we have thought better of the government if they stood up and took responsibility for the passport fiasco and set out a clear plan of action rather than simply pointing the blame towards the passport office along with threats of privatisation?

Perhaps this is driven by an environment in politics where mistakes are pounced on by the opposition or even members of a government’s own party wishing to push their own agenda. However, this approach to managing the communications during a crisis simply wouldn’t work for most businesses. 

Tesco were widely praised for their response to the horse meat scandal that also affected a number of other food retailers. Tesco found themselves front and centre of the story but didn’t hide behind the fact the issues occurred at one of their meat suppliers, they understood this was their responsibility and affected their customers.  There response was to:

• Place full-page adverts in a number of national UK newspapers apologising.

• Acknowledge they and their supplier had let customers down and promise to find out "what happened.”

• Follow up two weeks later with another full-page advert in national newspapers to let people know what they were doing to restore trust in the supply chain.

• Place the CEO front and centre of their response with interviews detailing how Tesco would regain the trust of their customers.

I’m probably being naive but wouldn’t it be great if we started to see this type of approach from our political leaders? However, for this to happen perhaps we need a bit more acceptance by all that people and governments will make mistakes and need time to put things right.