When AOL CEO Tim Armstrong publicly bashed work done by some of his employees, the media grabbed ahold of the quote and ran with it. Armstrong quickly realized that having your employer’s disparaging comments aired in public is bad for morale and invited the 250 employees whose work he had commented on to a meeting. Although the meeting was closed-door, The Business Insider managed to get this report from their sources inside AOL:
A source who was in the room tells us Tim didn’t “bullshit” and that he was “head-on” about his mistake. He said something like, “I said that the SXSW thing was crap because it was crap. My mistake in this was in coming to the press with this and not coming to you guys.”
When he was done talking Tim passed the microphone around the room. He took some “pretty tough” questions, answering them in “a fairly sophisticated way” that “was pretty reassuring.”
One editor used a complicated metaphor somehow involving a shower handle to ask a question which basically boiled down to: “Why do we writers have to deal with so much bureaucracy and bullshit?”
Tim answered, “You guys, the people who create the content and the people who sell the ads, they are the ones everyone else at AOL works for including me.”
By going about his crisis management in a humbler, honest, and apologetic way, Armstrong enforced the value of his employees and generated press to counter-balance the negative publicity he had initially received.
The BCM Blogging Team
https://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/