A client of mine was sacked last year, wrongly accused of sexual harassment. A handful of negative media stories followed, enough to travel through his entire industry. He didn’t fight the dismissal. His former employer had deep pockets. His did not. This is the kind of situation where crisis communications counsel matters most, in the first hours, not months later.
It has been an incredibly stressful period for him. He believes his reputation is permanently destroyed.
I’ve disagreed, and pointed him to two politicians who survived very public reputational collapses of their own: Barnaby Joyce and Emma Husar. My advice to him was simple. Watch what happens.
Australians are forgiving of other people’s mistakes, but only on conditions. A wrongly damaged reputation, or even a fairly damaged one, is rarely permanent. What decides whether someone comes back is not the severity of the original story. It’s whether they make two specific changes: genuine self-reflection, and a new story, deliberately and carefully communicated. This is the same discipline behind reputation management: building, protecting, and eventually recovering trust.
The author – Peter Wilkinson
Barnaby Joyce’s comeback started before anyone noticed
When Barnaby Joyce was at his lowest, he lost his posts as Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the National Party. My prediction at the time, very much a minority view, was that he could make a comeback. I said the same of Emma Husar.
Neither politician, nor my client, can return to exactly where they were. But with the right two changes, a partial and credible comeback is achievable, and often more durable than the reputation that existed before the crisis.
There were already signs of a Joyce comeback after the disastrous period leading up to his Channel 7 appearance. AFR political commentator Phil Coorey noted in August 2018 that colleagues who had privately urged Joyce to walk away with whatever dignity remained were, within two months, floating him for the leadership again. That is a fast reversal, and it didn’t happen by accident.
The people who decide if you get another chance
The approach has to be tailored to each person and situation, but it generally follows the same shape, built around three groups of stakeholders.
Your most important stakeholders are family, friends, and close colleagues. These are your supporters. They will also help with the harder task: honest self-reflection. It’s difficult to reset your own values and behaviour without people close enough to tell you the truth. We can all spot weaknesses in others. Identifying our own is a different skill entirely.
Secondary stakeholders move the needle. This is your professional community, and the prospective clients, customers, or colleagues who will eventually help you back. These are the people who reward you with respect and a return from the sin bin, but only once they’ve seen the change, not just heard about it. It’s one thing to change. It’s another to be seen to change. This is also where executive reputation is won or lost, in how a leader’s changed conduct is actually perceived, not just declared.
Enemies fall into three groups: your strongest critics or former employer, some media, and a portion of the public who believe the worst of the allegations regardless of evidence. Some of these people will never change their view. Some can become supporters over time. Most simply aren’t that interested either way. The task is to convert some, and to ignore or neutralise the rest. Ignoring intransigent critics takes real discipline, and it’s a skill in its own right.
Change has to be real, not just claimed
Over more than 15 years of watching this play out, one pattern holds, a view shaped by Peter Wilkinson’s background across both journalism and crisis advisory work. The “improved you” has to be genuine, and for most people, an apology alone doesn’t cut it. Barnaby Joyce’s book was arguably a step in that direction, a longer-form way of demonstrating reflection rather than simply asserting it.
This is where the new story becomes critical: what you communicate, and how. A page-turn only works if the reader believes the previous chapter has actually closed. Announcing change and demonstrating change are different exercises, and most people default to the easier one.
The six paths back, and why most lead nowhere
There are, broadly, six options available to someone rebuilding after a damaging story. None of them suit every situation.
- Hide. Do nothing to defend yourself. It’s the easiest option, largely because you’re typically at your lowest ebb and short on confidence. It’s also the option least likely to change anything.
- Get on with life. Keep networking with the people who matter, quietly and consistently, without making it a campaign.
- Build a considered website, with your new story carefully set out, supported by SEO to push your version of events up the search results, challenging the existing negative coverage.
- Engage with limited, non-sensational media to get the new story into the public domain. Joyce’s book, and the associated publicity around it, is an example of this option in practice.
- Undertake limited social media, structured to minimise the risk of pile-ons and trolling.
- Take legal action against a former employer, with the strongest possible statement of claim. This takes real courage and resources, but it can carry the best outcome if you’re genuinely confident you’re in the right. A court case is strong evidence to the world that you feel wronged, and it can embarrass a former employer enough, with staff and external stakeholders, to encourage a negotiated settlement. Whichever path is chosen, it should sit inside a tested plan rather than an improvised one, the same logic behind the crisis management team checklist we use before a crisis ever hits.
Most people default to option one. It’s understandable, and it’s usually the wrong call.
My advice, in every case, is to settle on a strategy and commit to it. Flip-flopping between tactics undermines the whole effort, and it stretches out both the timeline and the cost of recovery. A damaged reputation rarely comes back on its own. It comes back because someone decided, deliberately, what the next chapter would say.
