UpTrajectory Review
Harvard Business Review's latest piece, a Q&A with Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher, examines the long road a chief executive must walk after a scandal has damaged the company's reputation and, more critically, the public's faith in his judgment. Sucher, who has spent years studying trust in organizations, lays out the specific steps a leader must take: acknowledge the harm directly, demonstrate real change in behavior, and rebuild credibility through consistent action over time. The interview format lets her push past the usual crisis-management platitudes and get into the mechanics of how trust actually breaks and what repair demands.
For a small-business owner, this is not an abstraction. You may never face a headline-grabbing scandal, but you will face moments where a customer, employee, or vendor questions your judgment: a billing error that went unaddressed, a promise you failed to keep, a hire that turned out badly. Sucher's framework applies at any scale. Trust, she argues, rests on competence, benevolence, and integrity. When one of those pillars cracks, the leader cannot delegate the repair. The person at the top must own the mistake publicly and personally, and that ownership costs time, attention, and often revenue before it pays back.
What distinguishes Sucher's approach from standard crisis-communication advice is her insistence that apology alone does nothing. A CEO who says the right words but keeps the same decision-making process will lose trust again, and the second breach is harder to survive. She also challenges the instinct to minimize the damage or shift blame to a rogue employee. The leader's job is to absorb the hit, show what has changed, and let stakeholders judge the change over months, not press releases. This is a harder standard than most executives set for themselves, and HBR deserves credit for not softening it.
The under-reported angle here is the toll on the leader's inner circle. When a CEO's judgment is in question, the board, senior staff, and key investors all recalibrate their relationship with him. Some will demand proof of change. Others will quietly start looking for an exit. Sucher touches on the need for the CEO to surround himself with people who will tell him the truth, but the piece could go further into how a leader rebuilds trust with his own team before he can rebuild it with the outside world. That internal repair is often the harder job.
Watch for whether the CEOs now navigating high-profile scandals follow Sucher's sequence or skip steps. The ones who treat trust repair as a communications problem rather than an operational one will provide the cautionary tales. Meanwhile, take a hard look at your own operation. Identify the one place where a stakeholder might reasonably question your judgment, fix the process that allowed it, and communicate the fix before anyone asks. That is cheaper than rebuilding trust after it breaks.
Takeaway: Trust breaks when stakeholders question your judgment; repair it by changing the behavior, not the messaging, and let time prove the change.
Excerpt from the original — Harvard Business Review
<p>Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher explains what the CEO must do to recover from a scandal that has raised questions about his judgment.</p>