TL;DR
Bad press isn’t a PR failure: it’s a business decision made visible. Before you fire your communications team, ask yourself one question: is the story true? If it’s yes, you don’t have a PR problem, you have a business problem. And if there’s one thing that PR can’t fix, it’s problems that business decisions created (without PR pro input to avert the issue IMHO). Your reputation starts with decisions, and how those decisions are made often determines what stories end up in the press.
I recently had a “tough conversation” with a board member of a company that had been receiving negative press coverage after a mutual friend recommended he speak with me. Within the first two minutes, he told me they needed to replace their PR team because — and I’m paraphrasing here — they just couldn’t do anything right.
I asked him to walk me through a couple of the stories. He did. And then I asked the most important question”Is the story true? Did this actually happen?”
Yes, he said. Very combatively.
“Then it’s not bad PR,” I told him. “It’s a bad business decision that led to a bad story.”
He may not have loved the answer, but it’s the correct one, and more leaders need to be open to hearing it.
Bad Press Has a Source — And It’s Usually Not Your PR Team
When a negative story breaks, the instinct is almost always to look at the communications team. They didn’t kill it fast enough or they didn’t get ahead of it. “Fire them, hire better ones, and the problem goes away” is a somewhat standard response.
Newsflash: This isn’t how any of this works!
In my experience, negative stories almost always come from one of two places. The first is a deliberate hit job — a competitor, a disgruntled former employee, someone with an agenda. That happens, but it’s rarer than people think (more soon on what to do if this happens). The second, and far more common source, is a bad business decision that had a real impact on real people, and somebody picked it up and ran with it.
That second one isn’t a PR story. It’s a business story. And the difference matters..
Real Public Relations is about who you talk to, what you say, how you say it, and, perhaps most importantly, when you say it. It shapes narratives and builds relationships with the people who matter to your business. What it cannot do is manufacture a reality that doesn’t exist. (Althouth it is true that a fabrication can get airtime…and get traction and become the narrative, and then ultimately and expensively get disproved.) A skilled communications team can help tell a good story. They cannot invent one that sticks. And when the story that’s out there is true, no amount of media relations expertise is going to make it disappear.
A bad story about your CEO’s decision is not bad PR. It’s a bad story. Full stop.
Uber: The Case Study That Says It All
Remember when Uber was melting down under Travis Kalanick. This was a company that had built one of the most exciting brand stories in recent memory — disruptive, bold, relentless. They used to deliver puppies to offices. The narrative was irresistible.
And then it turned, and it seemed like a fast turn to people outside of the company, but for those inside the company, an inevitability if they acknowledged it or not..
Toxic culture. Allegations of sexual harassment. Regulatory battles on multiple continents. Internal complaints piling up. Dirty dealing with cab medallions. It wasn’t one story — it was a pattern. And patterns have a way of becoming undeniable.
Many people around Uber kept saying the same thing: “Uber has a PR problem.”
The Real Uber Problem: Leadership
No it didn’t. Uber had a leadership problem, and leadership problems don’t get solved by communications teams (although frankly, if everyone would just listen to their great PR council, many of these issues would be averted, again IMHO.)
Not one of those stories came to fruition because of a poorly worded press release, a missed tweet, or a spokesperson who fumbled a quote. Every single one of them was about decisions, behavior, and culture. When employees spoke out, that wasn’t a PR failure — it was a management failure. When leadership was described as aggressive and dismissive, that was a behavior problem. When the company kept clashing with regulators, that wasn’t a communications gap — it was a strategy problem.
The PR team was hustling. They were left holding the bag and the microphone every time a new story broke. And no amount of skillful communications can outrun what’s actually happening inside a company.
The fix didn’t come from a better media strategy. It came from new leadership. When Dara Khosrowshahi stepped in as CEO, he did something that seems simple but is actually rare: he acknowledged the problems out loud.
He reset cultural expectations. He repaired relationships with regulators. He brought in new people and made the changes visible — not buried, not quietly managed, but plainly communicated.
The narrative changed because the behavior changed. Uber didn’t fix Uber’s reputation by getting better at PR. Uber fixed Uber’s reputation by fixing Uber. Then PR helped tell that story — and it did so effectively, because now the story was true.
Reputation Is a Lagging Indicator of Business
One of the most important things about PR and business performance is this:
Reputation is a lagging indicator of business.
It shows up after the decisions, the behaviors, and after the experiences people have with your company. It is a reflection of what you’ve already done — not a variable you can adjust independently from the rest of how you operate.
When I work with companies on reputation, I always start with two questions: What do you want to be known for? And what are you actually known for right now? The gap between those two answers is the real work. Sometimes the gap is small and it’s a storytelling challenge. Sometimes it’s enormous, and you have to go through zero to get to the other side — meaning you have to actively dismantle what exists before you can build something new.
What you cannot do is claim to be the greatest thing since sliced bread when you don’t actually have a knife.
The first question to ask when a bad story breaks is not “Is this fair?” Fair is emotional. Fair sends you down a rabbit hole of grievance and defensiveness that helps no one. The question is: “Is it true?”
If it’s true, that’s your starting point. Not what do we say — but what needs to change?
How to Actually Operate Your Way Out of a Bad Story
Quiet fixes don’t rebuild trust. That’s the hard lesson most companies learn too late. You can make internal changes, retrain your team, and rewrite your policies — but if people can’t see what changed, they have no reason to update their perception of you.
I learned this firsthand when I was put in charge of a customer service team with a terrible reputation. I went in and started observing. Within the first day, I watched a rep put a caller on hold, walk out to the food truck, get lunch, come back, eat at their desk, and then pick the call back up. That caller had been on hold for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.
Was that bad PR? No. That was a business decision — or rather, the absence of one. Someone had decided, at some point, that this behavior was acceptable. And it showed up in the reputation of the whole team.
The fix wasn’t a press release. It was retraining, setting clear expectations, and making the new standard visible to the people it affected.
That’s the model. When something goes wrong and the story is true, the path forward looks like this: figure out what needs to change operationally, make the change, and then communicate about it clearly — not in polished corporate language, but in plain terms. We had a problem. Here’s what it was. Here’s what we’ve done about it. Here’s how things are different now.
No spin. No deflection. No blaming the team that was handed an impossible situation.
You don’t manage your way out of a bad story. You operate your way out.
So the next time someone walks into a room and says “we have a PR problem” — pause before you agree. Ask whether what you’re actually looking at is a business problem that’s now visible. Because in my experience, that’s almost always what it is. And the answer to a business problem isn’t a better press release.
It’s better business.
Want more straight talk on communication, leadership, and reputation? Listen to the Everything Speaks podcast with Lee Caraher.