Corporate leadership may wish to limit the scope of public statements on current events.
A new policy adopted by Harvard University is the latest and most prominent example of how large organizations are shifting from the active exercise of a corporate social voice to much more limited, targeted public positions on social issues of the day.
Arising from the tumultuous environment of late on many college campuses, the “Report on Institutional Voice in the University” takes the position that while the university and its leaders have a responsibility to speak out to protect and promote its core function, they should decline from issuing official statements about public matters that do not affect that core function (e.g., statements of empathy).
And it’s the second part of that position that sends a fairly loud preference for a somewhat neutral organization voice that corporate executives and board members should note.
The concept of ”corporate social voice” generally refers to authorized statements and positions expressed by companies and their CEOs on leading social issues of the day. The perceived value of the “social voice” is to more closely align the company with the interests of all of its organizational stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, communities, suppliers and customers.
Indeed, over the last several years, portions of the business community have leveraged their organizational profile with public comments on issues ranging from presidential succession, to voting rights legislation, to LGBTQ controversies, immigration issues, gender and racial equality, and abortion rights.
But more recently, corporate leaders have begun to re-evaluate the value of an active social voice, when confronted by threats of punitive state reaction, antitrust allegations, rising opposition to ESG regulation, costly reputational damage and - particularly - data suggesting that many consumers do not appreciate corporate intervention on societal concerns.
For example, The New York Times recently reported that corporate CEOs are increasingly choosing to stay out of the public spotlight (e.g. as commencement speakers) due to concerns that any messages they offer might be misinterpreted in one way or another. One expert described the current moment as one in which “even formerly anodyne messages encouraging employees to vote sound partisan to some”.
According to the Times report, CEOs are thus being advised by communications experts to limit their public comments only to things that absolutely have essential bearing on their company and its business. This, of course, begs the often-difficult challenge of defining the things that fall within the concept of “essential bearing” -or, in Harvard’s case, the university’s core function.
The Harvard Policy describes the university’s core function to include such matters as protecting the university’s autonomy and academic freedom when threated; such as when outside forces seek to determine what students it can admit, the subjects it can teach or the research it supports. The core function could also include protecting the university’s endowments from legislative taxation proposals. The Policy also recognizes the need for a mechanism going forward by which questions concerning issues that may relate to core function may be resolved.
All of this is a helpful template for corporations and their leaders in re-evaluating the extent of their social voice, given the current volatility of public discourse and the associated risks of participating in that discourse.
It may thus be a useful exercise for the board and management to work together to develop some sense of those issues relate directly to the “essential bearing on the company and its business”. This may well include social responsibility initiatives that corporate leaders feel necessary to address workforce issues and also ESG objectives. It may well exclude issues that are overtly controversial in the public milieu, regardless of the interest of their stakeholders. But for corporations as well as for universities, that will be a case-by-case analysis.
Ultimately, it is reasonable for senior leadership to regret the increasing number of barriers to the otherwise meaningful exercise of the corporate social voice. But it would be unrealistic to deny the fact that such barriers do exist. The Harvard policy provides an example of a neutral path forward.
