A running joke among D.C. sports fans arose in the late 2000s: The Washington Football Team were perennial “offseason” champions.
Year after year, Washington’s football team was known for making big money signings with big fanfare for big names, for players who were usually way past their prime: A 5-year, $23 million deal for 36-year old Bruce Smith; an 8-year, $56 million deal for 33-year old Deion Sanders; $8 million (and 2nd- and 6th-round draft picks) for 2.5 sacks from Jason Taylor; …Albert Haynesworth.
Shockingly, none of this ever panned out.
So it’s not surprising when, to much less fanfare, the franchise applied this same lack of strategy to snowballing reputational crises: From proudly maintaining their overall branding, protested by indigenous people as a racial slur, and continuing a widespread culture of overt sexual harassment at the high-end of offense, to:
Selling team-branded 9/11 fifth anniversary hats,
“Buying off” local media for favorable coverage,
Suing season-ticket holding fans into bankruptcy,
Attempting to silence a radio show critical of the team,
Selling expired beer to fans,
Using unnamed team sources to insinuate that their GM—a recovering alcoholic—was fired for drinking,
Pioneering a method to gouge fans on parking, and
Countless other examples, at the lower end.
(In fact, the local CBS affiliate compiled this 18-point list of scandals and complaints just from the past two years.)
Following the George Floyd protests, however, a cultural fever pitch for racial justice made team sponsors skittish and, finally, pushed executives to relent on a rebrand.
Reputational Risk
As I mentioned in an article about Arsenal’s front office issues, reputation is, tangibly, money—with a 5% improvement in reputation yielding between 1.6% and 2.5% market cap growth for an average-sized S&P company.
The Financial Times Lexicon defines “reputational risk,” as “the possible loss of the organization’s reputational capital.”
It continues:
“Imagine that the company has an account similar to a bank account that they are either filling up or depleting. Every time the company does something good, its reputational capital account goes up; every time the company does something bad, or is accused of doing something bad, the account goes down.”
Using this example, the Washington R-words are, fittingly, decades in the red. Or, to use a football analogy: If they’re losing ten yards for every flag, the team is currently lining up in the parking lot. Their rampant lack of adherence to an on- or off-field strategy had created an intractable culture of incompetence, harassment, pettiness and, above all, led to an NFL-leading 31% decline in attendance from 2008-2018.
In the 2018 season, Washington was the only team in the NFL that failed to fill at least three-quarters of seats in its stadium. And this, despite being in one of the largest and most valuable media markets in the country. While some leading companies can bank on an account of goodwill, for Washington, that well has run dry.
A New Culture
In August, the team hired Jason Wright as president, making the former running-back and McKinsey consultant the first black team president in NFL history. Wright has a tall order ahead, overseeing the team’s transformation across “operations, finance, sales and marketing divisions, among others.”
The hire was the first of a few—including Julie Donaldson as senior vice president of media, host of the team’s television shows and first woman to hold a full-time role in an NFL team’s game-day radio booth—that at least hinted at a self-awareness to move on from the insular boys’ club that got them in this situation.
Making a few new hires, however, doesn’t change a culture, and a new logo doesn’t mean you have a new way of doing things. From Jennifer Janson’s The Reputation Playbook:
“It’s not too difficult to describe the culture you aspire to. Maybe you want to drive innovation, delight your customers, be a responsible global citizen, treat your employees with trust and respect, and so on. However, what it boils down to in reality is the way things are done around here.” (P56)
To his credit, Wright has been open about the need for cultural change. In an interview with ESPN last week, it was revealed he’s instilled efforts to stop the bleeding:
The word culture has become a buzzword for Washington in the past 6 months and Wright said he and coach Ron Rivera meet every Friday for up to 90 minutes to discuss it. Wright also said he has an Ask Me Anything session with employees each Friday, and the team has beefed up its parental leave to 16 weeks, which Wright said puts it in line with most in the NFL. Washington also instituted a whistle-blower hotline allowing employees to leave anonymous complaints.
He artfully dodges specifically discussing his boss, however, team owner Dan Snyder—a notoriously change-averse figure, laid bare by his telling USA Today in 2013 that they can use capital letters to say he’ll “NEVER” change the team’s name.
Whether the changes work will likely depend on Snyder, who, former employees said, used to scoff at the mention of improving the culture.
Wright is optimistic.
"Our workforce," he said, "is eager for change."
It’s A Start.
Only time and consistency will tell the eventual story. Business industry communications are continually alight with the merits of top-down vs. bottom-up cultural change models, but they all agree: Every person in the organization needs to be involved and on-board, from the bottom to the top.
And when it comes to finally getting the value out of a strong reputation, a strong culture is key to its maintenance. “In many ways, reputation is the outward and visible sign of your culture,” writes Janson.
She continues:
“Many people associate reputation with awareness and so it’s often tempting to think of reputation as a communications issue, best handled by the PR team. In reality, reputation is a fundamental business issue that is at the heart of everything a company does. You build your reputation by ensure your employees, and company as a whole, behave in line with your core values, and that you set up your systems and processes to do the same.” (P13)
Wright is on the right track by realizing it requires all employees to buy into the process, but given the decades of blunders, it will take time for the Washington Football Team to climb their way out of reputational debt, and even get back onto the playing field. And they can only do so when everyone in the organization, including the owner, is working in the same direction.
Kyle Bagin is a strategic communications professional, with roughly ten years’ experience building successful communications campaigns by using research and insights to see the bigger picture, solve problems and change behavior.
Currently the associate director of digital media at the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy and a recent graduate of Georgetown University's public relations & corporate communications master’s program, he can be reached through the Contact page.