Banks, Image Problems, and the Ethics of Lobbying
Filed under: banking, brands, CEOs, lobbying, public relations, transparency |
Ethics in public relations can mean two different things. It can mean managing your firm’s reputation, since a reputation for ethical behaviour is of course a central part of the reputation that any company wants for itself. It can also mean ethics in the way you go about managing that reputation, since there are good and bad ways to do that. Sometimes the two go hand-in-hand.
Businessweek recently reported that Brian T. Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, has said he is “incensed” at public criticism of his bank, and has called upon 135 ‘market presidents’ (presidents of local business units) to lobby local officials and remind them of how much good the bank does for local communities. Call it reputation management, call it lobbying. Either way, it’s not at all clear that it is a good substitute for changing the practices that have been angering critics in the first place. It’s also not clear that a focus on ‘all the good we do’ is the right approach. Why not tackle the issues head-on?
Yesterday, at Canadian Business for Social Responsibility’s annual Forum, I got the chance to ask keynote speaker Stephen Lewis about the ethics of lobbying. (Lewis, in addition to being a former diplomat and a UN special envoy is also a former parliamentarian, so he seemed a good person to ask.) Lewis said that, in his experience — both as a parliamentarian and as someone who has lobbied hard on behalf of many causes — the best approach to lobbying is honesty. Put your agenda on the table, he said, and you’re likely to get a fair hearing.
That rings true, especially in an era in which just about everyone is cynical about corporate motives. Even people who believe fully in the crucial role that business plays in making the world a better place — and yes, that includes banks — are likely to respect you more if you admit that you’ve got an agenda, and that that agenda is not, and properly is not, direct pursuit of the public good.
The Business Ethics Blog 
Honesty is important. “Ethical lobbying” must also involve some form of self-restraint. Companies (in the US at least) have a very bad tendency to ask for everything they can get and more. Many (though certainly not all) politicians are often willing to compromise reasoned positions that are good for their constituencies in exchange for campaign funding. With no self-restraint, companies are simply feeding this system.
There are also rarely democratic “competitors” in the sense that lobbying is supposed to be a means for citizens – corporate and individual – to make their cases before political leaders and the nation. For many issues, such as tax breaks for oil companies slipped into legislation about something completely different, companies explicitly want to avoid having any other company or individual challenge what they want.