PR Lessons from RICS’ Troubles

#Week26 saw yet more turmoil at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), with the resignation of the entire Standards & Regulation Board at the professional body. Recent years have been turbulent for RICS, with complaints around governance, financial mismanagement and a bloated structure stalking the organisation. A number of investigations – notably 2021’s Levitt Review and 2022’s Bichard Review – provided recommendations designed to shake-up the body and make it fit for purpose.

Some hope. This week’s resignations have reopened old wounds (and created some new ones), once again putting the future of RICS under the microscope. Only time will tell if the organisation can reform and shape a role for itself both in the UK and worldwide, but any success will be based on it regaining the confidence of its membership base.

There are plenty of reasons for disillusionment, but a major contributing factor is how RICS’ actions have regularly fallen short of its sometimes overblown claims of new starts and lines drawn. It is a stark example that reputation is less about what you say, and more about what you actually do. RICS’ membership is a sophisticated one: they know from their own experiences and wider reports that lofty talk is not always supported by on-the-ground realities.

We can see a parallel with Thames Water, another organisation facing turmoil this week. Take a look at the ‘newsroom’ section of its website, and there is no end of stories about ‘record investment’, ‘ambitious 25-year programmes’ and ‘turnaround plans’. But as any customer of Thames Water could tell you, the company is a bit of basket case. Bills rose by 11% in April, a quarter of the water that runs through its pipes is lost to leakage and its debt pile has hit £14 billion. At time of writing, contingency plans to nationalise the utility were being drawn up by the Government.

There is a perception, driven perhaps by lurid tales of political ‘spin doctors’, that reputation management is all about messaging, promotion of good news and mitigating the bad. These are all vital – every company and individual needs to tell their own story – but it is not enough. As RICS and Thames Water show us, PR is about what you do as much as what you say. Now more than ever, words need to be backed by behaviour – and those that manage this best will reap the reputational rewards.