Burying your head in the sand won’t fix a PR disaster

When Lauren Schultz, CEO of McDonald’s UK and Ireland, was asked recently about historic abuse allegations at the chain, she said she didn’t want to talk about the past. The exchange caused a PR issue, which points to a wider question many leaders face: what is the right thing to do with the difficult parts of organisational history that you did not create, but which might still exert an effect on the people you lead?

The instinct to focus on the future is common. Often, it comes from a good place – a desire to give people a fresh start and not to dwell on what cannot be changed. The only problem is that it tends not to work. Difficult things that are not talked about do not disappear. They reorganise themselves, like dirty water seeping through a building and emerging somewhere unexpected. Unprocessed issues might start out as quiet drag in meetings – caution, deference, voices that don’t speak up – and eventually surface as serious mistakes. Sometimes they erupt, months or years later, in response to an incident that seemed trivial on the surface. The emotional residue of historic experience – mishandled redundancy programmes, leadership departures that left scars, episodes of poor behaviour that went unchecked – lives on in the relationships between people. It lingers there, whether or not anyone names it. Cultures store what they have not processed, and so do individuals.

When this material sits stagnant, it tends to settle into one of three forms. Each is a deepening of the same dynamic, and has a name that helps people recognise it.

The elephant is the conversation everyone in the room knows is needed but no one will initiate. It might be a behavioural pattern in a senior colleague that everyone has quietly worked around for years. The elephant lurks in the corner of meetings, watched but carefully ignored. The cost is draining – the work of not naming that grey wrinkly thing is exhausting.

The hangover is the lingering residue of an event the organisation has not properly processed – a brutal restructure, the abrupt departure of a senior leader, a pandemic-era decision that went awry. The event is in the past but also in the present; it still shapes how people interact. It shows up in the bracing posture people adopt before what should be ordinary meetings, or in the way decisions get second guessed long after they’ve been made. Leaders sometimes read this as a problem of motivation. More often than not, it is the manifestation of an unhealed injury.

The cupboard under the stairs is where the most difficult material gets stored: gnarly, unresolved, sometimes taboo stuff that no one even dares look at. The instinct to put things in the cupboard is human. The trouble is, nothing actually stays in there; it finds another way out. This can be through toxic office politics, or the freezing out of people who thought they had been performing well. People notice the smell, but no one dares name what is behind the door.

Left to compound, all three compromise organisational health, as the system reorganises itself around an event it never healed from. In the worst cases the organisation gets locked into hypervigilance or numb withdrawal, no longer responding to current reality but dominated by a historic wound that has not healed.

Naming these patterns is not, on its own, the work. But it is the door to it. What follows is grittier than any single intervention. It starts with acknowledging that something difficult is present, and that the lack of attention paid to it carries real consequences. Then there is the task of taking responsibility. Not in the sense of shouldering blame (at least, not automatically), but in recognising that this issue is now yours to handle, whether or not you caused it. Then follows the work of repairing what’s been damaged in people’s relationships. This is rarely as quick or as comfortable as anyone wants. 

Finally, the part that makes the difference long term: building practices that make this kind of work ordinary rather than exceptional. The goal is not to handle the next crisis better. It’s to stop ‘crisis’ being the only language in which difficult things get spoken about. This is harder than usual leadership remedies – to use a McDonald’s analogy, it is the opposite of a Happy Meal. A workshop, a restructure or a senior hire are all easier to commission, and are popular because they are easy to control. The patterns described here need leadership willing to sit in difficulty for long enough to make a difference, even when nothing about the work looks impressive from the outside. That work is unglamorous. But the promise is powerful – regeneration, and the kind of positive organisational energy that nothing else creates.

The question for any leader is not whether skeletons exist in your organisation, because they always do. The question is what becomes possible when, despite the discomfort, you decide to do something about them.

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