Are you any better prepared for public backlash than Starbucks?

If you spent anytime online last week, you couldn’t escape the headlines about Starbucks - nearly all of which had little to nothing to do with coffee.

It did, however, show how a failure in external relations can have significant costs for your organization.

The world’s largest coffeehouse chain shut down all 8,000 stores across the United States for at least three hours starting in the early afternoon on Tuesday, May 29 for anti-bias training. More specifically, the company said it held this training for its 175,000 employees as a “foundational step in renewing Starbucks as a place where ALL people feel welcome.”

The fact that Starbucks found itself in such a situation was a result of a failure in external relations.

Whether you are ready or not, in a fast-paced world every mistake has the potential to become a big one. The best crisis communication work is done well ahead of the actual crisis, even preventing it from becoming a crisis in the first place.

Shutting down such a large company is a significant public gesture. In this case, Starbucks was attempting to stem the tide of bad publicity that started April 12 when a store manager called the police, who then arrested two African-American customers. According to multiple reports, the two were simply sitting in the Philadelphia coffee shop quietly waiting for a friend.  

The incident made national headlines, calling into question the company’s commitment to equality and sending stock prices down 5.6 percent from April 12 to May 3 before climbing back up somewhat by the day of the company-wide training. New data from YouGov BrandIndex shows Starbucks’ workplace reputation at a ten-year low.

Unless you own stock in Starbucks this all may have little impact on you and you may think it has no impact on your business. However, business leaders would benefit from taking a moment for introspection to ask how your organization would handle a similar situation. Just how prepared are you to handle a similar incident, particularly if it stemmed from a storefront or wherever your business interacts with customers most directly? What are you doing right now to build the relationships and to put your best policies front and center? In short, what protections do you have in place?

By evaluating the effectiveness of your organization in six main areas of external affairs (communication, community engagement, government affairs, leadership development, philanthropy and corporate ethics), you can evaluate how well positioned your organization is to avoid situations like the one Starbucks is dealing with, and be better prepared to navigate trouble when it does arise.

Whether you are ready or not, in a fast-paced world every mistake has the potential to become a big one. The best crisis communication work is done well ahead of the actual crisis, even preventing it from becoming a crisis in the first place.

So, what did Starbucks do wrong and what did they get right? That’s difficult to say from the outside. Perhaps the better question is what does Starbucks now wish it had done before this became an issue? Did it have the right training in place? A quick visit to the company’s website shows “social impact” as one of the main sections, right behind information about its actual product. The section includes information about refugee hiring, job opportunities for youth, a charitable foundation, community service, diversity, inclusion, veterans and its relationship with farmers. Clearly, Starbucks was doing a lot of good, but it still became embroiled in one of the nation’s most sensitive issues.

So, the question is less about whether Starbucks had taken many of the right steps in its policies and practices, rather the question seems to be about how well or poorly did it communicate that to the key audiences? Did Starbucks proactively try to tell the story of its commitment to offering a welcoming place to people of all ethnic and religious groups? Did it tout its commitment to diversity in hiring and promoting? Had you ever heard about the company’s philanthropic efforts before its reputation on race relations was called into question?

From the outside, I don’t know any more than what I read on the Starbucks website (admittedly not one I ever visited before this became a story) to say if any of those values actually exist, though I’d like to think they do. If that is the case, then why wasn’t the story shared sufficiently and, more importantly, if it had been communicated how would that have either prevented or minimized the type of backlash we’ve seen.

Businesses have to do the right thing and in my experience that’s an ever-evolving process. No one gets it right all of the time. But your effectiveness in sharing the story of what you are doing right can make all the difference in the world.

Marty Carpenter is the managing partner of 24NINE,  a consulting firm that helps businesses create and maintain effective external affairs programs. He has served as the lead communication strategist for Utah Governor Gary Herbert and Utah’s largest business association, the Salt Lake Chamber.