Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose’s Chief Communications Officer, Sara Adams, sat down with Elizabeth Doty, Executive Director, Third Side Strategies to explore how companies can protect their values — and their reputations, in today’s hyper-political environment.
Sara: With so many companies quietly renaming or reframing their DEI and sustainability programs, how can leaders stay true to their core values without alienating key stakeholders or inviting regulatory scrutiny?
Elizabeth: It’s understandable that companies adjust their language to avoid friction in a hyper-political environment, but this can quickly become a Catch-22. Those who support your programs may now question your commitment and quietly disengage or call you out. Those who were skeptical will likely view the reframing as confirmation of something to hide. And with the March 2026 Executive Order 14398 strengthening False Claims Act enforcement for federal contractors engaging in DEI practices under any terminology, the regulatory risk doesn’t simply disappear when you change the name.
The solution isn’t wordsmithing. It’s developing guiding principles that reflect who you are as a business and how your values drive enterprise value.
That means digging into why you pursue inclusion, anti-discrimination, or sustainability practices — how they attract talent, reduce risk, satisfy investors, or advance your purpose. Armed with those principles, you can engage critics’ concerns, clarify misconceptions, and where needed, adjust practices, all while standing firm on your values and your fiduciary obligations. At a time when every choice carries risk, research consistently shows that stakeholders respect companies that evaluate their practices carefully rather than chasing political trends.
Sara: Your “Principled Influence” guide introduces the concept of Corporate Political Responsibility (CPR) Governance — what does that mean in practice, and why should management teams care about it right now?
Elizabeth: According to the Public Affairs Council, public affairs refers to “an organization’s strategy to monitor, manage and impact its business environment” including government affairs; advocacy; communications; stakeholder engagement and more.
The guide was designed to help management teams address three urgent public affairs challenges in today’s turbulent environment: broadening the view of risks and interests that should inform their decision-making; achieving cross-functional alignment, including with the Board, on how those decisions get made; and preparing for no-win situations where every choice carries significant costs.
The guide is based on the concept of Corporate Political Responsibility Governance — a non-partisan practice for managing a company’s external influences in a consistent, principled way — regardless of the political climate — with a focus on long-term value for both business and society.
What is critical is to have these governance safeguards in place before the next crisis hits, not after.
In practice, the guide walks management teams through a Public Affairs Governance Review structured around five elements: a clear purpose for public affairs; robust principles for identifying priorities and positions; aligned activities when engaging on issues; integrated governance and oversight processes; and transparent communications and reporting. Each element comes with a checklist, resources, and real-world examples.
Sara: CEOs increasingly say they’re willing to speak out on issues, but not alone. What frameworks or processes can help companies decide when to engage publicly on a political or social issue — and when to stay silent? And how do they find like-minded partners?
Elizabeth: CEOs face something close to a prisoner’s dilemma right now. The individual costs of stepping forward to uphold fundamental rights, impartial institutions, or free markets can be high, yet if no one steps forward, the collective costs are enormous.
We think about this in two categories. The first, and clearest, covers issues that directly affect your business’s ability to create long-term value or fulfill key stakeholder promises. People generally respond well to responsibility. If the issue connects to your mission, or to something you’re actively working to improve as a business, your CEO can explain that link plainly. One important caveat: before making any public statement, audit all the ways your company participates in the public square including lobbying, political spending, charitable giving, and confirm they aren’t quietly undermining the position you’re taking publicly.
The second category is tougher: issues involving the foundational systems your business depends on. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics highlighted the role of strong, inclusive institutions in fostering prosperity. Research suggests that 75–94% of the variability in shareholder returns is driven by the health of the overall economy. Every company has a shared interest in those systems, and silence can signal you’re willing to let others carry the burden.
The best time to find like-minded partners is before a crisis, not during one.
Engage your industry associations proactively. Mission-oriented groups like CECP create space for leaders to share how they’re thinking through these issues and to clarify their interest in the fundamental systems that enable business to thrive. Build relationships across divides now, so you know who might act alongside you when the moment comes. And if you’re not ready to lead, be prepared to be a fast follower.
Sara: A Public Affairs Governance Review involves pulling together cross-functional teams from Legal, HR, Communications, Risk, and beyond. How do you get leadership alignment when those functions often have very different risk tolerances and priorities?
Elizabeth: The differences in risk tolerance and language across functions are real, and worth taking seriously rather than papering over. The first move is finding the right project sponsor: someone with a whole-of-company view, whether that’s someone in the CEO’s office, a senior executive with Board visibility, or staff assigned to the Board Chair. A question from the Board about how public affairs decisions get made can do a lot of the work of convening the right people.
Beyond the sponsor, treat the review itself as a discovery process. Ask each function what risks they’re monitoring, what they consider highest priority, what factors weigh most in their decisions, and what unknowns keep them up at night. That listening exercise alone often surfaces the terms on which alignment is possible.
Alignment comes from surfacing the real concerns first, not from presenting a pre-baked framework and asking for buy-in.
From there, you can use the guide’s worksheets to flag topics that warrant deeper cross-functional discussion, propose criteria grounded in what’s best for the company as a whole, and call on your sponsor to help frame any asks that require a judgment call at the top. (See Table 9: Evaluating Either/Or Options for a practical guide to weighing tradeoffs as a cross-functional team.)
Sara: CECP data suggests that companies aligning business practices with corporate purpose see significantly higher revenue and profit — so why do so many companies still treat public affairs governance as a compliance checkbox rather than a strategic advantage?
Elizabeth: It’s one of the great mysteries. There are two underlying challenges.
First, companies that are already reaping the benefits of a strong purpose often can’t pinpoint precisely what’s driving it, because it is so woven into their business. That ambiguity makes it easy to inadvertently dilute the formula through shortcuts in product design, customer experience, employee treatment, or public affairs practices. As Jim Collins showed in How the Mighty Fall, those compromises can stay invisible for a long time. The implication: dig deep to understand your success recipe and design governance structures and practices that actively protect it. (This is why we created the Principled Influence guide.)
Second, companies still building their flywheel face a different challenge. It takes real discipline to walk the talk before the returns are visible, and the temptation to use more transactional methods to boost short-term numbers is constant. Here, CECP’s work on deep investor engagement is invaluable: staying the course requires helping investors understand why the long game is the right one.
Simple, clear guidelines — like IBM’s principle of engaging in “policy not politics” — provide the kind of clarity that holds up under pressure.
In today’s volatile, divided environment, a principled approach to public affairs isn’t just a reputational hedge. It has a direct impact on employee, customer, and shareholder relationships — and on public policies and institutions that allow companies to create value in the first place.