CHAPTER 4

Expertise

Using our expertise ethically is core to serving our employers and society well. I tell my students at Boston University—when you graduate, you will have superpowers to change opinions and drive action. You need to decide if you are going to use them for good or for evil. This chapter looks at challenges many professionals faced—and how they responded by using their powers for good.

The PRSA Code of Ethics states:

Expertise takes many forms. Following are challenges, advices, and failures of expertise.

Ethical Expertise Advice

Gary McCormick, APR, Fellow PRSA, a past President of PRSA, owns his own consulting firm, and previously worked in marketing and public relations for Scripps Networks Interactive, the parent company of cable network HGTV. He has great counsel on what to do when you encounter unethical behavior:

Every day is a learning experience. Every community is different, every technology is different, every client is different. A key lesson I learned is at the end of the day, I have to truly believe what I’m saying. I have to be willing to question authority, especially in the environmental area, because people’s lives, health, and well-being could possibly be at risk. If you take that away from them, you can’t give it back.

You can’t recover your own reputation if you’re caught supporting a falsehood or inaccuracy from your client or your cause. The end does not justify the means in this type of work, so I learned to ask:

• What do you know?

• When did you learn about it?

• Who did you tell about it?

• What did you do about it?

• How can we improve the situation?

I learned to say those things before I ever left the client’s office and started interacting with the public. If they aren’t comfortable with those answers or you aren’t comfortable with those answers, then you need to make the change and move on, because if you can’t get the absolute truth about where things are and what’s known, if it comes out later, you have lost your reputation, and you’ve lost your ability to do the job for them.

This same process works well for managing people and being a parent.

Kami Huyse, CEO, Zoetica, highlights how expertise allows us to respond and not react to unethical behavior:

First of all, protect yourself first. That’s number one.

If you encounter an unethical situation, get an ally. The ally could be somebody in your company, but it’s usually not. It’s usually somebody who is a good sounding board.

I always talk about responding, not reacting. If you react to abuse that makes you look like, “There’s that crazy woman again.” I like the idea of responding, which takes time. Think about what you’re going to do. Make a plan and then execute that plan.

If you need to have legal help, get legal help. If you need to stand up for yourself in a more constructive way, do it. Somebody needs to stand. It’s not easy. But it’s necessary.

Michael Meath, the retired Interim Chair of public relations at the S.I. Newhouse School at Syracuse University, believes taking the “Critical 10” helps you make more ethical decisions.

People believe speed has to be instantaneous because that’s the way the world works. I don’t believe that. I’m an old dinosaur. Yes, we need to be quick. Yes, every moment that we hold off on saying something can hurt us or at least make people wonder whether we know anything. But that has to be balanced with taking the Critical 10, where you’re figuring out and assessing what else is going on.

So, take the Critical 10, whether it’s 10 seconds or 10 minutes, to get a sense of what’s going on in the world.

Nicky McHugh, Global Head of Content for Rep Trak, agrees:

A former boss’ words resonate with me still today. “Practice the pause,” It took me a lifetime to learn this, and it’s something I try to do frequently. It’s the space between thoughts, the space between words, that space is where I find grace when in conflict, inspiration under stress, and inner peace when I simply give myself up to being open and vulnerable. Practice the pause.

Jim Lukaszewski, APR, Fellow PRSA, one of America’s most respected crisis and ethics counselors, believes expertise is essential:

I wrote a book about expertise Why Should the Boss Listen to You?¹ It talks about what CEOs look for and what they want us to do for them.

The first thing they want is advice on the spot. Business operates in real time. Bad things happen in real time. If you go to a meeting at 10:00 and are debriefed, and then you leave and try to figure out what you do, and you come back at 2:00 … a lot has happened in those four hours and you’re forcing the management to go back. Which they’ll do, probably with great courtesy, and then they don’t do what you suggest because they’re past the information point that you give.

Another weakness we have is that we believe so strongly in what we believe that sometimes we don’t realize how much pressure we’re putting on people when we ask them to do things.

I have a 10-day rule on ideas. If they don’t do it in 10 days, ask again if you think it’s that important. But if they don’t do it after that, drop it and move on to something else. They’re not going to do it. They’re adults. They have made the decision not to do it, and they’re just too courteous to tell you get off it.

I spoke to one guy at a convention, and he said he couldn’t get his manager to do what he proposed. I said, well, how long have you been proposing this kind of stuff? He said it’s going on 13 years, 13 years! Does the manager even talk to you anymore?

Here’s the problem. We tend to forget whose bus we are on. It’s their bus. If you have a problem with how they’re behaving or acting, get off the bus. Get another bus or start your own. Staff functions are paid to help management drive the bus better from their perspective.

There is a specific technique for giving expert advice that will be listened to. It’s called a three-minute drill. It revolves around the concept of making suggestions and writing options for action. Always have three potential options for them to choose from. Our problem is we’re so strong on communication that we walk in, and the boss wants options, but we say things like, I know in my heart this is the right thing to do. Well, the boss isn’t running the bus with his heart.

We characterize ourselves as solution finders. But many of us can’t be solution finders because we can’t add, subtract, multiply, or divide. The rest of management can. The solution I have found over the past 25 years is to offer three options every time. The three options are very simple.

First is to do nothing, and it is a strategic option. We tend to avoid it because we like to do stuff, but doing nothing is a zero percent solution. Then there’s doing something, which I call the 100 percent solution, which is important to do, and then there’s the third category, which I call doing something more—or the 125 percent option.

Always give them three choices. This is the one time perhaps in our entire career when they recognize that we were thinking about their problems from their perspective. They will like it, and they will call you back sooner.

Offer options instead of solutions because options are smaller, they’re doable and you’re actually helping them be successful. People who do this notice they get called back sooner than others.

One of the mistakes we make when there’s trouble is staff people link arms around the people in trouble and want to keep all the other voices away. This is the one time in a boss’s life when they want to talk to anybody for any reason who might have any information on how to solve this thing. The people who are listened to, including public relations people, are the ones who help them find people to talk to. Particularly in the crisis arena, they want to talk to everybody.

One thing I’ve learned in my career is people do not change. We can coach them incrementally to improve things. But if it’s illegal, immoral, monumentally stupid, and irritating, you’re going to have to change jobs. You’re going to have to go someplace else. If you have good advice and they’re not taking it, find a place that will.

Fred Cook, former Chairman of Golin and Director of the USC Center for Public Relations, expands on how to be an expert counselor:

To be an effective counselor, you must be in touch with the values of your client or your agency. The more that you can codify your behavior in advance, the easier it is to make a decision when something happens, because you know immediately if this is a good thing or a bad thing or how we’re going to respond. Second, you must find out all the information as quickly as you can. Sometimes, these issues get prolonged and aggravated because the people communicating about them don’t know the full story in the beginning, and they have to keep retelling it over and over as the information comes out.

Oftentimes, with a sticky issue, you’re better off resolving it as quickly as you can. It means that people in communications have to understand what is at stake in a conversation about gun control, or a conversation about climate change, or a conversation about immigration. These are very complicated topics, and employees are asking companies what their stand is. Customers want to know what the organization believes about these topics.

It’s not just enough to know about communications. You’ve got to understand everything you can about these individual issues, and many of them are quite complex and have very compelling stories on both sides. As you look at the current debate about Roe versus Wade, this is going to be something that companies are going to be asked to take a stand on. These are very complex and very emotional issues, and it requires a great sense of knowledge and a keen sense of judgment on the part of the people who communicate about them.

Expertise Ethics Issues in Action

Dave Close, the former managing director of MSL Boston, provides counsel on how to tell a client they are being unethical:

We had a hard charging client who asked us to call their competitors using fake names and fake company names to gather competitive intelligence. It was pretty easy to say, “No we’re not going to do that.” It’s certainly legitimate for companies to gather competitive intelligence, and they can do it themselves or they can hire companies that do that. But I just didn’t like the idea of using fake names as a PR agency working for this company. There was quite a bit of grumbling, but when I explained why we couldn’t, he understood, and he relented.

There was a legitimate chance that the agency could have been fired. At one point this client said “Well why did I hire you guys? What am I paying you guys for?” I said, “You’re paying us to do honest PR. Being clear about our affiliation and our role, not calling people with fake names.” I think that this client thought about firing us, but I believe he liked the work that the agency team was doing for him and ultimately was not going to fire us over that.

There’s a great line from Thoreau that stuck with me: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”² I would also say to PR people beware of all endeavors that require fake names. That’s just not the business we’re in. And it’s not how we operate.

You’re not going to have much of a business for long if you do dishonest things. In today’s world of social media and Google, if you’re dishonest, it is going to come out. Then not only are you dishonest, but you’re also recognized for being dishonest, and that’s going to hurt any kind of business.

It is essential to just say something more than “That’s unethical” when providing expert counsel around ethical issues. Marisa Vallbona, Founder and President of CIM, Inc. PR, provides advice on why we need to use our expertise to dig deeper:

A member of a client’s organization asked me to do something that was clearly unethical. We were having cocktails with one of the managers with this client’s organization, and the member looked at me over martinis and asked me to do something that was unethical. I was actually pretty shocked.

The reason that this was such a stressful dilemma is because this client means so much to me. It’s a substantial client for me. The manager looked at this individual and said, “She can’t do that. She’s an APR. She’s a Fellow. She will lose her credentials. Not only that, it’s illegal.”

I sat there and I thought, I operate offices in Southern California and in Texas. All of a sudden, I can see myself just leaving Southern California going to Texas, having to resign this client and just being done with it because I can’t do this. I was so happy that the manager protected me.

But here is the thing that I thought was really interesting, and this is a lesson for all of us. The member who was asking me to do something completely unethical is a very ethical person. I don’t think this individual realized what they were really asking me to do.

After cocktails, I thought about it for a while and I thought, what was behind this? What was this individual’s pain? Where did this request come from? What was this person’s end game? What was gnawing at them and keeping them up at night?

When I realized what their pain was, I was able to come up with a workaround that was ethical, that was legal, and I was able to solve their problem while maintaining ethics and legality. What we can all learn from this is sometimes clients, employers, and organizations might ask us to do something that is shocking and comes across as unethical, but they’re not necessarily coming at it from that perspective. We need to take a step back and understand what is their goal. What exactly do they want?

Kelley Chunn, Principal of Kelley Chunn and Associates, shared how she uses her expertise to determine if organizations that make mistakes on race and systemic injustice deserve help.

There was an educational institution that was in the middle of a crisis around a letter of solidarity that they had sent out to their stakeholders.

There was pushback about the content of the letter. While the letter attempted to communicate a feeling of solidarity in response to George Floyd’s murder, the letter seemed to be more concerned about supporting law enforcement than it did about police brutality and violence. It threatened to become a full-blown issue.

I talked to a friend about this who is not in the business about whether or not I should help. She said, “Well, why would you help them out? They got in trouble. It’s really their issue. Why should you try to bail them out?”

She saw it as an ethical issue. I saw it as a practitioner, and that they needed help. They realized that they’ve made a mistake, that they could have said this in a more empathetic manner, so why not help them out? We looked at it very, very differently, but she made me think about what I was doing and why I was doing it.

There are some clients who come to me about projects, and I would rather not take them on and I will decline. I could have done so in that instance, but I felt that their intentions had been good, and they just needed some help.

I realized that time was of the essence. We had to act fast, act truthfully, and act first. It requires asking the right questions.

• What have you been doing with regard to diversity and inclusion?

• How can you communicate that to your stakeholders?

• Who’s on your board?

• Who have you hired?

• Who is teaching?

• Who is in senior management?

I had them answer those questions as they communicated with their stakeholders.

Businesses need to demonstrate what, if anything, that they’ve already done, outlining a plan for the future that includes hiring and promotion and board composition.

Garland Stansell, APR, Chief Communications Officer for Children’s of Alabama, encountered a situation where it wasn’t his company that had an issue, but could be found guilty by association:

We were constructing a new expansion facility. One morning, we had protesters on the construction site because one of the contractors had a history of using undocumented individuals. We had meetings with the contractors, our board, and the hospital leadership, looking at what do we need to do about this? We had legal saying we haven’t done anything wrong. It’s up to the general contractor and the subcontractor who was employing undocumented individuals.

We said that kind of response does not fit. We were still in the midst of a recession, and we were one of the only projects in the state of Alabama of this magnitude.

That raised the visibility around the state. We needed to be proactive on this. We needed to come back and say we were not aware of this, and that we are demanding that this subcontractor verify that everyone that they have on their site is a citizen. If there was someone on the job site that was undocumented, that they were released from the job site, and replaced with someone who was either a naturalized citizen or a U.S.-born citizen.

We decided on the steps and the strategy on the first day, but it took about a week for it to blow over. I firmly believe that if we had not taken that stance and not held the contractor’s feet to the fire and asked for those assurances from the subcontractor, that it would have gone on for much longer, and it could have grown to be even larger.

That was an ethical dilemma. Legally we had not done anything wrong. It was something that one of the subcontractors had done in the past, but you’re guilty by association, and you need to consider what that looks like for your brand and your organization and your values as a company.

Ethics Issues in Media Relations

To pitch or not to pitch? That is the question. Adam Blacker, Vice President of Insights and Alliances at Apptopia, shares his insight on when to use your expertise to know when to ethically pass on a media opportunity:

I often have to use my expertise to make the decision to pass up on an opportunity for media coverage. Which, as a PR person, it’s like, “How could you ever pass that up?” But because our data might not necessarily fit, I pass what could be a juicy narrative.

Why? In the long haul, I want to be a trusted source of data, and I don’t want to mislead people. When we say something, I want them to be able to believe it. I want them to know we mean it, and that we stand behind it.

Our competitors will sometimes jump on something where they’ve taken advantage of setting parameters. Maybe they carefully selected the timeframe of the data to tell a story. For example, when COVID-19 started, certain European countries like Spain and Italy went into lockdown. Our competitors secured media coverage on the rise of streaming services.

They were saying, “There’s an increase in downloads for Netflix in these countries this week versus the week prior.” That’s true. Our data picks up on that as well. It sounds like a reasonable item to push out. I could have gotten media coverage on that potentially. But we decided we’re not going to release anything on it because it became clear after looking at the data that the increase was actually just part of the natural ebb and flow of downloads in that country. If you looked at a longer traunch, you couldn’t pin it to the pandemic. I just didn’t feel good about saying that this caused this, because if you just zoom out a little more than one week, it wasn’t justified.

Anytime you look into data you have to just go, “What’s happening.” And then you have to zoom out and go, “How significant is this? Is it best ever, worst ever? Is it just for this period?” You’ve got to nail down the specifics when you’re working with data.

It’s easy to say, “I’ve got this data, I’m going to frame it like this, send it to a reporter.” Most good reporters won’t be fooled. But we won’t even try. In certain situations, we will actively make the decision to not put it out there because we don’t feel like it’s substantial enough, or we don’t feel like we can pin it to an event that happened.

You need to use your expertise. Play the long game because trust is everything. Once trust is eroded, it’s hard to gain it back. With data being very accessible these days, people can find out pretty easily. Invest in yourself, invest in your company, invest in the stock market. It’s smarter to play the long game.

Bryan Scanlon, the founder of Look Left Marketing, explains what he does when his client wants to speak out on an area in which they are not qualified or appropriate:

I faced this issue around 9/11. There were some clients who said “We’re in the security business. We need to be on television right now, because we believe it’s going to be a cyberattack next. They’re going to come after the critical infrastructure. We believe this is just the beginning.”

In retrospect, the answer seems easy. But, like all ethical dilemmas, in the moment, it’s a little difficult. You’re running pretty high on emotion. We always looked for opportunities to get clients on television. We often took risks and tried to seize moments. That debate did not last long in my head. The answer was, “No. You really can’t do this.”

I asked every single one of those people. “Are you an expert in terrorism? Because those are the people who will provide value in this moment. Are you an expert in building design, construction, and safety? Then you could be of value to the public and to journalists.”

This notion of fear mongering, which exists a lot with security even today, was just not right. One client was like, “Well, you work for me. You should just do what I tell you to do.” And I said, “Well, we can NOT work for you. You can’t do this.” And that was the first time that I ever uttered those words of, “We could not work for you” and say I am willing to walk away, because this is a line I’m not going to cross.

September 11 also created an ethics moment for Martin Waxman, APR:

I was promoting Olay Daily Facials. We were trying to come up with a travel program for them to say, “Hey, these are great on the go.”

The concept was, we had our media materials printed to look like old school boarding passes. We got metal school lunchboxes and had stickers put on them—New York City, Twin Towers, Paris, and London. We put a water bottle in there, product samples, and a few other goodies, and we sent them to media on September 10, 2001, thinking that this was kind of a cute, creative outreach.

9/11 happens, and we start getting calls from a dozen of the outlets saying, “You sent us a metal package. You’ve gotta deal with this. You gotta come pick it up because we cannot open it. We don’t know what it is.”

We quickly called our key media. They appreciated it because the worst thing is so many communications people don’t empathize with media. We think of media as media and not as people. As soon as you put yourself in that position, you go, “Oh.” That reshapes what my decision would be and helps give me another perspective.

We then had to figure out: How do we explain this to our client? We had to determine how to tell our client we were canceling the campaign and get them onboard and deal with the expenses we incurred for the agency.

We came up with an amicable financial solution for all of us, recognizing that we had done some work. We would have to make an investment, as our client did, but we built our client’s trust by saying, “We cannot do this. In fact, we probably can never go out with this pitch again. We thought it was a great idea two weeks ago; because of what happened in the world, it’s no longer appropriate, so we need to think of something else.”

You’ve got to listen to your gut when it comes to ethics, and then you need a system to be able to cross-check to make sure that you’re making the right decision. You need a process in place. You need to figure out if you are going to go with duty-based or a utilitarian-based approach.

Expertise, Ethics, and Research

Another area where expertise comes into play is with research. While this also has elements of transparency—the expertise of in-person research issues highlighted by Robin Schell, APR, Fellow PRSA, and Stacey Smith, APR, Fellow PRSA, Senior Counsel and Partners at Jackson, Jackson & Wagner, stands out.

Robin: We would work on controversial issues like landfill expansions. Those are not the most popular thing. Sometimes I would go into the communities, and just do some underground research. Just literally sit at some of the cafes and the popular spots in town, talk to people about how they felt about the landfill expansion that had been proposed. Get their gut reactions without telling them that I was actually representing the landfill. If they asked me, would I tell them? Absolutely. But I didn’t necessarily present myself that way because I wanted to get an unbiased reaction from them.

I could have been a little bit more transparent about that. This was many, many years ago. Today it’s a lot more acceptable to go out there in a very transparent way, and introduce yourself as, “Hey, I’m interested on behalf of XYZ company. They really want to know what you think.”

Stacey elaborates: On the flip side, we were simply being sponges to hear what public opinion, what individuals were thinking on a subject. We weren’t advocating, we weren’t pushing any particular message. We just wanted to hear, and that’s a form of research. Today, research is getting harder and harder because people either don’t want to share anything or they want to share everything.

I’m a little worried about the ethics of where our research is going to go to try and understand our publics in such a way that is truly done in an ethical way. Right now, there are so many polls about this and that out there that you know they’re not being done in a statistical fashion. That’s unethical. For example, my local paper is running a survey, “Call in and tell us how you feel about X” And they get a hundred responses, and they’re putting it out there as fact, that 75 percent said this. It’s the worst poll. We’re going to have to focus on the ethics of how to do good, honest, ethical research going forward.

Stacey: To do good ethical research, go find a good research course. Learn from the professionals how to conduct good research, how to pick a good sample that’s balanced, how to ask questions that are not leading, how to look at data in a way that is truly honest in terms of how you’re interpreting that data. Even if you’re not going to be the one that’s actually doing the research, you will have the skills to be able to look at research that you are buying, and know that it is done in a good, ethical fashion.

Even with qualitative research, don’t start an internal project without making them commit to the fact that the data will be fed back to those who we are asking, so that they get that feedback of what’s been said. You always run into these organizations that say, “Oh we did this, and then they put it in the bottom drawer. We never heard about it again.” We won’t do that. That’s an ethical piece for us, where if they won’t commit to that, we won’t do the project.

Johna Burke, Global Managing Director for AMEC, elaborates and explains how agencies are using data incorrectly and not showing their expertise.

The biggest thing in public relations measurement is putting forward a number as ROI. We have diluted the financial term of ROI so much to twist it onto the P&L that over the years, whether it’s ad value equivalency (AVE), reach, impressions, or some other number, we try to get tied to some single metric that isn’t ROI.

Time and time again, you’re talking about return on relationships, return on those efforts. You can talk about the correlation.

It has evolved because edge computing has created a means for a lot of organizations to build their own data stack so that it’s getting them to a number that is their own net promoter internal scorecard, but it’s using multiple data inputs that they’re able to get to that point. If you’re going to a single source and if you aren’t giving that other costing data and they’re presenting you something as ROI, it should be questioned at every turn.

We need to focus on the objectives that look at impact not output. An agency should not take an objective of increased awareness. They should focus on SMARTER objectives.

SMARTER Objectives

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Realistic

• Time-bound

• Ethical

• Revolutionizing

There’s a whole love affair with the biggest numbers, and as the data mix continues to evolve, those numbers are shifting all over the place. We’ve all heard the story of 11 billion impressions, yet you couldn’t walk outside of your door and find one person who knew what happened. Is that realistic? Is that something that you want to have your name attached to? No.

Make sure that you are taking a measured and strategic approach. The more you ask the Why, you become a better, more trusted counselor.

Improving Ethical Expertise

Melanie Ensign, former Head of Security, Privacy, and Engineering Communications for Uber, explains how expertise changes your focus to stopping fires before they begin, rather than responding to a crisis:

People tend to glorify firefighting in our profession. That unfortunately leads a lot of communications professionals to think that they’re most valuable when there’s a crisis.

The reality is, we are incredibly valuable prior to that moment by helping our organization build muscle memory and resiliency so that they’re better prepared to do the right thing when one of these big moments happens. Quite honestly, there’s a lot that we can do to steer our organizations in a better direction so we can avoid some of these minefields. For me, that has been the most challenging … making sure that I’m identifying some of these decisions that may seem innocuous right now but are just another step in boiling a frog. It is working to make sure that we don’t actually end up in a position where we don’t expect to be, just because we weren’t careful about our choices early on.

One of the reasons why I feel like this is the most challenging and difficult is this is where you get a lot of the internal politics in an organization. You must be willing to stand up every single day for what the right thing is. That is a lot harder for most communications professionals in our organizations compared to when a crisis is happening, and everybody looks at the PR person for an answer. You have to make sure that you’re able to insert your voice and to represent that consciousness of the organization on a daily basis, and with all of the teams that you work with regularly.

Helio Fred Garcia, President of Logos Consulting Group, agrees:

Structures and clear protocols make courage less necessary in ethical dilemmas. In the case of the first job that I had to resign from, the PRSA Code of Ethics is very clear that PR people may not make promises for things over which they have no control, including the specificity of foreseeable press coverage because we don’t make the editorial judgment. I could say, “It’s not me. And, by the way, at the bank, you have a regulatory duty to not speak materially misleading things.” Pointing to structure is in many ways liberating because it isn’t personal preference.

But if you have a legal duty that conflicts with your ethical duty, which do you choose, and how do you determine which to choose? That’s actually not an easy decision. But the clearer you are about the criteria, the more likely you are to make the right choice.

For example, I teach in my engineering ethics course that Apple was ordered by a U.S. federal court to invent software that Apple believed would put millions of people’s safety and security at risk.

Apple had to decide whether to abide by the law, which would put it in violation of the first ethical standard for engineers, which is to protect public safety, or abide by their ethical obligation to protect public safety but then be at risk of the full force of the U.S. government coming down upon them, including severe financial sanction.

When I ask my students, especially students from outside the United States who were not here when this happened five years ago, what do you think Apple chose? The answer I always hear is, “Oh, they chose to pretend to invent the software but not succeed,” or, “Oh, they chose to invent the software and say they had no choice. The courts made them.”

Apple chose to defy the court order. When Tim Cook, the CEO, went out to defend the decision, he said, “We have to stand tall and to stand tall on principle. And the principle is our first duty is to protect our customers. Everything else is secondary to that.” That clarity helps you make the tough choices at the moment you need to make those choices.

Torod Neptune, former Chief Communications Officer at Lenovo, highlights how communication expertise can help move companies from the organization they are today to the one they want to be:

The most significant role and responsibility that I and my peers play is connecting the organization we are today in reality and truth to the organization we aspire to be ultimately. Managing that continuum is fraught with risk, inauthenticity, poor decision-making, and bad business decisions.

The challenge around that ethical continuum is most effectively pushing, poking and prodding organizations to fix the disconnect and to be open, honest, and transparent about that process. Many times, organizations are not even honest about there being a disconnect. We’re more inclined to want to talk about our aspirational view or vision or what we desire to be in our highest and most positive light.

But we have the responsibility of not just speaking truth to power, but also doing the hard work to challenge our organizations to live up to these commitments that we most often are fine making through a very myopic marketing or PR lens. But we need to live in a broad arena.

Relationships are key. The health and import of those relationships are directly proportionate to our ability to successfully have the kinds of conversations that I was alluding to. We must do the work of building, prioritizing, maintaining, caring for and feeding those relationships at a peer level. Perhaps more significantly, we need to do this at the C-Suite level to have the types of leadership and strategic business influencing conversations that drive change.

One important caveat, there’s a difference between speaking truth to power and being able to successfully influence an organization’s decision-making to drive business outcomes.

 

¹ J. Lukaszewski. 2008. Why Should the Boss Listen to You? The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, Jossey-Bass.

² H.D. Thoreau. n.d. Walden.