CHAPTER 6

Loyalty

Loyalty, like independence, presents some of the toughest ethical challenges for public relations professionals. The old adage: “Duty is heavier than a mountain, death is lighter than a feather” drives home throughout the ages the conflicts people faced with divided loyalties. Aside from greed, loyalty may be one of the biggest drivers of unethical behavior, for often people think they are doing the right thing, standing by a person, manager, or organization, even though the action is unethical.

The PRSA Code of Ethics states:

Todd Van Hoosear, Chief Engagement Officer for Business Breakthrough Network, gets to the crux of the matter when he asks “What do ethical PR professionals do when they are faced with conflicting loyalties?”

For me, the toughest challenge is the big question of, to whom do you owe your allegiance? Is it your client? Is it to your agency? Is it to the media that you have to pitch? Is it to society? Who’s your real boss?

For me, it has to be the media. And specifically, it has to be my reputation with the media. There were a few times when I pitched something that I didn’t believe in, and it showed. It always shows. The media weren’t happy. The client wasn’t happy. We should have never taken the business, but we were desperate, and we did.

The great thing about ethics is it gives you a platform for making decisions that are going to be both beneficial to yourself and beneficial to society. I guess the way that I benefit myself is by not pissing off the media.

Loyalty Ethics in Action

Paula Pedene, APR, Fellow PRSA, is a PR counselor, a whistleblower, and was PRSA’s PR Person of the Year in 2015. She is one of the most admirable PR people I have met, and her story of loyalty is one of the most profound of the past few decades. She goes into it in detail in her book A Sacred Duty,¹ but she shares a high-level overview of her story here:

I have the unfortunate, and sometimes fortunate, dubious distinction of being a whistleblower. I was backed up against a wall and had a need to share the truth, no matter how hard it was for people to accept.

We had a situation at the Phoenix Veterans Association where I was a public affairs officer for 20 years. We had some leadership changes, and we went from the “servant leader” to “what’s in it for me only” leadership. Then we went from that to unethical leaders, to actually gaming the system.

I worked with another physician, Dr. Sam Foote, to expose a leader that was hurting our facility. Fortunately, we were able to share that internally with the Office of the Inspector General, and with our senior leaders above him, because they had heard some of the same rumblings and knew that something was up in Phoenix. We were able to remove him and the associate director quietly. They were left with dignity, we were left with dignity, and we went about the business of rebuilding.

Little did we know that the new leadership coming in would be worse. Except this time, those leaders knew that Dr. Foote and I had gotten rid of the former director. We had targets on our back. They figured out ways to eventually remove me from my long-standing public affairs job for a minor infraction.

I was banished to the basement for reporting violations from senior leadership. They took me out of my job, they took away my work phone, they took away my BlackBerry, they took away my VA e-mail that I had had since 1991.

It was during this time that we found out about the worst part, which had yet to be revealed, which was the patient waits and delays, and the gaming of the system. Had I not been banished to the library, I wouldn’t have heard about the additional waits and delays. I wouldn’t have been able to see how they were setting up patient appointments and right before they’d hit the “submit” button to put it into the electronic system, they would hit “print.” They would print the piece of paper, and then they would exit out of the computer system, and the trace of the appointment would disappear.

They had an illegal paper list supplementing the electronic wait list. The paper list kept growing. Instead of having all of the clinics working on getting those patients in, they were relegated to giving the paper to one person who was trying to make hundreds of phone calls every single day and was nearly losing her mind in the process.

When we found out what they were truly doing, that’s when Dr. Foote and I just said, “We can’t have it.” We did what we did before, which was reporting it internally, thinking the leadership would listen. But this time, our efforts fell on deaf ears.

We worked to exposing it for a year before it finally got to the right people, and we were able to highlight what was truly happening.

Some practical advice for professionals that may encounter a similar situation.

• If you do decide to be a whistleblower, be prepared for it to take a long time, and be prepared for depression.

• You can mail something to the House Veterans Affairs Committee on Oversights and Investigations, and it gets to them. You’re not transmitting from work e-mail, or personal e-mail, so you aren’t violating policy.

• If you have evidence on your work computers, be sure to print it out and send it home. You want to have a backup copy and log of activities somewhere, so that if the going gets tough, you can say, “Here’s what I did, here’s when I did it, and here’s the evidence file.” Thank God I had done that, because when they took away my e-mail, they took away my phone, they took away my office, I had no access to anything in there. Nothing. I had paper copies that I had printed and took home, that were legal for me to provide as an evidence file in reporting it to members of Congress, and to the Office of the Medical Inspector, and the Office of the Inspector General.

Karen Swim, APR, President and CEO of Words for Hire, shares an example when she was put in that difficult situation of choosing between loyalty and duty to a friend:

Prior to my PR career, I worked in the health care industry. I managed a sales team, and one of my top salespeople falsified paperwork that inflated his sales numbers. It went on for quite a bit of time undetected. When it came out, it was not only an ethical breach, but it was a breach of his employment contract, and I had to terminate his employment.

It was particularly difficult because I was a young manager who was still learning how to lead, and the person was a friend. I knew his spouse and his children. It was a stab to the heart that someone I considered to be a friend had not only committed this unethical breach, but it put me in a position where upper management was digging deep to ensure that I didn’t know about it and ignored it.

I have compassion for people making bad decisions. As I matured and looked back on it, I can certainly understand that perhaps there were financial pressures that I didn’t know about. However, I cemented in that moment that no matter what’s going on and no matter the stress or the anxiety that you are feeling, you always have to do the right thing. The unethical behavior went undetected for a period of time, and he gained from that, but it’s never okay. You are always going to win by making the right choice. Even if it costs you in the short term, it’s far better to pay that cost than to say, “Well, no one’s looking, I can get away with it,” because the longer-term cost is far greater.

Doing the right thing is not always popular. It may cost you even when you’re not in the wrong. When you’re standing for ethical behaviors, not everyone will stand with you.

You need to use ethical issues as teachable moments. It was a painful time because we were a close-knit team. So, I brought them together and said as much as I could say, because at the end of the day, here was somebody who made a really bad choice, and I like to separate that out, because I don’t think that he was a bad person. He made a bad choice.

I did not focus on the bad behavior, but on the situation, and how we need it to recommit to doing things the right way. I focused on creating an open environment so that if people were struggling, they had a safe forum to discuss those struggles rather than making these bad decisions.

It was an opportunity for me to reinforce the standards, for me to talk about the right and wrong things to do while also providing an avenue for people to share if they felt like they were under undue pressure, to let me be the one that removed those roadblocks, and to support them through it rather than making these difficult decisions.

Michelle Egan, APR, Fellow PRSA, Chief Communications Officer of the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, faced an ethical dilemma when a friend asked for work after they left the company:

I was working for a nonprofit that was kind of a quasi-governmental organization, and the executive of that organization started to get a little sideways with the board.

We had an event where the mayor was upstaged a little by this executive and didn’t appreciate that too much. Part of it was on me, because in my eagerness to get the mayor there (I was 30 years old at the time and pretty new at this), I didn’t think he needed as much time at the event as he probably did. He ended up being tight on his schedule, and maybe even missing the opportunity to speak.

A couple of days later, the executive decided to leave the organization, and he blamed me. He told me, “If you hadn’t done this thing that made this mistake that led the Mayor to lose faith, then I wouldn’t have been encouraged to move on.”

I knew that wasn’t entirely true.

That was a little bit of an irritation for me. And it was a good thing, because a few days later when he was about to pack up to things and go, I asked, “What are your plans? What are you going to do?”

He said, “I’m going to do some consulting and I’m going to do it in this area of the organization that we were responsible for.” He said, “if you want, you could work a little bit with me and help me with developing the materials that I’m going to use in this organization.” I said, “Oh, that’s interesting.” He said, “because you know, we’ve developed quite a lot of material here at this nonprofit, and it’s aligned with what I want to do—we could just use some of that.”

And I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute!” I had put a lot into those materials, making them creative, attractive, and doing the research. I knew they were valuable, but I also knew that they didn’t belong to me, and they certainly didn’t belong to him.

I said, “That is not going to happen. Thanks for the offer, but these materials belong to this organization.” And so, we parted ways.

You see that quite a bit, especially at agencies when people leave, and they ask for a media list or document they created. You need to remind them that no, it doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the client. You can use the knowledge or concepts you know, but not the materials.

Sam Villegas, APR, Raftelis, discusses duty and shares an example when she was asked to unethically stonewall public health issue:

There was a large national public health news story. A reporter contacted me from my local area and wanted the local angle from my client. The company was doing great things about the issue. They had a good story to tell. When the reporter called, I was pretty excited to be able to tell our angle and tell our story, that this is scary, and this is bad news, but we’re doing a lot of great things about it.

When I went to corporate to share what I had planned to talk to the reporter about, they shut me down. They said, we’re not going to reveal all that information. They were fearful of the media. They were fearful of what might get asked, which I am not. I welcome questions because it builds understanding, helps us get better, and builds public understanding. That’s important. That’s part of the job. But this corporate communications department felt differently.

They nixed my approach. The reporter was asking for some very specific numbers. So, when I wrote this very blahzy line back to the reporter, it took her about 30 seconds to respond back and say, “Are you sure you want this to be your response?” The gauntlet was thrown. If she wasn’t looking for a story, now she had one. Needless to say, this saga went on for a few days over a holiday weekend.

When the reporter came back and said, are you sure you want this to be your response, I reached out to a couple of colleagues on e-mail because I had a stomachache, and I said, listen, here’s the situation. My gut is telling me I’ve got to remove myself, because I feel my company is asking me to stonewall, and it doesn’t feel right. It’s not in the interest of the public. It’s not in the interest of the company. God love my network, because they came back and they said, yeah, your instincts are right.

I went back to corporate, and I said, listen, I’m removing myself from this conversation. I could do that because I wasn’t an employee, I was a consultant. I thought, well, they could fire me, but for my own reputation with this reporter, I’m not going to go through with this sham. Corporate said fine, have her reach out to us. She did, and they stonewalled her. About a week into it, they finally gave her the information that she wanted, but it was a little too little too late.

The tragedy is the company had a good story to tell. They were just afraid to tell it.

Mark Mohammadpour, founder of Chasing the Sun Health Coaching, also discusses what do you do when your work does not align with your personal values:

One of the proudest pieces of business I had the opportunity to work on was the U.S. Army. In 2009, the United States was in multiple wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while domestically we were in a recession. There was a definite need to bring more soldiers into the Army to serve. This was before Twitter was big, this was before Facebook for brands, there was no Instagram. But there were more prospects coming online to learn about what Army life was like. Unfortunately, at that time, the Army wasn’t in those conversations, and there was a need to build out its digital assets and conversation opportunities for prospective soldiers to learn about what the Army was like. A lot of that was already in motion at Weber Shandwick, but I was brought in and added to a growing team to help tell the story of the Army soldier.

When I was asked to join the team, there was this question in the back of my head, as far as, “Okay, we’re in a war, is the war the right thing that we’re doing right now?” I had to weigh that with what was really the ask, to tell the story of the Army soldier. The Army was very supportive and understanding that it had to be very transparent. They needed soldiers to blog and to share stories and be very transparent about what life is like in the Army, the good or the bad. As long as it didn’t violate operational security, the Army supported these soldiers writing blogs and having videos taken of them that were run by our team.

This made me feel a lot better about joining this account, because there definitely was in the back of my head, “My God, I don’t necessarily believe that we should be in a war right now.” But to help support the soldier and their story and to give people who are interested in joining the Army as much information as possible so that they could make an informed decision was fine.

If people find themselves in similar situations, they need to realize that you can say no. That is a scary thought to have. We’re people pleasers, we’re in the service industry. We’re used to solving problems. It’s empowering, especially in today’s era to be able to say, “This does not align with what I’m doing.” But at the same time, you need to be prepared to say why.

Chris Penn, Cofounder and Chief Data Scientist for Trust Insights, shares what he did to help him sleep at night when he realized his personal ethics conflicted with his company’s ethics.

I worked at a company that fundamentally created and resold student loans. Our job was to put people in debt.

Banks and lending companies paid thousands of dollars per loan application, particularly for federal student loans, because they were guaranteed by the government. They were super low-risk financial contracts that they could then blend into higher-risk contracts and create these things that eventually led up to the 2008 recession.

The personal challenge was we were fundamentally making the world a worse place. Yes, people are getting access to education, but at an extremely high cost. They may not be able to pay it back. So, the challenge was, how do we balance the business need with the human need?

I went the route of creating content for free. I created The Financial Aid Podcast in 2005. I did 934 episodes of that, 15 minutes a day, every weekday, for five years.

I created seven editions of a scholarship search eBook, which is still mostly relevant today. My ethical balance was I have given you five years of daily information, and seven books on how you can go to college for free. It requires a lot of work to apply for scholarships. Treat it like a full-time job.

If you don’t want to do that work, then here’s a loan application. Now, you understand the tradeoff. You can put in the hard work now and not have to pay back the money, or you can take the easy path and then end up having to pay the money. But at least, ethically, I gave people the choice.

Dr. Felicia Blow, APR, Associate Vice President for Development and Director of Campaigns at Hampton University in Virginia, shared how her loyalty was tested when her employer lied to her:

When I was a public affairs specialist, many years ago, I was on camera weekly because we were a high-profile organization, and what we did was of interest both to the media and the citizenry.

There were at least two separate examples where senior leadership misinformed me about a matter. I went on camera, reported one thing, only to have to do a mea culpa the next week when it was discovered that what I indicated was not true.

The last time it happened, it was damaging to my personal reputation. So much so that I debated leaving. I called the board chairman and said, “I refuse to do this anymore. I am not going on camera to talk about X.” I got personal assurances from the executive director that I would never be put in those circumstances again. I never trusted certain folks in certain departments, ever again, and I would qualify every answer, stating, “As you can see in our annual report, it is noted X, Y, and Z. Should this change, I will follow up.”

But with some of the reporters, my credibility never was restored.

Loyalty, Racism, and Sexism

While there has been significant progress in the industry on issues of racism and sexism over the past few years, there is still a long way to go. Cedric F. Brown, APR, an independent consultant, discusses your duty when you see racist behavior at work.

I had to confront racism at work. I noticed that some Black colleagues of mine were sharing a lot of the same experiences that they were having with particular staff members and particular members of senior leadership. It was to the point where some of my colleagues would be in tears because they were berated over their work, among other pretty blatant actions that were taken against them. These actions and the way they were treated drove some of my colleagues away from the organization.

It felt like at times, our senior leaders just sat on their hands and did nothing about the problem for people of color in the organization. When I had the opportunity, I spoke up. I couldn’t bottle in the frustration that I had felt, especially when one colleague of mine was a mid-level professional, who had spent several years in the organization, moved on based on the way she was treated. She deserved better. That’s all I want for Black and Brown professionals, diverse professionals, regardless of your race, your age, your orientation, your religious beliefs. Everybody should be treated fairly.

I was at this particular organization long enough where I felt comfortable that I was providing enough value in my actual work to speak up because I could risk being targeted for retaliation. I strongly believed the quality of my work would make it tough to get rid of me. What I would advise others, unfortunately, is to be able to play corporate games a little bit. Demonstrate that you bring so much value to the organization that you make it hard for people to part ways with you.

With the issues of racism in the workplace, many people carry out microaggressions. Things that on the surface, come off as compliments, but are not. They might be unintentional; they usually are unintentional. If you as a white man, comment on me being articulate, that’s microaggression because it’s steeped in this idea that I probably wouldn’t speak properly because of the way I look. There are other microaggressions Black women will often face and hear such as, “I like how you wear your hair a certain way, usually straight and ‘neat.’” That’s based on your Eurocentric standards, and honestly, our standards of professionalism in the workplace and in corporate America are defined by old white men. We have to reimagine what we consider professional.

When you’re looking to talk about racism and address issues of race in the workplace, the advice that I give is to never call out specific people. As you can see, I’m doing my best to not disclose the names and their identities. You have to be able to pinpoint that it’s not one specific person (if it’s not one specific person) but paint it as it being a trend.

Angela Sinickas, CEO of Sinickas Communications, gives another perspective on what to do ethically when you realize you work at a company rife with sexism and racism:

I didn’t realize that it was an ethical challenge right at the beginning, but it became more of a challenge for me to get myself up in the mornings and go to work. I had been working at a consulting firm for about six years, and I was on track to be invited to become a partner. But I was becoming more and more uncomfortable working there for a number of reasons—mostly due to racism and sexism.

I remember in the hallway outside of our communication consulting area, there was a very senior partner in our office talking to another very senior partner who was my boss, and it was Christmas time. We had a Toys for Tots drive going on. We all brought in unwrapped presents to put under the tree, and these guys were talking about the black Ken doll that was under the tree and making totally inappropriate comments about black men. As heinous as that was, they were also having this conversation right in front of the office of one of my colleagues who was not Black, but her husband is Black. They saw no problem with having these kinds of conversations and laughing in public. You can’t change how a person is deluded and sees the world, but you should be able to control what they expose other people to in the workplace.

Sexism was very similar. Very few women were invited to become partner and primarily only if they didn’t have children. There were a whole series of things going on, and so I had begun raising my voice to say this isn’t right.

I didn’t call that partner out. I certainly was not in a position to do that, but talking with my own boss, talking with HR, and the result of that was they still wanted me to stay on the partner track, but they put me through counseling because they thought the problem wasn’t the firm or the partners, they saw the problem as me. The counseling they put me was to teach me how to do only what was my job to do and not to worry about the things that were not mine to do.

That solidified it for me. They thought that they weren’t acting inappropriately. They thought I was acting inappropriately by calling them on it. That’s when I decided I needed to leave. I gave my announcement, and the CEO of the company flew in from headquarters to try to talk me out because I was doing a good job for them. I was bringing in revenue. I explained to him that I couldn’t stay for all these reasons. He said, “Yes, but we can change.” I said, “You might be able to, but it’s going to be a long, long time.”

The problem with being a partner in the organization was it went beyond just being an employee. These people also spend time outside of the office together. They’d buy their vacation homes in the same places. I could not see myself living in that world with those people even beyond work. It was a simple decision when I finally came to it. The problem was, I walked away from a lot of money because those people not only made a lot of money, but they eventually sold their firm and they all cleaned up huge. Do I have any regrets? Yeah, I wish I had the money. But do I have any regrets about my decision? Absolutely not.

My advice for others is you’ve got to decide what is the end result that you’re looking for. Because if you do want to stay there, then you have to go to extraordinary lengths to try to change the place. If I’d had more confidence in myself (I was only in my early 30s at that point, probably didn’t get that kind confidence until I was 40), I probably would have gone into the office of those different people one on one and just said something more like, “I don’t know if you realize this, but I have a problem. My problem is when I hear these things being said, I feel this way.”

I can’t change the way you feel about things, but please don’t do that in the workforce around me. That’s just a human-to-human conversation. It’s not a junior person to a senior person. It’s just saying this makes me very uncomfortable. And I’d rather, if you had these conversations, you didn’t do it in my presence. Speak out, but say it one on one in a private setting and explain why it’s a problem for you personally rather than just pointing fingers at them—because then they don’t listen.

Too often we keep quiet for too long, and that makes it harder to speak up. Mark Cautela, Head of Communications for Harvard Business School, shares his opinion on why you need to act quickly and decisively on even small ethics concerns:

I was a junior person in a room, and a more senior person started to use off-color language that today, with both the #MeToo movement and the Black Lives Matter movement, would be cause for dismissal. But at the time, it was sort of an old boys’ club network type of thing where that was more accepted. I felt uncomfortable at the time. Things were said in the presence of women and minorities that I didn’t feel right about.

I didn’t stand up and say anything at the time. And that one eats at me. Should I have said something? Should I have done something there? Should I report that person?

In some cases, the comments were made when it was just me and this person. By not doing something very early in the relationship, it set the standard that they thought it was okay for them to talk and behave like that around me. It created a challenge for me with working with this person.

I had to ask myself what are you going to stand up for? What are you going to believe? If that person were to say that in front of your friend that was a minority or a woman, what would you do in that case? Would you let them do that right in front of your friend? And if you wouldn’t want them to do it then, why is it okay for them to do it when they’re not around? Is this the kind of person you want to work for, or the kind of company you want to work for that allows that to happen?

I thought of that again as these things were unfolding over the last couple of years. I thought of myself in that situation. Yes, it was a different time back then, but I still knew better. I was always wondering why I didn’t say something sooner or why I didn’t make a change. In the end, that person was called out for that very thing, and eventually let go, but it wasn’t until several years after I worked with them.

It is something I think about a lot, and it never left me feeling well about the way I handled it. One thing I would’ve done differently, I would have established early on with that relationship that kind of talk wasn’t going to be okay with me, and let that person know that I would be willing to go to HR if it didn’t change. Once that precedent is set, you enter this dark spiral where it gets worse and worse.

This is the case with many ethical challenges that people face. No one ever starts out by saying, “I’m going to defraud the company of millions” or, “I’m going to create a toxic culture.” It starts with little things. It’s one number is fudged or it’s one comment made, and it goes unchecked, and so the person feels emboldened to make another comment, or they feel okay to maybe fudge more numbers, or maybe add a penny here or a dollar there, or a plus versus a minus, and it all adds up eventually.

Keeping quiet can create and enable a toxic culture. It’s not necessarily one person. It’s usually a culture. Culture is created by the way we handle our business on a day-to-day basis. If we are unethical or if we let things slide that we know we should correct, those add up, and the people that work in that company, that don’t stand for those things, they notice. Today, with the way social media has emboldened people to have a voice and to speak up, your company, your institution, your culture is much more likely to be called out for something like that.

It’s up to you as a leader to make those hard calls and take the decisive action to stop that as soon as you hear it. It is easier said than done, but luckily, I’ve had the opportunity in my career to also work for some great people that I admire a lot who were strong leaders, who had that voice, and would do what they thought was right. If you can surround yourself with those people and work for those companies, you’re going to find yourself feeling a lot better about yourself personally, and not just your career.

Loyalty Ethics Advice

Karen Swim, APR, President and CEO of Words for Hire, believes ethics trump any agenda:

So often, the ethical issues that are brought to the public’s attention send a message that an agenda is more important than ethics. Ethics decisions are made through the lens of the results. You have companies and the government that act in unethical ways, but they get a pass if the results are there. They only don’t get a pass when the results fall apart.

As PR people, we are the guardian of ethics. We have a duty to ensure that it is enforced. We have a duty to protect the clients, the organizations that we work with, as well as the publics that we serve. But when we are working in an environment where it’s seen that ethics doesn’t matter, if you’re getting the results over here, then we’ll just sweep this under the rug, that is dangerous.

We have to have a louder voice. We have to educate, we have to advocate, we have to guide. In my opinion, having an ethical framework is not just a nice thing to have, it drives profitability.

Trust is critical to a company’s survival. If the public doesn’t trust you, then they’re not going to buy from you. When there’s trust internally, you have employees who are advocates for your organization, you have more cooperation, you have higher productivity, that results in happier external customers, and it means that they’re going to make the right decisions.

Our role is to draw the lines for corporations and to be the voices that are louder than people saying, “Ethics is not so important.” We have to take a harder stance and speak up. Professionals must speak in a language that is meaningful to an organization. If you just talk about ethics, it could fall on deaf ears, but when you translate it into language that they understand, then you can definitely move the needle and have influence.

Sometimes, your boss asks you to burn bridges as Sherry Feldberg, Principal, Leadership Journey, recounts:

I was leading a response to a crisis communication situation where a client had a pretty unfavorable story come out. I fundamentally disagreed with the strategy my manager wanted to push forward. It was tied to letting the reporter know how angry and disappointed we were on the way the story came out.

There were no inaccuracies in the story, there was no false information to ask for a correction. It was really just to express that sentiment. It felt very wrong and not in line with my values. I’m all about building relationships with people.

It bothered me too that in trying to explain some of my rationale and have a conversation about it, there was no desire from my manager to understand a different point of view. Then to make it even worse, I had a colleague who was privy to the situation, essentially say, “Well, why don’t you just say you’ll do it and then don’t do it.”

I was like, “What? I can’t do that.” That’s just so dishonest and not the way that I want to carry myself professionally. I wouldn’t feel okay about that and hearing that from a colleague was like pouring salt on the wound.

If others find themselves in a similar conversation, my best advice is we can make any point we want to make. It’s the words we use and the way we position things. Do not be highly emotional about it. Stay calm and make it clear that you’d like to have a conversation. Start by asking to have more of an open dialogue so that you can better understand their point of view. Then ask for the opportunity to express your thoughts as they stand now and just see if we can see each other’s points of view and see if perhaps that changes anything in the situation.

Approach it calmly. Don’t say “I can’t believe you’d asked me to do this.” Don’t be accusatory or use a lot of the “you, you, you.” It’s when people either are too afraid to say something, so they don’t say anything, they feel like they have no choice, or they just use a lot of emotion, is when it goes south quickly.

Dr. Joe Trahan, APR, Fellow PRSA, a 30+-year PR pro, and retired Lt. Col in the Army, shares advice on where your loyalty lays with your boss:

I was two doors from the boss, and one of the things I said when I interviewed with him, was I wanted direct access to him. He wasn’t too happy with it initially. I told him, sir, I’m going to tell you when it’s bad and when you’re ugly. When I tell you that, I’m going to also offer you solutions.

In all my career, I’ve never purposely lied in a news conference. I’ve been truthful and said I don’t know something. We have a responsibility to advise our clients, our bosses, and say, this is what’s happening, and that’s what I would do.

The Army taught me, problem, discussion, recommendation. I would identify the problem, I would come in and discuss, and then I offer solutions.

You have to be the voice. You have to speak up, I’ve been shut down numerous times. I’ve been told to shut up. I remember generals chewing me out—Trahan, all you do is bring me grief. I said, yes sir, but I’ll bring you solutions.

I remember a general telling me, you always want me to do the right thing. Yes sir. We’ll never go wrong. Even if we make a mistake doing the right thing. Our job is to be vigilant. Our job is to represent our organization. However, if our organization is doing things that are wrong or unethical, we need to take it first internally.

I’ve had some other friends when I went through this years ago say, well, why don’t you take that to the media? I felt a responsibility to my organization first. I was Don Quixote, charging windmills. You go in there and you say, this is the problem I see, this is the discussion, here’s the three courses of possible action, and I recommend this course of action. That’s where we earn our keep. That’s where we make sure we’re sitting next to the boss like the lawyer is.

In all the interviews I have done on ethics, this advice from Michael Smart, a leading media relations trainer and coach, is the one I come back to most often and tell others:

This advice was given to me by Dr. Laurie Wilson, one of my PR professors at Brigham Young University. As we were getting closer to graduation, we were doing a real raw Q&A with her, and one of us asked “What do you do if you’re in a position and your employer asks you to do something inconsistent with your values?” She said, “Start right now saving your freedom fund.” She recommended we save three months’ salary so that when you’re put in that position, there may be other reasons you might consider how to comply with what your boss wanted you to do, but if it was a violation of your ethics, you wouldn’t cave because you needed to eat or pay the rent.

I took that to heart. I saved that freedom fund. It was even more relevant to me, because my wife and I had our first child when we were 25, and we always saved so that we didn’t have to make that kind of decision. When I started my business, I made sure I had enough saved so I wouldn’t have to take or keep a client that would put me in a difficult situation.

 

¹ P. Pedene. 2021. A Sacred Duty, Skyrocket Press.