CHAPTER 13

Enhancing the Profession

When I first started in public relations, my mentor Dave Close gave me some great advice:

Every interaction you have with the media or a client, your reputation either goes up or down. The agency’s reputation goes up or down. The client’s reputation goes up or down. Make sure what you are doing makes it go up.

The one thing he didn’t say is that the industry as a whole has its reputation impacted as well. Ethical professionals always work to raise the reputation of the profession.

PRSA addresses this in its Code of Ethics when it discusses “Enhancing the Profession.” The Code states:

I can sum it up even more simply by looking at it in a slightly different way, but it goes to an old Boy Scout maxim—leave the place better than when you found it.

Enhancing the Profession—DEI

One of the biggest areas where we are failing to enhance the profession is our failure with diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Neil Foote, CEO of Foote Communications and President of the National Black Public Relations Society, reminds people that celebrating success is not enough to drive diversity:

Yes, we want to celebrate the wonderful successes of those diverse individuals who are getting opportunities. But we’ve got a lot of work to do. We can’t sit back and think that everything is good. The operative phrase that I’ve been using is that DEI equals ROI.

Mike Paul, President of Reputation Doctor, pulls no punches in his frank insight into this issue when I asked him about companies woke-washing, DEI, and the need to quantify the efforts.

It’s bigger than that. It is not just putting numbers behind it; you have to actually hire people. We don’t need another panel.

Here’s what I tell people, “I’ve been studying this for almost 30 years. I’m not a diversity, equality, and inclusion expert, I just happen to be black. I solve crises. This pops up, I look into it, I find the best practices approach to fixing it. This isn’t rocket science. When McKinsey and Deloitte¹ and others more than six years ago came up with studies that said, “When you start hiring people from intern to board member and every level in between to match the demographics of which you reside, operate, and serve, on average, you make one-third more money.”

Think about how profound that is.

We’ve known this evidence for over six years. I sent it to every CEO you could think of and their boards. I said, “This is the playbook. Here it is. Here’s a few corporations that have done it well, that have won a best approaches award. Utilize their example along with this data and this study.”

If a CEO on average finds out once a year that something can make them one-third more money on average … and you don’t do it….

This is what I’ve said to CEOs of major corporations and their boards. “Guys, I got to flip it for you to wake you up. What that means is if you now don’t do this, the only reason why you wouldn’t is because you’re either too prejudiced or too racist to do it. Why would you not want to make one-third more money? Why would that not be a good analyst question if you’re a publicly traded corporation? Why would that not be a good journalist question? Why would that not be something that a shareholder raises their hand?”

Jessie Jackson buys stocks just to be able to do this and ask that question. Al Sharpton buys stock at his organization just to do that. The NAACP has learned how to do it. The National Urban League has learned how to do it.

Someone just a half hour ago said, “Mike, you keep talking about at least dozens of senior executives in each organization that need to be hired. Not sprinkles, not one or two. One or two’s been going for two generations or more.” I said, “That’s true.”

They ask, “Where do we find them?” I said, “It’s an insult to even be asked that question, and you don’t even know that. It’s an insult to also say that when you hear the three letters or the term diversity, equality, and inclusion and instantly respond to talk about interns.”

I’ve been in meetings on panels, and I said, “Excuse me, nobody mentioned interns. How did we get to interns? Somebody mentioned three words, diversity equality and inclusion, why are you talking about a college scholarship. Why are you talking about an intern? Why are you talking about entry? Do you know how demeaning that is?”

There were several white women on the panel, so I said, “Let me break it down for you, this is the equivalent. You came in and wanted to talk about senior executive women and equity in pay and power and somebody just said, “Oh, I’m going to give a $1,000 scholarship to the Girls Scouts of Westchester County, New York.” You’re supposed to go, “What? What are you talking about? Who’s talking about Girls Scouts?” It’s demeaning. This is 2020. Wake up people, you can’t do that.”

We have people who have even married outside their race in senior executive positions, have children with someone else who is outside their race, children that don’t look like them, and they still have conversations with me as though it’s only a white world. I wake them up by saying, “You do realize your daughter’s Asian, right?”

“Oh, Mike, where did that come from?”

Guess what? It’s called the one-drop rule in America. You want me to shake you? Let me shake you. Let me wake you up so you don’t sleep tonight. Your daughter’s going to be called a chink soon. It’s like, “Holy, why would you say that?” I said, “Because I’m trying to wake you up. No matter what wealth you give her, you can’t stop her from having that experience. I can’t stop my son who’s as light-skinned as my wife from being called the N-word or being told his hair is different, and not in a kind way. I can go on and on. You need to educate yourself about these things. But it’s not my job to constantly educate you.”

You know what my job is? Let me give you this example of a CEO who is white, who stepped off of his board, and asked for them to replace him with an executive of color, in particular a Black male, which is the biggest area of crisis regarding DEI in any organization, at any level. It’s the least opportunity and the least jobs filled. “Mike, my term’s not up though, why would I want to do that?” “But you told me you wanted to help. You said, ‘Wow, this DEI is something I’m getting to understand now. I want to do more. How can I help?’ I’m asking you to help.

“You’re coming up for your next board meeting, right?” “Yeah.” “You should work in there and tell them you don’t want to be in the board anymore.” “But I like being in the board.” Oh, I know you like being on the board. And I know of the 35 people on your board, 25 of them are white males. But you said you wanted to do something. The best way that you can help is to step down from the board officially and send a letter and have a conversation in that board meeting that says, “I want to help find my replacement, and I want it to be an executive of color.” You see, because I know when 25 out of 35 on a board like this are white, certainly does not demonstrate the demographics of which we reside, operate, and serve.”

When I use New York City as an example, people lose their mind. New York City is the capital of advertising, PR, finance, and insurance. In 2010, the demographics in New York City was 68 percent people of color. That was over 10 years ago. It’s almost three quarters people of color now. They go, “Mike, oh my God, what does that mean?” “That means when you got 2 percent executives of color, you’re at a you-should-be-sued level.”

They respond “Well, Mike, you’re not saying that we should have three quarters of our board and our senior executives of color?” “It’s exactly what I’m saying. You’re supposed to match the demographics. That is the best practices approach to businesses, you’re supposed to match the demographics of which you serve and operate and are headquartered. It’s exactly what I was saying, yes.”

“Well, we’re never had a discussion about that.” I say, “I know. That’s why you’re in crisis. By the way, there is more of an educated population in New York City than most places in the world. There are some of the best universities. So, when you say you can’t find them, they’re here.”

When someone was talking to me about a senior public affairs position within a global agency 10 years ago, and I said, “You do realize that the president of the United States is Black.”

How many communication professionals are in that administration … you’re a headhunter, this is your job. When there are white guys in those positions in the White House, you make them vice chairman of your firm. You pay them a $500,000 salary plus bonuses and other structures to pick you. How many firms have hired Obama communication executives who had eight years or four years’ experience?

I said that had to more than 200 hiring executives. You would think that they would have said, “Wow, what an amazing idea. I can go make money. Let me go after those people.”

I said, “And here’s what makes it even easier, they worked for the public sector. You don’t have to buy a list; you can look it up. It’s free. If they look Black, you might not be able to guess where they’re from, but they’re probably a person of color, right? This isn’t rocket science.” Nobody that I know who was told that did anything about it.

But the attitude is like, “You should have gotten to know me. I’m a CEO of a top five firm.” I’m like, “What are you talking about? These guys are Harvard educated, Columbia educated, Yale educated, speak four or five languages, have the opportunity to start their own lobbying firms. You don’t get it. You got to compete for them. But your mind can’t fathom that because you have no experience in doing so. You see us as other; you see as less than. You see us as incomplete. And now worse, you now seek to interview us to check a box and don’t give us jobs. We’re not sitting around waiting for you.”

Here’s the irony, many of those people are making more money than the CEOs of these firms. If you tell those CEOs that, they think you’re lying. They think you’re making it up. They think you’re exaggerating. Until these leaders can see us as equals or peers or something, they can’t fathom, better…. Oh, God-forbid you say that word, better. We’ve done it in athletics. We’ve done it in entertainment. We’ve done it in many other sectors. We’ve become the president of the United States. Why on earth would you not think that some of us are better? Why could you not fathom that? Because your ego can’t take it.

So, when I talk to friends who are saying, “Mike, what do you see coming? Biden’s about to do some amazing things. He’s already doing it in his administration.” I said, “I warned you guys for years this was coming. It started with Obama. Now you’re going to have a federal government with a vice president who’s an attorney, who’s going to be whispering in the president’s ear every day, because every meeting is going to have dozens of people of color in it. White people are going to feel uncomfortable.”

They’re supposed to feel uncomfortable.

Troy Brown, President One50one, agrees with Mike Paul regarding the myth of no diverse candidates:

I talk to people and have these conversations, and they tell me, “Well, we just can’t find qualified candidates.”

Really? Have you heard of the tool called LinkedIn? Do you know about HBCUs? Do you know about UNCF? Have you heard of the 100 Black Men? Have you heard of NSBE for Black engineers?

There are just so many organizations with qualified people of color and not just for Black people. I’m talking about Hispanic organizations. I’m talking about Asian organizations.

If you want to really find them, there are a multitude, a plethora, a cadre of people out there for you to find. My grandfather used to say this: “Troy, people aren’t stupid. They’re lazy.”

The people are out there, but business just don’t want to find them. There are no excuses anymore. There is this thing called Google or Bing. If you want to find them, they’re out there.

Ana Toro, APR, Fellow PRSA, CDC, also has insight into how we can advance the profession through diversity and inclusion:

We have to go to the root of the problem and go to schools, high schools, and do PR for PR. If students don’t know what PR is and how cool it is, they won’t join. If school counselors don’t know what this function is, how this profession benefits society and the many roles a PR practitioner can have, we won’t have the number we want of diverse students entering to universities to study this career.

With many Latino students, it’s the expectation of your parents that you will be either an architect, doctor, lawyer, or engineer. If you tell them you are going to do PR, they’re like, “What is that, and why?” There’s a cultural aspect of it, but also, it’s just the lack of knowledge of the many opportunities.

Mickey Nall, APR, Fellow PRSA, shares how he approached fairness and inclusion at Ogilvy Atlanta:

I was running the Atlanta office, and as time went by, the staff became larger and larger. I had gotten out of the process of determining who could interview to hire. I had delegated that to a mid-level manager to work with HR. We were always very slow to hire because we wanted to be very careful to make sure we were matching skillsets with the need, and with the potential client.

Suddenly I noticed, everyone I was interviewing looked just like this mid-level manager. Everyone was a Caucasian female, with blonde hair, size two. We were suddenly becoming the Step-ford wives of PR agencies. I’m going, what the hell is going on here? I kept looking at it, well maybe this is what we’re getting, I mean this mid-level manager is a phenomenal employee and revered by her clients. So, there was no issue with her performance.

The next time internships came up, I called her in, and I said, I just feel like we are just sort of tiptoeing into diversity, and this is a huge problem in our industry. I don’t understand with the University of Georgia, Georgia State, Kennesaw State, and Morehouse, Spelman, and all of these colleges here in Atlanta, why everyone is female? That’s all I said at that point, everyone’s female, we need a more diverse group.

So, she said, “Oh, you want to hire more men.” And I was like, well I want you to hire men and women who bring something to the table beyond our sameness. Our clients are certainly not that way.

This person was very upset with me and said, well let me just bring you the resumes, and you will see that I have chosen the most qualified individuals to come in for interviews.

Well, I flipped through about 25 resumes, and I found you could just tell from schools that people had come from and gender, that goodness it looked to me like, we had quite a few applicants that could be brought in.

I sat down with a supervisor, and just said, well here’s what we’re going to do, I’m not trying to get in your way, but I just have a duty to at least bring in qualified individuals and give them a shot, and see what happens. She was very upset with me.

But it became, as far as I’m concerned, the most ethical decision of my life to override someone I had handed off HR recruitment and interviewing, who did an excellent job with client work. And take it back and say, this isn’t correct for me.

I literally looked through and found about 25 people that were great, I brought in 10, I hired a young man who went to a very small school, a small program. He worked with us for seven years, all the way to account director who then left to work for a major Georgia-based company and became a director at a global financial company. This young man would have never had the opportunity to experience our brand, to get that next job, to get that next job, because of someone screening inappropriately for the job.

I’m very proud to say over a three-year period, we became ethnically the most robust office in the United States for Ogilvy. We had more African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, Latinos in our office percentage-wise, per capita, than any other office in the United States. It was something I was so proud of because we were walking the walk of the need to diversify the industry.

Now did we do a great job of inclusion? The industry is continuing to suffer from great diversity efforts, but less great inclusion efforts.

Diversity isn’t just about hiring practices and mentoring. Beth Monaghan, Founder and CEO of Inkhouse, discusses steps every agency and business can take to help drive panel diversity:

The last time I checked, PR as an industry is only 8 percent diverse, which is pretty embarrassing when you live in a city like Boston, which is a majority minority city. Our staff should mirror the population in which we live if we ever hope to have the right kinds of ideas and be reflective of people who we work with. We are committed to that, and we’ve beat the 8 percent. We’re at 11 percent which is still embarrassingly low and we’re trying to go higher.

But one of the things that we’re putting in place there to draw attention to it in the PR industry is our panel policy, which is basically that we will not sit on any panels that are all white or all male. So far, almost every time that I’ve told the panel hosts about the policy, they’ve diversified the panel.

There are some common mistakes when to enhancing the profession. Cedric F. Brown, APR, Independent Consultant, highlights why we can’t just look forward:

The thing that was a little bit troubling about some of these organizations that put out statements about equity last year, is if you talked to their diverse employees, regardless of race, orientation, gender, what have you, many of them would say, “This organization doesn’t treat me well. I don’t feel included here.”

Organizations need to be able to look within themselves before they put on an outside front. That’s an ethical challenge. Many people don’t like looking backward. They only want to look at the good things, but honestly, you can’t know where you’re going, if you don’t know where you’ve been. It’s going to take looking at and being able to atone for some of your past inaction toward racial diversity, gender diversity and orientation diversity. You need to be able to address some of those injustices that happened within your organization to be able to move forward and build trust, because otherwise, it rings hollow.

In a regular conversation, someone would tell a Black person who speaks about these injustices that, “Slavery ended in 1865. Get over it.” That’s discounting somebody’s lived experience because racism is more than the ending of slavery. My take is just that slavery just evolved into different forms. And there are far more prejudicial practices that have been put in place that have prevented Black and brown and diverse publics’ advancement in our society.

You need to be able to apologize for those past actions and just say, “Wow, I can’t speak for my ancestors and our history. But I can commit to doing a better job and trusting your lived experience and listening to you as to how I can be a better support for you.”

Enhancing the Profession Advice

Beyond DEI issues, Perry Headrick, Founder of Crackle PR, highlights why we need to fight sensationalism to enhance the profession:

Being honest with defensible claims builds long-term annuities. If you are coming out of the gate, gangbusters with all kinds of broad, indefensible claims, your revenues are going to be the victim, and your company’s not going to do well. It’s only when you harness the best of what you do and can show ironclad proof that your claims are accurate, that you can begin to have the platform to inspire people beyond the product or service that you’re selling. It starts with having something that’s real and then building on that with decisions that are beneficial for the company, employees, and stakeholders.

There’s a certain degree of marketing and PR puffery that’s okay. “One of the world’s best, one of the leading.” These kinds of things aren’t necessarily terrible. But there are some claims that start getting a little bit ridiculous. There is the overall tone of some companies, you can see that they’re punching way above their weight class, trying to kind of fake it until they make it. I understand the temptation. How many shots are you going to get in life to succeed with something? The temptation is there.

But discretion is the better part of valor. People ultimately learn that lesson at some point. Ultimately, everybody gets slapped back down to earth about what is real and what is true and what your True North ought to be.

Sabrina Ram, Founder and President of Blu Lotus, calls on the industry to stop putting profit over ethics:

We’re seeing a lot of PR professionals putting profit over ethics and that’s how we’ve gotten into where we are. As PR professionals, we have to understand that we hold a lot of power. We have the ability to shape the present and future for so many people, and there are short- and long-term consequences to our decisions.

Yes, we want to make a good living wage, and we want to be able to afford things that we want, but you have to ask yourself is that at the expense of a person or a community or an organization? Is that something that you can live with? Are you part of the problem, or are you part of the solution?

This is going to be an issue for a very long time. As a society, we are a very me society. What works best for me? What is going to help me get what I want? We need to start moving away from that from a professional standpoint and seeing the broader effects of what we do and how we do it.

Another ethical trap professionals fall into that does not enhance the profession is enabling toxic, abusive high-performers. Lisa Gralnek, Principal and Founder of LVG & Co., explains:

My toughest ethical challenge is something that we see a lot, which is when everyone knows that there’s a bad player or a bad players, and they don’t take action. When we’re looking the other way, when there’s this willful ignorance, or even straight up defense of bad behavior, I find that ethically challenging.

This came up in one of the companies I worked with. There was a real culture of this. Whenever there were big meetings where the entire organization would come together, senior female leaders would regularly coach and advise the younger female employees not to end up alone with a particular male executive.

There was one in particular who continued a meteoric climb through the organization. And yet, he had this very long track record of hitting on and harassing younger female employees. Everyone knew it but never did anything. It made for a pretty toxic work environment. That culture ultimately penalized everyone, people who don’t speak up, and if they did, as I ultimately did, you were gravely limited in your career advancement. In my case, I was ultimately forced out.

Otherwise, your only choice is to put your head down and go along with it or to be one of these senior leaders who think that you’re protecting your younger females by telling them about this. I just never understood that mentality.

This extends beyond discrimination or harassment. It’s true whether a particular leader or manager takes credit for someone else’s work, or when a firm or person in power overly exaggerates or spins the positive impact of their work. That poses such an ethical dilemma. The enablement of unethical behavior in defense of power is a challenge.

Changing this is a cultural question. This behavior of silence and complicity enables what I call the “Pass go, collect $200” behavior mentality that’s so prevalent in large corporations and public institutions. You put your head down, you nod, you smile, you do what your manager tells you to do. You do the bare minimum to survive, and you’re rewarded for it.

If you’re going to say there’s a no a-hole rule, or we don’t tolerate harassment and discrimination or we’re equal opportunity, you need to walk the walk. Let your values lead.

Values are the guideposts for driving forward. They are the GPS coordinates. In getting to a destination, you need to put those parameters in place, and you need to communicate them to the organization. I don’t know if I’d say there should be a zero-tolerance rule, because everyone makes mistakes. But you certainly can’t have everyone in the organization aware that there are exceptions and hope that you’re going to be able to change the culture.

If you want to change the culture, it starts with your mission and your values. These values guide you from the mission to the vision to the destination and throughout the journey. Almost every large organization and many small ones have annual performance reviews or a performance management system. You need to tie values to these things.

You also need to enable people and encourage people to speak up. HR and senior managers have a very large role in this. You need to give them enough training and enough runway, so they know what to do if someone comes to them, and that they encourage it. You need to abide by values and not just shunt it under the rug, because it creates problems more broadly. If you’re going to walk the talk, you need to make sure that the people who are the pathways and the conduits to that are taking action and trained appropriately.

Training

Training is essential for enhancing the profession. When training, first you need to understand what skills need to be trained. Marlene Neill, PhD, APR, Fellow PRSA, Assistant Professor at Baylor University, addresses this:

Ethical awareness is one of the skills that is lacking. There is a need for young professionals and professionals in general to be aware of the codes of ethics for their industry and be able to identify those issues, especially as we’re all busy, and it can be very easy not to take time to think and deliberate about your decisions. Time constraint can be a challenge, in that we’re so busy that you’re not taking time to think things through.

Courage was listed as number one. Having that competence and willingness to speak up, especially to people who outrank you. That can be quite intimidating, especially early in your career, having that courage to raise a concern and ask the questions when something doesn’t seem right.

Other types of skills were critical thinking and problem-solving skills. We can definitely see where that would be something you would need to develop early on in your career. Leadership comes over time. It was interesting that personal accountability came up on the list because you would think that people naturally would be accountable. But one of the concerns is that they have that personal integrity as well.

Other areas for training include the moral compass, having that personal values decision-making that’s guiding your behavior. Strategic planning, research, and measurement, again, those core skills in public relations are also considered essential when it comes to ethics. One of the other skills that they listed in the longer list included business literacy.

What does that mean in the context of ethics? It can help you identify industry specific issues and understand the implications of the counseling that you’re providing and how it can impact the business that you’re working for. It gives you a better understanding about how to make your arguments and make a stronger case.

Blake Lewis, APR, Fellow PRSA, Principal and Founder of Three Box Strategic Communications, has advice for how to make ethics training a regular part of your culture:

We spend a fair amount of time discussing it. We have weekly staff meetings. We handle the agenda for the staff meeting in an interesting way. Anybody anywhere in the organization has the opportunity to create an agenda item saying, “Here’s something I’ve seen that I want to talk about. Here’s a situation that we as a team need to evaluate.”

There are absolutely no filters. It doesn’t matter if you are a junior associate or an intern, you can put something on there. The only expectation is that you can come to the table prepared to raise why is this relevant, why should we care? A lot of times ethical questions come up through just that observation of what’s going on around us, whether it’s the local community where we have an office, or anywhere in multiple countries where we do business.

When you set that sort of standard and you give that kind of freedom with responsibility, that’s when you can start these conversations saying, “Hey, here’s something that happened. How do we feel about this? What would we have done differently? Why would we have done it differently?” Inevitably, part of that conversation comes back around to what were the ethical considerations and how were they handled?

Matt Kucharski, APR, President of Padilla, also believes ethics training should not be an annual checkup:

We do ethics training, but it goes beyond ethics. It’s training on our values. If you take those values, and you take that ethics training, you’re probably 90 percent of the way there. We talk a lot about values to our employees and how to create a great work culture and create employee engagement, and believe me, that’s incredibly important.

It’s also a risk mitigation strategy. You make sure people are acting the way you want them to act. If they aren’t, you have a reference point to be able to say, “You know what? That behavior does not follow these values and it’s clear that these values are important to us.

You need to make sure that it’s part of regular professional development curriculum and not, “Okay everybody. You need to go to our annual, once a year ethics training.” That’s a little bit like, “Take your vitamins.”

Learning about the ethical dilemmas makes you a stronger practitioner because it allows you to see around corners. It allows you to be more strategic.

Other Advice to Enhance the Profession

One area where the profession hurts itself is with unethical measurement. Melanie Ensign, former Head of Security, Privacy, and Engineering Communications for Uber, emphasizes we need to stop confusing coverage with action:

I focus more on, “What are the behavioral outcomes?” versus just the output.

For example, there are tons of articles about how to secure your online accounts and how to use two-factor authentication. The Internet is just littered with these, whether it’s a journalistic article or on a company blog somewhere, and yet we know within the security community we have abysmal single-digit adoption of two-factor authentication in most consumer communities. A lot of PR teams would consider those wins, because they got coverage, they created content. Yet, I have a hard time seeing that as a win, because it hasn’t made a difference in securing people and getting them to use the tool.

Part of that has to do with the limitations and the weaknesses of the tools themselves, and that is where I see the role of a communications professional being able to go back to their product team and say, “We’ve done X, Y, and Z on the comm side. If we’re not moving the metric of people using these tools and finding them useful and valuable, we need to figure out how to fix the product.” That’s not a message problem. That message has saturated the market. That’s where, again, being involved in those discussions in product development and business strategy early on can help influence, “Let’s build something that protects people even if they never have to push a button.”

That’s where Uber started. Our first two-factor authentication was on by default because we just knew that a lot of people weren’t going to turn it on. So, the first iteration was to build something that would be triggered if we detected suspicious activity, and then chapter two of that was, “Let’s give them an option of how they want to use that mechanism, whether it’s a text message or security app like Duo, But we started knowing that there was no amount of marketing PR or messaging that was going to convince everybody in the world to turn on this feature, so we built it on by default.”

Some issues with enhancing the profession are industry-specific. Peter Loge, Director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication, George Washington University, reminds us we have been facing the same challenges with political communication since the 1700s:

Be honest, be clear, be direct, be skeptical but never cynical. It’s a line I stole from a colleague who is a Republican Communications Operative and is now at a conservative site called The Dispatch. It’s important to note America communication wasn’t happiness, rainbows, puppies, and unicorns, and then along came Twitter, and the wheels came off. We’ve always been awful.

In the Adams/Jefferson campaign, the supporters of Adams accused Jefferson of all sorts of things…. The President of Yale said that if Jefferson were elected president, our wives and daughters would be subject to legal prostitution. Jefferson didn’t stoop to respond. Jefferson didn’t get in the gutter. He hired someone to get in the gutter for him, and he paid somebody to spread stories in the partisan press that among other things, if elected president, Adams would invade France.

Our political communication in this country has always been racist, lying, partisan, and awful. In 1946, George Orwell wrote that in our time, it is largely true that political writing is bad writing. He said that political rhetoric is a defense of the indefensible. It’s rooted in pure wind. It’s always been awful.

Social media allows speed and scale in ways we haven’t seen before, but it’s a lot of the same. The response has to be the same. Don’t be that person. Don’t spread stuff you know isn’t true. If it sounds outrageous, check it. Push out good messages. Just be better, and then hopefully policy makers and others can figure out ways to fact check stuff on the technological end. But the fact that I can’t fix Twitter doesn’t mean that I should be bad.

I live in downtown Washington, DC. Sometimes there’s litter in front of my house. I pick it up, and I throw it away. It’s not my job. Somebody else gets paid to pick up garbage. That one piece of garbage isn’t going to change the world if I leave it there, but it’s garbage in front of my house. I don’t litter. One more soda on the street doesn’t matter, but still, I shouldn’t liter.

I view communication and social media the same way. Just because one more won’t matter doesn’t mean you ought to do one more. Just because one more bad thing online goes unchecked won’t matter, you still ought to check it. Garbage is garbage.

Todd Van Hoosear, Chief Engagement Officer for Business Breakthrough Network, has a challenge to all of us to change the perception of PR:

The problem with PR is that we’re really good at talking. We talk a good game. We don’t spend enough time doing, and we’re not appreciated for our ability to inform action. The best thing that PR can do as a profession is to insist on being in a position in which you’re not an afterthought, that in which you are informing action and not justifying action. Words ring hollow, unless they’re accompanied by action, and this has been made extremely clear over the past few months, as we’ve dealt, not only with COVID-19, but also with this crisis of consciousness that we’re dealing with as a society in dealing with institutional or structural racism. Everybody’s talking a good game, but what I love seeing is people taking that extra step and saying, “This is what I’m doing about it.”

I’m donating money. I’m not just lecturing people in what is actual racism—although I’ve done a lot of that—but are we donating to causes? Are we walking the walk as much as we talk the talk?

The important part is not just walking the walk but being in a position where the CEO and management team sees you as a strategic resource for them and an important voice. PR stands for public relations. It doesn’t stand for propaganda. Public relations is as much inbound as it is outbound. Representing the voice of the consumer, the voice of the public in the management decisions is a valuable and important thing to do.

I’ve been on many award committees. I’ll never forget one conversation we had where it was down to two contestants. One of them was a small YMCA up in the North Shore that had suffered from a horrible incident with one of its coaches and had a terrible reputation problem. Because of that, PR had an opportunity not to make big splashy numbers and run a multimillion-dollar campaign, but fundamentally change how that organization operated from the ground up.

And the other campaign was the classic integrated marketing communications campaign that had great, incredible numbers in terms of engagement and visibility. The numbers were awesome. The sales impact was huge. We ended up going with the YMCA story because they insisted on having a seat at the management table, and they changed how that business operated. They didn’t just change sales numbers. They changed how the business operated. They probably saved that organization.

Tami Nealy, Vice President of Communications and Talent Relations for Find Your Influence, highlights the role of mentors in enhancing the profession:

Find a mentor early in your career. Find someone who you trust, who you can talk to about your personal growth and your struggles.

“Here’s what’s happening. Here’s what I’ve done. This hasn’t worked. What could I do next?” I felt trapped in my own head. Being a young professional who wanted to be successful, I was afraid to speak up to other people and to be like, “well, you know, the company is run by men, and they have a lot more experience than you do at 32 or 33.” But having those trusted mentors who believe in you, who see your potential, can be very, very beneficial.

Licensing is a topic that has been debated by the profession for decades as a way to enhance the profession. Karen Garnik, APR, President of Asociación de Relacionistas Profesionales de Puerto Rico, shares how Puerto Rico does it:

There are five countries in the world that regulate public relations. We have 1,500 practitioners with the required license on the island right now.

What you need to do is maintain continuing education. Just to give you an example, paralegals are not attorneys. You have an accountant, and then you have a CPA. It’s the same thing. We have academic preparation. We do continued education. We adhere to a strict code of ethics. We have experience, and we provide the right type of advice, serious, transparent, ethical advice to all our clients, whether it be community relations or crisis management or issues management.

It is the whole spectrum of skills that we have, alongside the ethics and the integrity and the education, that separates us from the rest. There is no cost to have a required license. What you need to do is have the preparation. You need to have studies in public relations, and you need to provide the certificates that you do, the justification, and the evidence, and you need to continue developing professionally via education.

It’s more an investment than a cost. If people want to work, they need to comply with the law. And this is a law. You need to comply with it.

Unlike the APR, you didn’t have to study to take an exam or present to a board to begin. You need to maintain the skills that you have, improve them, and make sure that you work ethically.

Yes. There are sanctions, and you can be penalized. That’s done not by the Puerto Rico Public Relations Association, but rather by the regulatory board. They’re the ones who oversee those sanctions and any kind of penalizing effects it might have.

Jim Olson, former Global Corporate Communications lead for Starbucks and U.S. Airways, takes a broader look and believes we can help heal the fracturing of humanity by moving from impact to consequence:

To be frank, what we’re facing right now is something much bigger than an ethics challenge. We’re essentially looking at the fracturing of humanity and a crisis of humanity. The good news is that when we want to solve these mega challenges, we can do it. As we saw with COVID-19, we are capable of extraordinary acts of humanity as companies of all stripes from small startup companies to hundred-billion-dollar market cap companies like Google, orchestrated to do everything from converting their factories to manufacture masks and ventilators to airlines essentially giving up seats to fly doctors, nurses, and supplies across the country. We need that same orchestrated unity of purpose that companies use today to fight the global pandemic, to fight the equally big, if not bigger, virus of racism and injustice that has been plaguing our country for decades.

As companies and leaders, we need to move from looking at our leadership through a lens of being impactful to looking at our organizations and our leadership through the lens of being consequential. We need to move from trying to just be successful to actually being significant and having a ripple effect across our communities.

In 2015, at Starbucks, we rolled out an initiative called Race Together. When we developed that initiative, we asked ourselves, what could we do as an organization? How could we use our scale as a global organization, to create more empathy, more understanding, and more compassion in the wake of a number of racially charged tragedies that at that time had rippled across places like Ferguson, Missouri, and other parts of the country?

Race Together was not about pretending to have all of the answers or even any of the answers to racism and injustice in America. It was simply about starting the conversation, and conversation as we are seeing today is long overdue. We took a lot of heat for that initiative, and absolutely we did not get the execution or the sequencing perfect. But our intention to use our stores and our brand to have the conversations that so many people are saying we need to have now…. I have no regrets and would roll out that initiative again in a heartbeat.

When I think about being impactful, it may be from a customer perspective about driving extraordinary customer satisfaction. It may be about from a financial perspective, driving exponential double-digit bottom-line results. From a community standpoint, it may be about making a dent in a particular issue in the community.

Being consequential to me is ultimately about having the judgment and the leadership to weigh in on what ultimately are in many cases, life and death decisions. Boeing’s a great example of a company that was faced with consequential leadership choices with the 737 MAX. Organizations today in the face of COVID-19 and the racial injustice travesties that we’re seeing are going to need to make consequential decisions about how they operate going forward and how leaders lead going forward.

I can’t let this chapter end, without repeating a plea I made as National Chair of PRSA in 2016. PR people need to stop saying “I hate math.” The language of business is numbers. As PR pros, we can have a knock-down, knives-drawn fight over the Oxford comma. For 10 minutes, it’ll be passionate on both sides. Executives feel that way when it comes to EBITDA and understanding how to read a balance sheet. The minute you say I got into PR because I hate math, you’re cutting yourself, and you’re cutting the whole profession, off at the knees.

 

¹ “The Diversity and Inclusion Revolution.” January 2018. Deloitte Review, Issue 22.