CHAPTER 11

Safeguarding Confidences

Safeguarding confidences can often put communication professionals in a difficult situation. Do you tell a friend if they are about to be laid off? What about when a reporter asks you something you are not ready to reveal?

The PRSA Code of Ethics states:

PRSA gives to examples of Improper Conduct Under This Provision:

• A member changes jobs, takes confidential information, and uses that information in the new position to the detriment of the former employer.

• A member intentionally leaks proprietary information to the detriment of some other party.

But there are so many more issues to examine.

Safeguarding Confidences in Action

This is one of my favorite examples of safeguarding confidences. I think it skirts the ethical line, but doesn’t cross it, and even 40+ years later, Kirk Hazlett, APR, Fellow PRSA, Adjunct Professor of Communication at the University of Tampa, is still keeping the details secret.

I had an interesting encounter very early in my career that drove home the point of ethical awareness and fast thinking and how little things and seemingly innocent questions can get you into a fix.

I was the public affairs officer for the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Fort Devens in Massachusetts. As the name might suggest, we were pretty super-secret, chain link fences, frosted windows, armed guards, all that kind of stuff.

But our student soldiers lived and worked and shopped in the local communities and wore their uniforms off base like any good soldier would.

My phone rings one morning in 1979. It’s the editor of the local newspaper. He’s got a question, and it’s still in my head 40 years later. “I understand that you have soldiers from country X going to your school. Is it true?” Simple enough. But I knew that if I answered it as asked, I’d be guilty of releasing classified information.

Kind of a no-brainer here. I can’t do that. If I try to dodge the question, the editor is going to get his answer anyway. He’ll know that I’m doing it. I’ll still be accused of having released the information. To make matters even more interesting. I’m looking out my office window. I see a group of soldiers from country X walking across our parking lot.

Here’s what I said to the editor, “I have never been told that we have soldiers from country X enrolled here.”

This response was the absolute truth. I had never been told by anyone that we had soldiers, or students, from other countries. If the editor decided to go ahead with it, he had an evasive, but a truthful answer from the school’s public affairs.

The good news is the editor decided not to go with the story because he knew he was getting into some deep water. He couldn’t say that the public affairs officer refused to answer my question or didn’t get back to him because I was literally on the phone talking to him.

But there are lessons to learn here. As a person responsible for an organization’s public relations initiatives, I absolutely have to be aware of everything that my organization is involved in. I have to be able to communicate it in a way that will maintain my own professional credibility while protecting my organization’s right to privacy.

Moving forward, I made sure that I knew what the dickens was going on inside the organization. I poked my nose into everything so that I would be able to give stories to the public that did highlight the good stuff that we were doing. That people would say yeah, they’re not the guys that live behind the chain link fences. They are people who are out in our community and doing valuable things. It’s a matter of thinking and planning ahead. In every organization I’ve worked with, I say what’s going to happen here that I’m going to be the one that’s going to have to answer the questions, so what do I need to know about this?

Know what it is that you’re doing and be ready with the answer. You never know when you’re going to get a question.

Helio Fred Garcia, President of Logos Consulting Group, shares how Goldman Sachs taught him why even in difficulty situations you need to think long term when safeguarding confidences:

One of the principles I teach my students and my clients is the old principle from the guy who headed Goldman Sachs in the 1980s. It’s okay to be long-term greedy. It’s not okay to be short-term greedy. It’s a foundational ethical principle that if you organize yourself for sustainability in the long term, you will avoid taking short-term shortcuts that might be ethically suspect. If you want to be sustainable for the long term, you’re not going to take short-term ethical shortcuts. Short-term greedy bad. Long-term greedy good.

When I’m talking to business leaders or when I’m talking to people who are the stewards of reputation, I sometimes use the word stakeholder, but I’d rather use the purely accessible term—those groups of people who matter to you. The CEO, your investors, your employees, the regulators, the customers. What are their trust drivers? We need to make decisions that are more likely to result in either maintaining or restoring trust. It’s much harder to restore trust after it’s been lost than it is to maintain trust in the first place. So, let’s get it right the first time. Measure twice, cut once.

Mike Paul, President of Reputation Doctor, takes a contrary stance and believes personal relationships may be more important than safeguarding confidences. It all comes down to where you believe you have the strongest duty.

I left Hill & Knowlton to go work for a corporation that ended up eventually merging with MCI WorldCom. Long story short, I had found based on someone I was dating at the time that my boss and several other bosses were on a list to be laid off soon. Because she cared about me, she thought I was probably going to be in the list too. She’s been told to draft this memo for executives of MCI, and she told me about it.

She was so freaked out about it, she said she didn’t want to talk on the phone, she wanted to talk in person. I met her and she handed me this draft memo. I had an ethical dilemma to decide on the spot, “Do I do something with this thing I’m about to read, or am I only corporate loyal?” Well, the guy who had given me the job, had taken me from Hill & Knowlton and brought me into the telecom company, he was a great guy, and we had a good relationship. I trusted him and he trusted me. He even called me his consiglieri. I knew where he was. I knew I didn’t want to just talk to him about it. I knew I had to be face to face with him because he was going to have to make some big decisions soon. Two weeks from that time, this was going to happen.

I simply said to her, “Can I have this?” She said, “This is just a draft.” She said, “What are you going to do with that?” I said, “I’d rather not tell you, so you don’t get in trouble.” I took that draft copy, I jumped on the plane, and I went to see him.

That evening I had dinner with this person, and I simply said, “Read this, don’t touch it.” I held it up, so he didn’t have to touch the paper, because I fully wanted to be the person who was involved in the decision. He freaked out, I said, “Read it again because it’s not going to be here in a couple of minutes.” He read. I went to the bathroom, flushed it down the toilet, came back, sat down for dinner. I looked him in the eye and said, “All right, what are we going to do now?”

He said, “Mike, you have no idea what you just did for me and my family. Three things. Number one, I’ve been offered a job to go back to a big four accounting firm. Two, I have to make a decision within a week whether I’m buying this second home.” Three, he had to make a major decision regarding his kids that was going to be an expensive decision, “and I can delay this decision now based on what I now know.” He ended by saying, “I’m taking that job.”

Now, he and I had been on phone calls, almost a year before that that were for leaders within the company, and he wanted my gut feel on the verbiage that was used and the tone that was used by leaders of MCI WorldCom, really from the WorldCom side of the team, on those phone calls.

Part of my feedback to him and a bigger boss who came from the MCI world that was on that phone call was, “These guys sound like cowboys,” I said to them both. “So, you want my gut feel of what I just heard, I didn’t hear shareholder value, I didn’t hear what our customer needs are. I heard, ‘We’re going to win.’ It’s like a Ponzi scheme call. They scared the hell out of me.” They both looked at each other and said, “We felt the same way.”

That was an important phone call for our own heads to start thinking about our futures. And then this happens.

He said, and this reminds me of the negotiations like all of the actors in Friends who decided, “It’s all of us or none of us.” He included me on that list with three other people, and basically said he’s negotiating for us to get an equal package pro-rated based on what we’re making now, with various things that he’s asking for. Four days later, the negotiation was over, and we all moved on.

We then now know only months later what happened to WorldCom. People were literally walking out in handcuffs. But we were gone. We had an ethical dilemma as to what we were going to do based on things that we know. We chose and risked our own futures by saying, “Time to leave,” but felt comfortable that it was the best decision for us.

When it comes to safeguarding confidences, my answer is very, very clear. What supersedes that is the values that you either have or you do have not that were learned when you were being brought up. When I’m dealing with very powerful men who are in their 60s, 70s, or 80s about fraud that they were involved in, I talk to them from a moral perspective. I know some of them were using other firms before they hired me, because they weren’t getting good advice. Some of them say simply right to your face, “No one had the balls to tell me the truth.” I said, “You got the right guy for that.”

I’ve had people call me the N-word as I’m counseling them because of the fear that kicks in, literally, “You effing N.” Two weeks later, I’m at the dinner with that same person and his wife, and his wife says, “He told me what happened … how are you here? I don’t understand how you would forgive him.”

I said, “Easily. I have prepared myself for a response of A, B, C, D or E, not just A. I am trained to think worst-case scenario. That’s what you do in crisis management work. I know I could put myself in his shoes, not exactly, but with enough experience to go, “He just freaked out. He’s now realizing what he’s said. He’s embarrassed to call me back. He knows I can help him, and I will help him. And he knows the other guys that are on the team want to spin and lie for him.” That’s what made him call back.”

I had to tell that guy, “You’re not going to be CEO again, but you can be an amazing coach and councilor, you can write a book.” You could say, “It was gut-wrenching. I learned the wrong things growing up…” You could say all of it. You could let it all out, and you will help other people. He’s one of the top coaches out there now.

While every industry has confidential information, the health care and financial services industries have even tighter guidelines. Erica Sniad Morgenstern, Chief Marketing Officer, Virgin Pulse, shares her insight into top ethics issues in health care:

A big topic in the healthcare industry right now is data and transparency. A lot of people are concerned about the privacy of their information, how it’s being used, who’s using it, where it’s going. I’d say that would be in any aspect of your life, but with health care, it’s so much more personal. It’s a challenge for data-driven organizations to help educate people about why it’s important that some of your data is used to serve you up better.

I’m willing to use Google Gmail for free, and they’re collecting data so I might get a more relevant ad. So why can’t that apply to health care? There are some valid concerns. For example, I don’t want my company to know if I have X, Y, and Z. Because they might treat me differently. I totally understand that. I’m in the same boat as well, but to the same degree, there’s machine learning. People aren’t looking at the information, they’re collecting the data and applying it to serve you better. Who doesn’t want that?

There are two types of situations. Ancestry.com DNA, that’s a one-to-one situation. They are matching you with your DNA data. Whereas, with a lot of other organizations, it’s aggregated, encrypted, and encoded. It’s not like all of a sudden my company is going to know that I have three kids and one of them has eczema. That’s not information that they need to know, but my physician’s office, they should know that.