Years ago, I received a Request-for-Proposal (RFP) request from an old PR friend who was on the board of a nonprofit. He pestered me into responding to it when I allowed a certain amount of time to pass without responding. In my experience, if you’re not given some indication that the creator of the RFP really wants you to put your hat in the ring, it’s a waste of time. The game usually is rigged.

I told this to my friend when he called me to get me to participate. He responded by saying this would be worth my time. I took that as an indication that at the very least I’d be given a fair shot. So, with that in mind, I pulled out all stops. I conducted come original research and included some well-informed strategic recommendations in my proposal. This is something that could have waited until after they hired me. I didn’t need to do that, but I did so in good faith.

The RFP process was structured so that any questions my competition and I would ask during the research phase would be answered, and those answers would be shared with all other competitors. In other words, the weakest competitor gets to benefit from the curiosity of the strongest competitor simply by getting information it wasn’t even curious enough to request.

I had the chance to meet the other finalist when we did a group on-site meeting with the prospective client. She was a fellow adjunct professor at the same college as my colleague. I started to get an uneasy feeling about all of this, especially when she came into the meeting without even knowing who the nonprofit’s board members were, asking them their names and what they did for a living.

For comparison, before this meeting, I knew all of the board members’ names and their professional affiliations making it easier to strike up meaningful conversations in front of my competitor, who benefited from observing their interactions with me.

By the end of that meeting, I could tell she knew little about the organization, and her thinking on the kind of PR that was needed here was uninspiring and cookie-cutter. At this point, I myself could sense my proposal was much better, comprehensive, thorough, and would actually achieve the change the nonprofit said it wanted in the RFP.

All of those in that meeting, including the prospective client’s paid staff, gave me a strong indication that my team was the front-runner in this process. It was so obvious, I actually started to feel a little bad for my competitor who could see this, too.

But then it got weird. After that meeting, the prospect when silent for a bit, and I was the one who had to call my colleague for updates. He was very cryptic, and before you knew it, they announced that my colleague’s fellow professor had won the business.

Having seen her and her team in action and hearing of her reputation in the field, I knew without question the nonprofit did not choose the best proposal or the best firm. At the very least, my trusted colleague played politics with his fellow board members so that he could boost his own standing on the college campus where he taught. In hindsight, this all became clear as day to me.

My colleague is now gone, but over the years since that RFP, I’d run into him from time to time at the same gym where he worked out and I swam. I never brought any of this up to him because, what’s the point? Our conversations were professionally cordial. But I never could forget the shell game he played with me, using me to make him look better on his college campus.

After that RFP experience, it just became my policy. No more RFPs, no matter what.

My phone rang just after I got into the office and before I had a chance to fill my coffee cup. It was a lawyer I knew on the other end.

“Tim, this is Rick. Do you have a minute to talk?”

In the background I could hear the voice of a woman shouting a string of obscenities that would make a bar full of Marines wince. Worse, I thought I heard my own name sprinkled into her tirade.

“Yes,” I said.

At that point, Rick went on to tell me that the obituary I wrote the night before - the one that was now in the morning newspaper - had a typo in it. The prominent lawyer who worked at my client’s law firm, Rick’s law firm, had died at home, but not in the tony neighborhood where I was told he lived. Instead, he lived in a nearby, more middleclass neighborhood.

Forty-eight hours after this lawyer died, I’m learning that he took pride in his middleclass roots, all while his widow is cussing me out for the crime of preparing and sending his obituary into the major newspapers the night before.

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At this point, I promise to see what I can do to get a correction. Just after I end the call my phone rings again. It’s my other contact at the same law firm who gave me the errant information for the obituary. We compare notes, and it becomes obvious to me that the prominent attorney’s widow has enough clout to get him fired if she discovers he made the mistake. That’s when I agree to take the heat for him.

And so, the “Widow Smith” is left to assume I made this egregious mistake, no one at my client’s firm will be fired, and I do get the newspaper to make the correction for future editions and online.

All is well? Not quite.

It turns out that Mrs. Smith and her now deceased husband had been very close friends with the CEO of the global communications firm where I worked. She was very tight with my boss’s boss’s boss. And now she was determined to get me fired.

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That sparked some hastily convened internal meetings at my firm, where it is once again determined that while I was not responsible for the inaccurate information I was given, it would be best for all concerned that the widow continue to believe I was at fault. A promise is made to me that I will not be fired. The CEO himself assured me of this. And so it happened that way.

What I learned in the process of this, and a handful of other times when I’ve written someone’s obituary is why people are like this when someone close to them dies.

Your obituary is the final record, the final “report card” if you will, on the legacy you leave. When someone dies, their loved ones feel a sense of loss of control, a helplessness. They desperately want to grab hold and control anything, everything that they can to make things right. And so, they see the process for finalizing that obituary as a way to do that.

They want the world to see this perfect encapsulation of their loved one’s life and legacy. One misplaced comma could be enough to set them off.

After that, I’ve written several other obituaries and each time I saw the same dynamics at play. The obituary becomes the focus of their acute obsession to put a fine point on their loved one’s life. To make it perfect.

Looking back, I gained a better understanding of what was going through the mind of someone I had never met before, this doyenne of society, who found a way to include my name a cloud of blue obscenity that held over the city of Pittsburgh one summer morning, on an otherwise cloudless day.

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If you’ve been on one side of a contentious issue recently, even if it was a friendly debate with your brother-in-law at the family reunion this summer, there’s a good chance that you or he trotted out an example of an exception as the rule.

Case in point. This time of year, there are shark sightings off the coast of America’s beaches. That’s because more people are in or near the water, not because there is a change in shark behaviors. This can set off a certain amount of panic among beach-goers who may remember the occasional shark attack they saw in the news at some point in recent years. But the truth is, there are only a handful of global shark bite incidents yearly. In 2024 the total number of unprovoked shark bites around the globe was 47.

Still, based on fear and no small amount of legal risk awareness, lifeguards will be instructed top shut down beaches at the mere hint of sharks anywhere near swimmers, and to be honest, I myself would be the last one to go near the ocean if I heard of any sharks in the vicinity. But still, my emotions aren’t enough to establish a new rule that sharks are any higher of a threat to humans than they’ve ever been.

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Closer to home, there are any number of hot-button issues that also deploy the strategy of using the exception to make the rule, from sports participation and locker room policies, to environmental regulation and onto free speech issues.

On matters of speech, it’s gotten so that if one person is offended by a group’s words or vernacular, companies, school boards and others leap into action to tamp down the offensive speech. That’s a very common case of minority rule, where a single individual can establish new policies if that individual is offended by or concerned about something.

Of course, it can go the other way, too. In Aberdeen, Scotland, one student suffering from a condition known as species dysphoria believed he was an animal, not a human. While the schools did not make specific accommodations for the student, that student was permitted to continue attending school under the belief that he was not human. The system in effect accepted this as a norm. This passive sanctioning of a mental disorder is an example of how one student’s issue made the rule for the school.

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What Does "The Exception Is Not the Rule" Mean?

When we say, “The exception is not the rule,” we are trying to distinguish between anecdote and data, between rarity and commonality, between the greater good and the wants of the individual.

On matters of speech, just because someone may be offended that does not warrant preemptive self-censorship. Even if a minority of voices complain about a person’s exercise of their right to free speech, should those complaints be used to justify sweeping new speech-regulating policies?

If someone uses the right buzzwords (i.e. “safety,” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate,” etc. ), do they still have the right to silence others and force them to surrender their own rights to free speech?

During the Covid-19 pandemic, this was the first time in my decades-long career in media communications where subject matter experts were routinely punished and ostracized by society as a whole for offering alternative points of view. This was the case even as authorities acknowledged we were learning as we went. But they and others in positions of power refused to allow any disagreement with decisions they made.

As a result, some medical doctors and scientists were removed from jobs, positions of influence, membership in medical associations. Their articles were banned and removed from websites. They were banned from social media. These are the ones who were medically trained to offer informed points of view. A slew of journalists, social media users and others also were banned from public discourse if they deviated from approved narratives.

When the Covid vaccines were introduced, we were told they were “safe and effective,” and that if you were vaccinated you could not get or spread Covid. When that turned out not to be true, instead of reexamining the vaccine itself against the common definition of a vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) changed the very definition of “vaccine” on its website such that it allowed the Covid vaccine to still meet the criteria for a vaccine. The exception made the rule.

A Call for Discourse

This is not a call to ignore exceptions. Exceptions can be meaningful. They can point to gaps in our systems, inspire innovation, or highlight unseen struggles. But they should prompt investigation, not instant generalization. The exceptions certainly should not be used in themselves to establish new precedent for all.

In these times, emotional appeal often trumps reality and real data. The rare is too often portrayed as the norm. In this climate, understanding that the exception is not the rule is not just logic at work, but it is also an obligation we have to the truth itself. We must respect the actual rules at play while learning from the exception, not the other way around.

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Anyone who’s ever moved into a new place knows this instinctively. Whether it was when you moved into your freshman dorms for college, a new apartment or your first home, you made sure to bring something that was already familiar to you. Something you liked. Something that instantly made this new environment feel like home.

Why? Most likely it was your way of dealing with change, easing the transition from your comfort zone into what felt outside of your comfort zone. It’s not much more complicated than that.

You’d think that a behavior like this for most people – something so universal – would be more readily understood in the communications world, but it’s not. In fact, communicators almost reflexively work to ditch anything and everything that is familiar as they devise new change management strategies.

This is usually due to a desire to get on with necessary change as quickly and definitively as possible. Perhaps senior management is driving this sense of urgency. Sales are down. Membership is dwindling. Funding is drying up. Whatever the challenge, once leadership has determined that change is necessary, and it’s ready to embark on a plan for that change, the first impulse is to abandon anything familiar. The familiar is seen as the enemy to effective change, and this assumption can be a fatal mistake.

The mindset among leaders and communicators is that anything that’s too familiar is just a reminder of prior failed strategies and behaviors. Ditch it. Get rid of it all. Make a bold statement. Change is here.

This can exacerbate the organization’s problems. Now, not only do you have a dreadful situation that necessitated the change, but people are left with a bad taste because you failed at getting them to embrace your strategy. They didn’t buy in. They’re guarded and skeptical. You hit them with too much too fast, and you removed the things they did trust and like. You took away the familiar.

A Ketchup Case Study

In 2002, I was a member of the communications team that handled the sale of some of the major assets of the H.J. Heinz Company. The company sold two of its major subsidiaries, iconic brands in their own right, and certain other operations to Del Monte. Among those operations was the legendary Northside plant in Pittsburgh represented the company’s roots, a place where the founder once ran the company. Where so many generations of Pittsburgh families worked. Where iconic products like ketchup and Heinz pickles were initially made and served to generations of Americans.

The plan coming out of our transaction was to use a portion of the property for Del Monte, and to convert other portions of the property for private real estate development and repurposing.

This meant that Heinz would no longer have a manufacturing presence in its headquarters city. That those two very familiar plant smokestacks on the Northside featuring “Heinz 57” would no longer be owned by Heinz. That the city’s claim on the beloved Heinz name would be somewhat lessened. And that future generations of Pittsburghers would not be able to do what some of their parents, grandparents and great grandparents did, and that was to actually work in a Heinz factory.

These were the facts we could not change. So, addressing these concerns and sensitivities became as high a priority as clearly communicating the business implications of the deal.

We took stock of where in the city the Heinz name was so integrated. We started with the products themselves, and how their shelf presence in every grocery store was something that mattered. The company made sure, especially in Pittsburgh, that its in-store presence was as strong as ever.

Looking around the city, there were obvious locales where Pittsburghers expected to see the Heinz name. They needed reassurance that the company still called Pittsburgh home. That Pittsburgh was still integral to the company’s identity.

Headquarters wasn’t moving out of the city. Another place of note was at the stadium that was home to the Pittsburgh Steelers and the University of Pittsburgh football team. Heinz Field.

The company had just bought naming rights for the stadium when it opened in 2001. Just a year later, when this transaction happened, we had to assure the region that the company remained committed to keeping the name on the stadium as a symbolic way to reinforce that Pittsburgh was as important to Heinz as ever. We handled that through messaging and action, but also through a wide range of smaller community-centric sponsorships. If you lived in Pittsburgh, you were sure to be seeing the Heinz identity around town.

I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but local traffic reporters continued to refer to Northside traffic as “backed up to the Heinz plant,” even though the new owner was Del Monte.

All of this heightened the familiar and did nothing to diminish it in spite of the major corporate changes that were taking place.

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Change Happens

Sadly, nothing is forever in the business world, especially among publicly traded companies where priorities can change from quarter to quarter.

After my work with Heinz, in 2013, Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital bought the company. Not long after that, in 2015 Heinz merged with Kraft, creating a new entity called Kraft Heinz Foods Company. Its CEO and other key members of the leadership team are no longer based in Pittsburgh. Heinz Field is now Acrisure Stadium.

None of this, however, diminishes the fact that for as long as you can control your brand and your organization, you can institute change effectively. But you really can’t do so without understanding just how important the familiar is to the people you’re trying to reach. Embrace the familiar. Conserve and preserve it. Promote it if it makes sense, but do not discard it out of hand.

When you want to institute an effective change management strategy, start with the familiar.

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Legendary former CNN news anchor Aaron Brown, has died, his family has reported. For me, he was the face and the voice of the news coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, the Pentagon and on United Flight 93.

And so, well before the 20th Anniversary of the terrorist attacks, I planned an ambitious series of special Shaping Opinion Podcast episodes, each one focused on a first-person story. Because I felt Aaron Brown was so important to that story, securing him as a guest was my dominant focus in plans for the series. He was my starting point. I knew if I could get him, the project would be worth it. If not, it would not be the same.

There was one problem. Aaron wasn’t doing many interviews. In fact, he almost seemed reclusive. This isn’t my observation. There were actual news stories on just how hard Aaron was to find.

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Based on my internet research, he had been a college professor in Arizona and had given a smattering of interviews and speeches over the years, but in 2020 when I did my prep work, it seemed to have been at least four years since he had given an interview of any substance.

In the course of my work on the Shaping Opinion Podcast, which is currently on hiatus, I’ve always approached landing guests the way I learned in the early days of my career when I worked in newsrooms. In fact, landing a hard-to-get-interview was always one of my favorite parts of the job.

And so, when I could see that the person I wanted to build my special series around was hard to find, I saw that as a nice challenge. I decided to pursue the interview at least until the man himself told me, “No.”

It didn’t take long.

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Based on my web research, I could see that the only recent mentions of Aaron were about his participation in a handful of charity golf events, and a few of them were at the same course. The news hound in me surmised that he was likely a member of that club. As such, the one person I knew that might actually see Aaron on any regular basis might be the person staffing the pro shop.

So, on a Sunday morning, I called the pro shop at the course and left a message for Aaron via the person who answered the phone. I made sure the pro shop staffer wrote everything down. The staffer could not have been more accommodating. I told her to let Aaron know I’m a podcaster doing a big series on 9/11 and absolutely had to talk to him about his story.

She said she would, and she did.

That was on Sunday, December 6, 2020 at 12:49 p.m. At 1:16 p.m., 27 minutes later, Aaron sent me a short email that said in its entirety: “I hear you’re trying to find me. You have.”

That began months of back-and-forth emails, a prep phone call, and on April 8, 2021, our recorded interview for the podcast where you can hear for yourself his full story from 9/11.

On the day of the interview, we recorded about 60 minutes of conversation, 50 of which made the cut. But after I stopped recording, Aaron and I talked for another 60 minutes or so, sharing old war stories from different parts of our careers. He was as much of a listener as he was a yarn-spinner. He was naturally curious about my own story, which caught me off guard.

He told me of his own career origins in Western Pennsylvania, who some of his mentors were, what some of the tough lessons he learned in journalism, and some of the most enduring ones.

He told me the only reason he did our interview was the gumshoe way I found him. That impressed him.

For a news junky like me, this was perhaps one of my favorite moments of the Shaping Opinion Podcast. Aaron Brown could not have been more kind, more gracious, more humble, or more candid and forthcoming than I could have hoped. He had the news business in his DNA.

We didn’t speak again after that but based on the analytics that the podcasting platforms serve up, the Aaron Brown episode is one of the most popular of the 340-plus Shaping Opinion episodes.

Today, the headlines of the sad news of Aaron Brown’s passing universally mention his groundbreaking work on 9/11 and at CNN. But there is something more, and it’s quite simple.

Aaron was someone who just wanted you to know. And so, in the process, he saw it as his job to get to the source of that knowledge, process it as accurately, ethically and thoroughly as possible. And then give it to you because you deserved that much. If you were his viewer, he held you in the highest regard. And today, we do that for him.

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Have you ever been in a strategy session and by the end of it, the white board is full of great and not-so-great ideas? And then there’s this one magical idea that lights up the eyes of everyone in the room. So, then you spend the rest of the session discussing how this wonderful new idea or solution will change everything.

Pretty shortly, assignments are made and everyone goes back to their work spaces to, collectively, enable this new strategy to take hold and make change.

In my experience, this describes 90-plus percent of the strategy sessions in which I’ve been involved. And it’s not bad.

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But here’s something else that has happened in those sessions. Before we hit on the “big idea,” there was often a more practical solution, and while not sexy, it met the commonsense standard of everyone in the room.

It’s the second bullet on the board that will be accepted and acted upon, but it is not generally regarded as the focal point of the strategy. It’s the thing you’ve done before and you know you can do again. It’s the problem you already understand, and you know what to do about it in this new context. It’s the right strategy for this situation, and you know it will work to the extent it needs to. But it’s so well accepted, it doesn’t meet the standard of the “big idea” everyone came into this session to find.

For example, let’s say you have a problem connecting with the male demographic between the ages of 25 and 45. So, in the course of your brainstorming session, you looked at sports, the outdoors, fashion, video games, entertainment, and ultimately, you decided that the big idea will be to use the sports of American football and hockey to connect with your targeted demographic.

But in the course of that same brainstorming session, you came up with some key supplemental ideas to ensure you’re not missing anything. The second bullet on the white board is a series of somewhat tactical and somewhat strategic how-to videos for YouTube, and shorts and reels for Tik Tok and Instagram. You’ve done them before, and they’ve performed respectably, so the culture of your organization is taking them for granted for that they are and what they can do.

After you launch the new campaign, that big idea involving football and hockey is struggling, but for some reason, this new series of how-to videos is taking off. It’s on message, it’s relevant, it’s timely, and it’s getting clicks and shares.

So often, we devote so much of our time and resources on unproven ideas, and we take for granted the ones that have already brought us much of the success we’ve achieved.

The next time you participate in a strategy session, don’t underestimate the power of that second bullet.

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We’re downsizing right now. In a few weeks when the unboxing commences, my wife will give me “that look” when she sees that my old high school football helmet made the trip. She wanted me to get rid of it. She thinks that for me it’s a reminder of glory days, and it is, but not the kind she may presume.

That was the helmet I wore when I was enough of a knucklehead to see my future only in terms of Friday and Saturday nights. And my Friday nights weren’t going so well after my coach changed everything for me and moved me to back-up linebacker. That meant I wouldn’t really play that much and my own dreams of any kind of an actual future were dashed.

I was wearing that helmet one Friday night when running at full speed, looking up for the ball, and my chin met the crown of an opposing player’s helmet, knocking me out for a few moments. This was long before there was such a thing as “concussion protocol.” They got me on my feet with smelling salts. To this day I don’t remember playing in that game, but the next day I watched myself on film finish the rest of that game.

The next week, the coaches moved me back to my original defensive end position, which changed my life trajectory. I had the game of my life, and the film of that game attracted the attention of the football coach at Duquesne University, a school I would not have gotten into given my propensity to put having fun before school work.

If it wasn’t for that helmet I wouldn’t have gone to that college.

A few months later, on another field, a group of friends and I were playing softball. I filled in at catcher, and thanks to a collision at home plate, I found myself the next day in surgery to screw my ankle back together. There would be no more football for me after that. So, I decided to focus intensely on my new journalism major.

If it wasn’t for that softball injury, I wouldn’t have happened into the communications field.

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Fate is a Funny Thing

The next year, I was at an off-campus party and I met a cute young girl who happened to go to Duquesne as well. We had a lot in common, and we had a few laughs. Four years later she became my wife.

The two of us have built a life together. We’ve worked, we’ve bought and fixed up homes, we’ve become integral in our community, in our kids’ schools, and in our families’ lives.

When we think about the things we should be thankful for, we often think of the good things. Friends, family, and sometimes the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time, or not being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Fate is Not Always Funny

About 11 years into our marriage, I saw an allergist, and he put me on antibiotics for an extended period of time. I started having strange leg sensations. These were listed as possible side effects, so the doctor took me off of the antibiotics. Just like other key moments in my life, I can pinpoint an exact time when my life took a turn, and this was yet another one.

It transpired over years, but very steadily and very gradually, parts of my legs weakened to the point of feeling like rubber in certain muscle groups. The condition baffled doctors who never could come up with a diagnosis. But the one thing they all agreed on was that I was wrong to suspect those antibiotics as a trigger, even though to me it there was a clear cause-and-effect. Over two decades later, this thing that those doctors ruled out now has a name. It’s called floxing, and it has left me reliant on a cane and a couple of ankle braces to get around. Sorry, docs. Floxing is a thing.

If it wasn’t for my being floxed and the process for dealing with it, I’m quite sure I would not have become as faithful. True faith is something for which to be thankful.

One thing we almost never do is look back to trace the pathway to the good things that happen to us. But if we do, it’s not uncommon to find that something bad might have precipitated the good.

Without a concussion and a broken ankle and the impact of those antibiotics, the trajectory of my life most certainly would have been different. I would never have met my wife, had my career, had my children, many friends, and now my extended family that includes my sons’ partners and a grandson, who has introduced me to a kind of joy I never could have imagined. I wouldn’t have an unshakable faith and the inherent confidence and optimism that come with it.

I’m thankful for all of that. This holiday season, when I set up my new office, there will be shelves, and on one of them a tattered old green helmet with a bent facemask will keep vigil, reminding me always to be grateful for the bad things.

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There’s an old saying you may have heard as a child:

“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”

Moms and dads would say this to remind their children not to get too rattled when other kids are mean to them. But as we see every day in the media and in social media, names and words and language can be used quite effectively to hurt individuals and organizations.

Your critics know this, and they know how to marshal strategic messaging and all of the media channels at their disposal to hurt you until you submit and do what they want, or you just plain lose.

Of course, that old saying was right to a certain extent. Names in and of themselves can’t hurt you. And a lot of pressure that critics try to apply to you oftentimes can’t hurt you unless you let it. The main thing to know is critics can only really hurt you in a PR sense if you let them define you. Here’s how they do that.

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They Frame You

When the word is used as a verb, we often think of being “framed” as when someone is set up for a crime he or she did not commit – a false charge against a person. That’s not precisely what we mean when we talk about your critics try to frame you, but it is in the right neighborhood.

When your critics frame you, they are simply framing their message so that how they want to define you becomes the most common perception of you, whether it’s true or not. Effective framing means to give the public a simple and clear picture of who you are through simple words, images and symbols, all that work to define you. The frame is the intellectual structure within which you are defined.

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How They Frame You

Values – Your critics may have many techniques, but one of the most effective ones centers on the use of common values that everyone shares, but spun so that you are defined as not caring about or having complete disregard for those values. In the process, your critics define themselves as the ones who care, and you as the one who does not. Do you care about the environment, safety, the community, your employees?

Maybe you do, but if you have critics, these are the kinds of values they may say you don’t care about.

Metaphors – Metaphors are powerful tools for taking complex ideas and simplifying them in such a way that people get it quickly. If your critics are waging a campaign against you, saying you don’t care about your employees, they may choose the metaphor of the giant, saying you don’t care about “the little guy.” That’s an image and in idea most everyone can readily understand and remember, which makes it an effective metaphor.

Data & Statistics – Data and statistics are often used to substantiate any argument, and they are effective because they convey a sense of indisputable fact. Of course, stats can be manipulated to support every side of an issue. By rearranging some stats, excluding others, and interpreting them any way your critics see fit, they can use data and statistics against you.

Solutions – This is the call to action, but it’s often offered as a reasonable solution. The minimum wage issue is a classic example of how the solution is used to garner public support. Who doesn’t want to make more money, right? Who doesn’t want others to make more money?

So, the common number of $15 per hour is the more common “solution” offered, but the proponents of that wage have never discussed the bigger problems it potentially creates. The City of Seattle learned the hard way on this.

That many proponents of a higher minimum wage purposely leave out or ignore is that when employers have to raise the minimum wage, that money has to come from somewhere in a small business. That means while everyone may make at least $15 per hour, each employee may have to give up more hours. Full-time workers with benefits may be cut to part-time and lose their benefits. More people working fewer hours with less benefits, all so that the hourly wage can be raised.

The hidden problem in the debate is that raising the wage does not raise revenues to cover the increased wage. In fact, if the store owner has to raise prices to pay for the wage increase, that could hurt retail sales, reducing the amount of cash available to pay employees. In short, the wage increase forces employers to give away money it doesn’t have. That could hurt jobs and the workers lose.

The point for this discussion is be prepared to address those simple “solutions” offered by your critics.

Anecdotes and Stories – People like stories. We have since we were kids and that’s never changed. It’s why we like books, TV shows and movies. The power of story is in its ability to aid our memory. Think of your own life, your own memories. You may not remember what grade you got on every assignment, but you probably have many stories of teachers and classmates over the years, stories you will never forget. The same is probably true of your college years, your family, your partner or kids. Stories.

How it All Adds Up

In the end, your critics will use all of these tools and many more to define you. They will come up with values they can turn against you. They will create or collect data and statistics that can be used to define you. They will offer solutions that put you in a no-win position, and they will come armed with all sorts of stories that while they may not even be true, will place you negatively into the narrative. For your critics, that’s mission accomplished.

They will tell the public or other third parties why this should matter by reminding them of shared values – values they say you don’t care about. They will detail their case against you through the use of metaphors, statistics, stories.

They will take care to show what you are doing wrong, or that you are wrong for not doing.

And they will offer a solution that is likely to persuade people to see you the way your critics want you to be seen.

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What can you do about it?

The first thing is refuse to be defined. Have a clear idea of who you are and what you and your organization stands for, and have your own set of values that everyone understands when they think of your brand. Have your own set of metaphors, statistics and stories that further define your reputation should it ever come under attack. And have your own set of solutions that persuade people to understand that what you are doing is right, for the right reasons.

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One of the biggest mistakes I ever made in the business of communications happened to me when I was a young account executive at a global PR firm. My client was the CEO of a logistics company. To describe him as tough-as-nails would be an understatement.

He’d taken on investor groups, regulators, unions and competitors with a bare-knuckle approach to business. If you screwed up, he was the first to tell you, and in a way you would never forget.

There was a method to his old school madness. He managed a lot of people. In his mind, if he had to repeat himself, he wouldn’t get anything done and his companies would fail. He had a reputation for choosing not to have to repeat himself, which meant if you were the target of his wrath, you felt it.

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When it was my turn

I remember when I discovered this dynamic for myself.

The CEO was in the midst of the emergency shutdown of a major operation to meet the expectations of his investors and keep the rest of the company from sinking under the weight of the failing division. Times were changing. Competition was intensifying. This division had already lost.

It all came to a head on a Friday night in the meeting rooms of a small chain hotel in a crossroads town, where the failing division was headquartered.

The company’s senior managers and consultants were all in the main conference room, waiting their turn, each expected to stand and deliver their plans for their role in the transitionary process. The CEO sat in the back of the darkened room, behind a blinding light coming from the Powerpoint projector. He peppered every presenter with questions.

First went Finance, then Accounting, then HR, then Legal, and then it was my turn, Communications.

You would think that after having watched the CEO verbally destroy everyone who presented before me, I might have learned something.

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I didn’t, until I did.

Every presenter was expected to cover what his or her respective function would do to facilitate the shut-down of the division with as little impact on the larger company and its people as possible. Every presenter took the stage with a plan that tried to anticipate every one of the CEO’s questions and preemptively answer them. In other words, we all thought we were expected to have all the answers before we presented our plans.

This is hardly unusual. Anyone knows that if you have to give a presentation to any CEO, you want to be as buttoned down as possible.

So, when it was my turn, I started to lay out our communications objectives, strategies, targeted audiences, key messages, timeline, and a plan for implementation of a communications strategy. Like the others, I didn’t get too far into my presentation before the CEO started laying into me from behind the bright projector light hitting me in the face.

Question after question for which I didn’t have the answers. Most questions were ones no one could answer because none of us could predict the future, I thought.

Maybe it was the time of day (after 10 p.m. on a Friday night) and I was tired. Or maybe it was because I couldn’t actually see his face, or that to get to this meeting I had just driven through a blinding snowstorm, passing tractor-trailers stranded snow-deep in ditches. Whatever the case, my own patience was as tapped out as his.

So, as respectfully as possible, I mustered up the pluck to start asking him questions. I asked him what he viewed as the best possible outcome. I asked him how he thinks this project would be perceived once implemented, and what he felt was the best-case scenario or a worst-case scenario.

There were two company managers to my right waiting their turn to speak. The expressions on their faces told me I was taking a risk. You just don’t put this guy on the spot. This was the conventional wisdom in the company.

That’s when something totally unexpected happened. He calmed down. He answered my questions reasonably and thoughtfully, and in such a way that I wondered what had happened.

Then it hit me, he didn’t want us to have all the answers.

This was a working meeting. It should have been a collaborative environment. As important as it is to have ideas on what to do, it’s just as important to tap the power of the collective mindshare in the room, especially the CEO.

He didn’t want to have to tell us what to do. That was certain. But he didn’t want us telling him what to do. He wanted us to come into the room armed with ideas and plans, but above all, the right questions. He wanted to know that we recognized that some things couldn’t be decided until we, as a group, discussed some of the most pressing challenges and asked the right questions.

Somewhere in the course of my time in that room, we were able to hash out an actionable communications plan, one that was realistic and had the best chance for success. We couldn’t prevent the closing of a division, but we were able to communicate that this was a last-resort measure designed to save the larger company and those who depended on it.

The lesson for me going forward was and is that there are times when we can’t be expected to have all of the answers, but the most important thing we can do is to go into these critical moments armed with the right questions.

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In my experience, clients who’ve already come under attack by activists and the media tend to understand this scenario better than you might expect. They are usually much more open to counsel, and they also tend to be more accountable and transparent than they are portrayed.

On the other hand, I’ve also had the chance to work with some organizations that until a particular crisis, they had been considered media and social media darlings. Some have been popular brands, others have been emerging growth companies. The thing they had in common was that they had never experienced a downturn in their business to that point or unexplained attacks in the public arena.

Using a common metaphor, this is when the “shine comes off the apple.” It’s when they are faced with their first major crisis of negative publicity, and it tends to stun them. The most common, emotional reaction on the part of senior management is, “This isn’t fair,” or “We don’t deserve this!”

One of the more common misunderstandings when it comes to crisis communications is the issue of whether or not the organization at the center of the story actually did anything wrong.

In instances where the company is or may be at fault, like a product recall or a problematic decision, the course of action is relatively simple. While it still may be difficult, the way through to the other side of the crisis is fairly obvious. You own up to it and communicate corrective or preventative actions. And commit to full transparency.

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What If You are Not to Blame?

What most people don’t realize, however, is the vast majority of true crisis situations are scenarios where the organization is not at fault, where it’s being falsely or errantly portrayed as being the problem. Usually, a destructive narrative has taken hold, and there’s just enough truth in it to make it very difficult for the organization to prove its innocence in the court of public opinion.

Companies and organizations who have been through this sort of thing before tend to know what to expect, and how to respond, and perhaps even more importantly how not to respond.

But if the organization at the center of a negative publicity flap has never been through this before, they can be caught flat-footed, surprised to find out their relationship with the media is not quite what they had thought. This leads to soul-searching revelations for some managers or leaders who may have been over-confident in their own charismatic qualities, or over-trusting of the media, or had a dangerous sense of invincibility.

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Why Us?

I remember one company that was faced with a situation where a Hollywood celebrity and a group of activists were protesting one of the company’s facilities. The group attracted a swarm of media, which led to national coverage. While the company was used to receiving national media attention, what it wasn’t used to was negative national media attention.

The thing that sparked the protests was not very complicated. Management had to make some difficult cost-cutting decisions to keep its operations going. If it didn’t do so, the company’s future was at stake.

I would end up meeting with the CEO of the company to determine what we could do to help.

We had a frank conversation, and in the end, it became clear there were no easy choices. I knew that I couldn’t tell the CEO what he wanted to hear. I had to tell him to essentially take ownership of the decisions that were made, and to explain why and how those decisions were in the best interest of the employees, customers and the very future of the company.

What he wanted to hear was that there were some simple words he could say that would make everything go back to where they were before the crisis, and that the media would return to treating him and the company like rock stars.

I tried to explain that being honest, candid and frank was his best hope for doing that, but he was too preoccupied with his dilemma. There were other consultants in the room as well, each advocating a complementary strategy for HR and legal. The whole time, the CEO just looked distracted and gobsmacked.

At times like this, it’s very important to give someone in this CEO’s position a chance to process. What we couldn’t give him was more time to decide. As we spoke, a protest in another city was launched in front of one of his facilities, and the media were on hand.

After we talked about his options, with a puzzled look he just blurted out, “I thought they liked us.”

At that point, it became clear to everyone in the room that leadership was so stunned by the manner in which the media seemed to have turned on them so quickly that they couldn’t make any firm decisions on this day.

We wished the company’s managers the best and went on our way. To my knowledge, the company never did engage outside crisis communications support.

Having the Right Perspective is Readiness

Here are some things this CEO should have known before this crisis happened:

• The more visible you become, it is more likely that at some point, your organization will face a negative publicity crisis.

• The positive coverage you receive today, and the negative coverage you may receive someday have nothing to do with whether the media likes you or doesn’t like you.

• No matter how positive the coverage, it is a mistake to assume that the driving force is the power of your personality or the uniqueness of your culture. If the coverage is positive, it’s because there is something about your story that supports a narrative the media wants to tell today but for whatever reasons may not want to tell tomorrow.

In short, when your organization is considered a media darling, that is the time to understand you are vulnerable to an effort by someone at some point to take it upon themselves to try to take the shine off of your reputational apple. Just understanding this will go a long way towards helping to ready you for a crisis of negative publicity.

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When I was younger in my adult life, one of my friends from the blue-collar neighborhood where I grew up had landed a good job as a union tradesman.  We met at one of our old haunts over a beer and talked about anything and everything but nothing important, really.  But towards the end of our conversation, I brought up a local political race that I knew he’d have an opinion about.

The candidate for the Republicans represented everything I knew he had supported throughout his life. And the candidate for the Democrats pretty much opposed everything I knew my friend cared about. For me, this was a test of sorts. I wanted to see where he stood just out of curiosity.

“I gotta go with my union,” he told me as he explained why he was voting for the Democrat.  More to the point, he not only openly framed his vote as in line with his union’s priorities, but he delivered what appeared to be a 10-minute heartfelt speech on behalf of the Democrat centered on every one of the candidate’s own key messages. My friend had internalized all of it and had no idea he’d done so. He truly thought these were his own opinions articulated in words of his own choosing.

My take after our conversation was this. My friend took his lead from his union, which he stated clearly, and through a mixture of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance had convinced himself that the candidate’s key messaging and the union’s endorsement were separate and distinct from his own beliefs, when to me it was obvious they were anything but.  I had already been working in the field of communications for a few years prior to this, and I could spot regurgitated talking points from a mile away.

The conversation didn’t go any further, and I didn’t share any of my observations with him because in the end it doesn’t matter. We’re still friends and no political discussion is going to get in the way of that.

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Your Opinions are Not Your Own

Still, if you are into communications, this is a blatant example that our opinions are more than likely assigned to us instead of rising up organically from within us. One reason is often practical. We really don’t have time to research every issue or news story under the sun. So, we trust others to do some of that and tell us what they think, and then we may adopt that point of view.

Any married couple can attest to this. In our house, I’m the IT guy by default.  I’m the one who does all the research and deals with computer issues, or phone issues, or anything technical like that. My wife defers to me on that stuff. It’s one thing she doesn’t have to bother herself with. So, if someone were to ask her what the best computer is, she might say, “Dell PC,” because that’s the brand I’ve settled on for us. On the other hand, my wife is the Chief Financial Officer in our household. So, if anyone were to ask me which is the best bank or bank credit card, I might say a Visa card from one of our town’s bigger banks, not because I did any research at all, but because I’ve deferred to my wife’s judgement. That’s one thing I don’t have to worry about.

The fact is, there are maybe a handful of topics over which you are willing to really dig in and do your own research. Otherwise, you will more than likely have your opinions assigned to you by someone else. On public matters, often that “someone else” is the news media or digital and social media. Or it may happen through your profession, or some club, or organization, or church to which you belong.

But make no mistake, some ideas are assigned to you.

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Take This Quiz

If this piques your interest, then take this three-question quiz and think about your responses:

1. Does everyone you know agree with you on a given news topic, political or social issue?

2. Do all of your news sources and social media feeds reinforce these same positions without exception?

3. Do you find yourself sometimes supporting something that you normally wouldn’t support, or do you oppose something you normally wouldn’t oppose if it were not for the idea that most people you know support or oppose that thing? In other words, do you sense you may be following the herd against your own better instincts?

If you answered “yes” to any one of these questions, chances are you are living within a bubble where you have allowed others to assign your opinions to you. If you answered “yes” to all three, there is no doubt that a good number of your thoughts and opinions are not organically your own and you are allowing others to think for you.

What’s the solution?

Get out of your bubble. Talk to people who don’t agree with the majority of your friends and colleagues and do so with an open mind. You may not agree with them, but you should find a way to truly understand where they are coming from and why they see the merits of their views.

Then, of course, do your own research from multiple sources. Follow some news sources that are the opposite of what you follow now and try to understand where they are coming from.

And if you feel like you could be following the crowd on some matters, and this represents a marked change for you, you should stop and reflect. Decide if you really want to do that, or if you need to do some things to get back to who you feel you really are.

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There are three reasons people sue, typically. One is that they truly were damaged in some way, either financially, physically or some other way, and they decide to seek compensation for damages. Second, whether you did anything wrong or not, someone has decided they have enough of a case to squeeze money out of you in court, but more than likely through an out-of-court settlement. And third, someone may sue you for attention.

That attention may serve a purpose, such as helping draw attention to a cause, an event, or a campaign of some kind. In this third scenario, even if the case is thrown out, by virtue of generating publicity for simply filing a claim, they’ve already achieved their objective.

If you or your organization is targeted with a lawsuit, be prepared for the plaintiff’s lawyers for the plaintiff to use some over-the-top PR strategies to put you on the defensive even before your lawyers have the chance to read the complaint.

“We have yet to see the complaint.”

Very often, the plaintiff’s lawyer will share the complaint with the media before or simultaneously with actual court filings. In this situation, there is a good chance the media will have more time to review the filing than you will. In fact, there is a chance that your first indication that a suit was filed is when that first reporter calls you asking for a comment. Where plaintiff’s lawyers gain the most momentum is during this period where they drive media coverage, while you and your legal counsel are still working to obtain an actual copy of the complaint to see what’s in it.

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The Complaint Focuses on the Most Sensational and Bizarre Allegations

I once saw a situation where a disgruntled former employee sued his former employer over what he argued were unfair grounds for his firing. The fact that he had a substance abuse problem that affected his job performance was not mentioned in the complaint.

What was mentioned was the company’s “strict in-office bathroom policies.” The complaint characterized the work environment as “hostile” because the plaintiff was regularly questioned for his long absences from his workstation. The other major fact excluded from the complaint was that management suspected he was engaging in most of his workday substance abuse activity in the restroom.

Of course, the media could only base its coverage on what it knew, so this case became known as the “bathroom policy lawsuit.” What made it even more difficult for the employer to engage in the media was that it was forced to adhere to its own policy of respecting employees’ and former employees’ privacy on personnel issues, and because the matter was now subject to litigation.

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The Media will Believe the Initial Narrative First, You will be on Defensive

Anyone who works in the media, or even consumes it on a regular basis, understands that while in a court of law you may be “innocent until proven guilty,” but in the “court of public opinion” you are more than likely to be considered guilty until proven innocent.

This means you may have to prove a negative, which is often impossible. You may have to defend yourself in the media. So, while in the court, the plaintiff may have to actually prove you did something wrong, in the media, the plaintiff is not so hindered. Whatever they say you did, it is perceived you did it until you can prove otherwise.

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The Legal Process Provides a Publicity Timeline

Once the initial filing is made, the legal system has its own built-in timetable, which may include everything from discovery and depositions, to publicly accessible court dates. These public hearings and trials are oftentimes treated as media events by plaintiff’s attorneys, meaning you have to approach the case as though it’s a communications campaign, in addition to a legal case, with a beginning, middle and end.

The most important steps you can take if you are ever faced with a lawsuit is to work closely with your own legal counsel to make sure all of your communications are in support of and in synch with the legal strategy. You must also be fully aware of the systems your organization has had in place and has in place to prevent the very thing your organization is being accused of in the legal complaint. The key is to make sure that even in the event the suit against your organization has some merit, it is the exception and not representative of something deeper, more systemic.

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One thing that continues to amaze me is how few current-day public relations practitioners understand the importance of the First Amendment to their work, their careers and their livelihoods. Further, I’m often disappointed at how few PR professionals have even given a serious read to the Amendment itself, so let’s start there. Here it is:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

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What does this mean to the PR profession?

Well, let’s talk about what it doesn’t mean first. It does not mean that private citizens in private environments or in their own private lives can’t live out their religions as they see fit. Its only intent is to restrict government’s role in establishment of an official state religion. The courts have been busy for many decades adjudicating the boundaries here.

Second, the government should not “abridge” free speech. By definition, to abridge something is to shorten or reduce in scope. So, what the First Amendment says is free speech is free speech with no limits, no restrictions, no reductions in scope, and it applies to all American citizens, not just the press. It didn’t need to define venue. It didn’t qualify by saying, ‘Your speech is free in this place or on that paper, but not here.’ No, it clearly provided a blanket statement with regard to the natural human right to free speech that is not bestowed by government and cannot be taken away by government.

The Amendment also clearly distinguishes between the people and the press, while ensuring that both are acknowledged as having the same rights to free speech. The point of this distinction is a reminder that the press does not have exclusive right to free speech.

Assembly was mass communication at the time the First Amendment was crafted. That and the printed newspaper. To “peaceably assemble” is to protest without harming others or property or the entities of society. A peaceable assembly is non-violent. Stopping traffic and hindering emergency vehicles from transit is not peaceable. Burning and destroying property and blocking other humans from going about their own daily lives is not peaceable. Physical intimidation is not peaceable.

“To petition the government,” is to use every legal and public governing tool at your disposal to give voice to the people before the government itself.

What’s Not in the First Amendment

There is nothing in the First Amendment that makes allowances for the censorship of concepts and terms that weren’t even in the common vernacular until roughly the past ten years. “Hate speech,” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “fake news.” These are common 21^st century terms that mean different things to different people, but the things they describe are not new.

People have lied, deceived, exaggerated, promoted, advertised, and campaigned for both popular and unpopular ideas since the dawn of creation, and most certainly for as long as the United States of America has been a nation. If you need an example, being a used car salesman or a politician is not illegal, yet both professions are known for what you might call “misinformation.” And just about any form of dissent, when it starts, can easily be labeled as “hate speech” by those in power. If you can squelch dissent in its cradle by labeling it hate speech and suppressing it, you can retain power indefinitely.

But the First Amendment has protected all of that. It recognized that it’s not the government’s job to be the source of all truth, not because that’s too much work, but rather, because the founders recognized you should never entrust that much power to the government.

Once you do, there is no end, and the government will use its power and control over speech to control every aspect of your life. If you think such thoughts are the stuff of conspiracy theorists, then count all of the nation’s founding fathers as conspiracy theorists. They did not trust an all-powerful government, including the one they created.

Of course, there are few exceptions to unrestricted speech, but they must be mentioned. If you feel you’ve been smeared through libel, slander or defamation, you can sue. You have recourse. But that’s a civil offense, not a criminal offense. In other words, there are legal penalties for defamation, but they don’t involve police coming to your house in the middle of the night and arresting you.

You can violate rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) or even the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), by disclosing certain information that is regulated. The common thread for all of this sort of regulation is that it is not designed to regulate opinion, but rather confidential data or information that could lead to tangible harm to private citizens. In no case are these regulations designed to protect the hearer from exposure to another’s information or opinion.

Incitement to violence is one other area. Citizens are not free to incite violence. Still, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken a very narrow view on this. All too often, PR professionals and others will say, “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater” to justify all sorts of censorship of speech they deem as harmful. But in the courts, most inflammatory speech is protected by the First Amendment. What is not protected is when the speaker clearly instructs the public to target a specific person or entity and they immediately go and act on the incitement. Many “fire in a crowded theater” cases lose because they don’t meet this rigid standard.

The one thing that none of these regulations restrict is opinion. Your opinion is not restricted by the First Amendment, no matter how hateful or unpopular that opinion is.

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The First Amendment and the PR Profession

When I transitioned into the PR field from the news media, I was one of many journalism alumni who populated the profession. No one had to tell us the importance of the First Amendment. That was ingrained in us since journalism school. We did not want any government telling us which speech is correct or acceptable and which is not. We wouldn’t have stood for anyone telling us that just because you disagree with me, my words are “hate” or “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

This more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the First Amendment has been lost within the public relations profession as fewer and fewer PR professionals have any news media experience, and as the news media itself has largely lost its own reverence for the First Amendment as the sacred foundation for all that we do.

As a result, you have an increasing number of PR professionals who are gladly willing to surrender free speech rights to the government, or to an algorithm, trusting that if we all agree on the same things, everything will get better. Unknowingly, they have surrendered the mission of entire profession on the naïve assumption that a society made up of millions of people can or should universally agree on anything.

But if you work in public relations, the very field exists to allow at least two different entities to have polar-opposite points of view, and trust that in a free communications environment, protected by the First Amendment, all will be permitted to make their best case, and let the public decide. This is the essence of democracy.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald recently made the point that anyone can have free speech in totalitarian states like China or North Korea, so long as you agree with and support everything the government says and does. That is what all too many public relations professionals feel these days. We should have free speech so long as we concur with government sources or directives, or other authorities, or in accordance with some trending social code.

Greenwald added that the First Amendment’s very existence is designed to allow the citizens to dissent, to disagree with the government or some other authority, to offer opposing views, opposing data, to capture the imagination and the attention of the masses. And through your dissent you should not have to worry that you will be censored and silenced.

To do that, you need a message, and you need access to those masses with no restrictions.

None of this can happen if the PR professional rolls over and submits to the kinds of controls over speech that before the past ten years was the kind of thing most Americans would never have dreamed could happen here.

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According to the Post Millennial, Amnesty International has teamed up with a canvassing group to hire activists in Seattle in its efforts to “Demand a Ceasefire in Gaza.” Another organization called Stop Antisemitism, featured in the same Post Millennial story alleges that the paid canvassers are also participating in protests.

The report says it has found a job listing where paid activists could make up to $30 per hour.

This just highlights something anyone who’s had to respond to protestors has speculated about for many years. When it comes to the media and protestors alike, protest movements can be big business.

Media coverage of protests tends to generate consistently high ratings, page clicks and readership, which attracts more ad revenue. And when it comes to the protests themselves, in an increasing number of cases there is more than meets the eye. In some instances, there is the stated reason for the protest, such as calls for peace, or a common environmental or a safety concern. But sometimes there is an unstated reason which may better explain why someone was willing to make an investment of thousands if not millions of dollars to prop up the protestors. In the Amnesty International case, I will not speculate.

But in general terms, one thing is certain. The professional-protest economy has gotten very good at creating made-for-TV and made-for-social media events. The recipe is simple:

1. Form a group around a theme that makes it look like you’re a victim or that you stand on morally higher ground than everyone else.

2. Obtain funding for that group from an activist foundation or nonprofit. Or, not uncommonly, it’s the funder itself that conceives of and organizes the whole thing, from the theme of the cause and the creation of the protest group, to of course its branding. #GottaHaveAHashtag

3. Create the core protest organization by paying professional activists to lead, organize and recruit others.

4. Target third-party events like a company’s annual meeting or an industry convention, or you can create your own events. The beauty of any protest is that with the right camera angle, you can make 20 people with signs and a bullhorn look like popular opinion.

5. If you’re having trouble recruiting people to your cause, simply run an ad online looking for “paid volunteers,” which is an oxymoron. You can’t be a volunteer if someone’s paying you. That would make you an employee or paid contractor. More on that in a moment.

6. With a core group of “paid volunteers” you have a better chance of recruiting others who are willing to join a protest to be a part of something, or to just be where the action is.

7. Promote it all on social media and blanket the traditional media with your publicity outreach.

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And there you have it, a protest-in-a-box.

The current protest model is based on a tried-and-true formula and counts on the general media’s need to drive ratings and readership by depicting volatile events as though they represent an organic popular uprising.

The prevalent and outdated assumption, or myth, in this kind of media coverage is that these events spring organically up from the grassroots (Professional protests do not); that the participants are only there because they believe in the cause and not because some are compensated in some way; and that their presence indicates they are willing to risk their jobs or studies for something bigger than themselves (Many don’t have jobs, or are still under the finances of their parents, and many of their college professors actually encourage them to join the protests).

In other words, while the professional protest formula follows a very 21st Century template, media coverage of these same protests is still rooted in a 1960s narrative, one that automatically assigns hero status to just about anyone willing to block traffic.

One Question that Could Change Everything

If the general media wanted to bring its coverage of many of today’s protests into the 21st Century – if for any other reason than to be responsibly accurate – journalists would ask protestors one question and then base their coverage on the response. That question?

“Who’s paying you to be here?”

To be sure, many protestors aren’t paid at all and truly have bought into the cause of whatever it is they are against. Others who may be paid, still may have no idea where the money originates. But make no mistake, in more cases than you may realize there is a money trail if you are inclined to look for it.

If journalists ask this question of event spokespersons and other leaders every time, they might start to see a more clear and consistent pattern.

If a journalist makes sure to know which interviewees are paid and by whom – by asking directly or doing some investigative work – it would shape coverage with the same sort of accuracy as when the same journalist asks corporate spokespersons for their names and titles. In both instances, the valid premise of the question is to provide context that’s based on the motives and self-interest of those involved.

This shouldn’t be too much to expect this since it’s largely regarded as normal journalistic practice when protestors are not involved. But it seems that when they are involved, the protestors get a pass. Just calling themselves “protestors” is enough to give them automatic immunity from standard journalistic scrutiny.

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Protestors as Rock Stars

I once happened to be at an environmental protest event where a group of grungy, un-showered and unshaven environmental protestors led a rally where they played acoustic guitars and ladled barley soup to the crowd. On stage it was a mini-Woodstock.  They gave the visual impression they could have made their way to the event by hitchhiking, riding bikes or traveling communally in beat-up old school buses.

What the crowd didn’t see, but I did, right around the corner was a parked caravan of shiny new, air-conditioned, luxury tour buses fit for Taylor Swift and her entourage. This is where the 21st Century “hippies” retreated to presumably to cool off, and drink and eat something far better than barley soup, while they expanded their carbon footprint. The behind-the-scenes infrastructure looked less like that of a group of grassroots environmental protestors, and much more like one suited for a million-dollar, gas-guzzling traveling circus.

If the media wanted to report on the very high-dollar feel of this organization, all it had to do was walk around the corner and see for itself, just as I did. I’m sure some members of the media actually did see this, but none elected to investigate or report on it. If it did, that would have blown the whole narrative that the media wanted to report.

So, if you happen to be a reporter, I’d challenge you in the name of accuracy and journalistic professionalism, to make sure to ask every protestor you come across a simple question and be willing to use the facts involved to shape your story. Ask, “Who’s paying you to be here?”

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There is a common assumption, particularly in public relations circles, that there is such a thing as a good apology. And by “good apology” they mean one that works on several levels. It is genuine. It satisfies the anger of your critics. It mends fences and brings a return of unity. Or, at the very least, it causes your critics to back off. There is a naive assumption that a “good apology” leads to forgiveness.

This may be true in our personal lives. It may be true in our marriages. It may be true in our friendships. It may even be true in a one-on-one, offline customer service situation. But it is a myth when it comes to cancel culture and the current climate of mob aggression.

The fact is, whether you are at fault or not, once the cancel mob decides to humble you or your organization, there is no such thing as forgiveness. If the mob decides you must pay, you will pay insofar as the cancel mob can help it.

This theory that apologies do much to provide cover when under attack by cancel culture is often a fool’s errand.

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So, You Should Never Apologize?

That’s not at all what I’m saying.

You should always do the right thing, regardless of how it looks or even if no one ever finds out. In sports there is a mantra I like: “Champions are made when no one is looking.”

The same holds true in life. Good people and good organizations do the right thing when no one is looking or when it really doesn’t make a difference. They do the right thing because it’s the right thing and that’s enough.

When you apologize, that’s why you apologize. Because there is a legitimate reason for it. When you do it, it’s because it’s the right thing even if it has no impact on the outcome.

Quite frankly, a lot of demands for apologies we see online and in the media are not themselves genuine. The amount of faux anger driving so much of the discourse we see is incalculable. These dynamics, by design, lead to real, mass anger that only serve the purposes of those driving it. Some who demand an apology aren’t even self-aware enough to realize that they themselves won’t accept any apology. They expect contrition without a willingness on their part to forgive, and that presumes their ire is justified, which quite often it is not.

The notion that in a public relations sense a genuine apology will make a difference is misguided. If you only apologize after demands for an apology are made, no apology will be seen as genuine. It’s apology-on-demand, and that’s inherently disingenuous. Better to focus on corrective actions, transparency and communication.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that there is an art to an apology, particularly when cancel culture dynamics are at play. There is not. Cancel culture does not forgive, no matter how you apologize or how often. Your communications strategies must keep this top of mind.

During the ten years I spent at global PR firm Ketchum, one of the things I benefited from was the firm’s commitment to professional development. In addition to gaining the experience of working with some of the world’s leading companies and organizations as clients on some of their more challenging problems, if you worked for Ketchum, you knew you were an investment.

The company invested in you in a variety of ways, but the most notable was regular workshops and sessions that might happen in your local office, or at some more central location, like Dallas or Chicago.

Everything from business management and creativity, to presentation skills and branding. The firm would bring in top-flight instructors, or sometimes tap some of its own experts, to show developing staff how it’s done, and more importantly, how it should be done.

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Off to Camp

But the pinnacle of professional development at Ketchum was something where you had to be selected to attend. It was an intense, four-day boot camp at a luxury resort in Siesta Key, Florida, called, “Camp Ketchum.”

If you were selected to attend Camp Ketchum, that meant you were in line for senior management at the firm. Ketchum wanted to make sure you had the complete set of skills that they expected in a leader. The hard and the soft skills.

In that spirit, it was also a proving ground. Not only were you there to learn and improve, but you knew you were being watched. Senior leadership of the firm were all there, engaged and involved, and watching.

I had worked at Ketchum for four years before I got the nod to attend the boot camp with two colleagues from my local office. When we got to Florida that January, we joined others from offices from all over the country and other parts of the world. A total of 40-50 Ketchum attendees and their leaders.

The four-day boot camp was a mix of socialization, team-building, classroom-style lectures, and a capstone-style project that brought everything together. To say Camp Ketchum was a career-changer for me would be an understatement. We often hear the over-used and cliché term, “Work hard, play hard.” But that is exactly what Camp Ketchum was.

Four days and nights of intense work, play, competition, and for most, fun. After all, you didn’t get here if work, play and competition weren’t fun for you.

To be sure, prior to Camp Ketchum I had already experienced my share of intense competition for new business, promotions and opportunities. I had worked in the media and in PR for years, so pulling an all-nighter was familiar to me. And I liked to have fun, so going out on the town with a work crew was something I had enjoyed.

But Camp Ketchum brought all of that to bear in such a way in just four days that you could actually hone your skills in that area, know your boundaries, push them perhaps, but through it all, master it as a combined skillset. Through shared experience, you would form bonds with colleagues from other offices, more fully adopt the “Ketchum way” in your work and bring all of that back home to the teams you managed. It was about agency performance, culture, continuity and leadership.

An Immersive Experience Like None Other

To get a sense of how immersive it was, I’ll go through the agenda as I remember it. First night was a meet and greet with everyone over cocktails.  We were assigned our teams, which were color-coded according to the tropical-colored T-shirts and sweatshirts they had given us. Prior to attending, we were given a strict list of how to pack. White pants would be worn for the group photo and the beach dinner on the second night, along with our team sweatshirt. A suit would be worn on the final day when we were to present our pitch.

On that first night, after all the niceties, our teams were sent separately off by car to a very nice nearby restaurant to get to know each other over dinner and drinks. In my case, the color shade of our team apparel was a salmon or peach shade. One of the first things we did as a team was decide it was more of a watermelon shade and that would be our new identity. Little things like this can be important on a number of levels. The Watermelon Team was made up of me (a guy from Pittsburgh) and other members from New York, Atlanta, San Francisco and Milan.  No one from your local office was allowed to be on the same team with you, so your team members were all new to you.

Anyone who had worked at Ketchum for any length of time can relate to this, but we all hit it off instantly at dinner. We were all different, but given the strong Ketchum culture, we came in very like-minded, particularly when it came to our careers.

There was an already familiar term to me. You wanted to be thought of internally as a “Ketchum person.” Or, in my case, a “Ketchum guy.” That was a high compliment. Not everyone who worked at Ketchum had earned that sort of identity, but by the time you stepped foot on Siesta Key at Camp Ketchum, all of you were deemed appropriately “Ketchum.”

Such a person tended to be positive and upbeat in nature, serious about work, and willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done – not to mention smart and pretty good at establishing quick interpersonal relationships.

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Off and Running

At the end of the first night, we had formed that team bond and had a sense of each other, personally and professionally. We were starting to get a feel for each others’ strengths and assets. This was Camp Ketchum organizers’ intent and it worked.

Next morning and all day were classroom workshops on everything from creativity and public speaking, to persuasion, research and measurement, client relations, and business matters. None of this was new to us, but the way in which it was all covered was at another level. It was both educational and a message to each of us – this is the Ketchum standard.

That night was the beach dinner, the ‘class photo’ and more socializing. Teams were encouraged not to retire early to their rooms but to go out ‘on the town.’ This is that work-hard-play-hard thing. Everyone knew we could stay out late and be fresh for more classroom instruction in the a.m. After all, we’d done it before. And so, we did.

Next morning, more of the same. Intense classroom instruction, some role-playing and a lot of internalizing of what would be expected of us when we returned back to our local offices.

At the end of this day, however, there was no planned group dinner. Instead, we were given a team assignment. We had to put together a full-blown new business pitch. In our case, it contained elements of marketing, branding, media relations, crisis and issues management, and of course, research and measurement. We were given the bare essentials in terms of tools to work with, but we were expected to show up the next morning with something that was every bit as good as if we had weeks to prepare and full office facilities behind us.

We were to compete to win the business against all of the other teams. We would be judged harshly, so we had no choice but to come with our A-game.

Keep in mind, this is after two days of all-day workshops, socializing, and for most, not much sleep in the past 24 hours. But here we were, expected at 5 p.m., to start work on a PR program and pitch that we then had to present at roughly 8 a.m. the next day.

No one flinched. Not on our team. Not on all the other teams. We now looked at those fellow Ketchum staffers in the other-colored shirts as competition, not colleagues. We formed our group, met at our headquarters, which happened to be the hotel suite I shared with our team member from New York.

We elected him leader, and we set about defining the problems and putting our program and pitch together. We divided up tasks and responsibilities, and we identified the things we needed to know, but did not know. We had to do research and had no access to a computer. At the time, that was not permitted.

We hit the nearby establishments and conducted man-on-the-street interviews to get consumer perspectives on the famous brand we were to be pitching.  We came back and then worked all night. We worked on the content, the program, the pitch and the presentation. Then we rehearsed.

We. Did. Not. Sleep. 

By the next morning we were ready. By this point, we were running on adrenaline. Over the past 48 hours, the most sleep any of us may have had was 2-3 hours. We had to get showered and suited up for our presentation.

Then at the appointed time, we went in as a team, made our pitch and received interrogation and questions from our simulated client, which was agency leadership and Paul Holmes, better known today as the founder of PRovoke. It was brutal and exhilarating at once.

Once we made our pitch, we had the opportunity to sit in and watch the other teams make theirs. This was educational for those of us who presented early, but it only added to the pressure on those presenting after us.

And then by the end of the morning we were tapped out. The adrenaline was wearing off. We did it. It was over, right?

Wrong.

There was a quick lunch and then time to change into our white shorts and colored T-shirts again. Beach games!  That’s right. We had to participate in a series of picnic games on the beach, again, competing with the other teams. Think “dizzy bat,” relay races, etc.

By the end of the afternoon, we were physically, emotionally and mentally wiped out. It felt good.

Then at dinner, Dave Drobis, our CEO and pseudo client prospect for the week, announced the winners of the pitch. I’m a little fuzzy on this, because I know somewhere in there Paul Alvarez, Ketchum’s Chairman at the time gave a speech, too. We may have had to wait until the next morning to learn who won the pitch.  I can’t remember. By this point, most everyone just wanted to have their nice dinner and go to bed. I do know our team did not win first place, but we did not come in last, either.

Next morning was for packing, having breakfast, saying our goodbyes to our newfound friends and colleagues, and some parting words from the CEO.  Then, off to the airport.

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So, what did it accomplish?

When we went back to our teams, we were psyched. We had bought more deeply into the Ketchum way and were even more energized to make sure that was integrated into how we operated as groups. We had contacts in other offices we now not only knew, but we knew we could trust. We’d be more likely to bring other offices into work projects as it made sense.

And individually, we knew how better to handle ourselves in extreme business situations in ways we hadn’t before.

About a year later, I vividly remember handling a major media event for a coalition of companies that were members of a leading national trade association that was my client. Much like Camp Ketchum, it was work 12 hours during the day, and blues clubs and drinks with the client and some reporters all night. And then back at it with little-to-no-sleep the next day.

After Camp Ketchum, I thought, “This is nothing.” And yet, I was able to push those limits without ever compromising my professionalism. That’s when I realized what a gift Camp Ketchum was to me. I was grateful.

In various ways over the years, I have drawn upon that Camp Ketchum experience again and again.  I had honed a complete skill set I once never knew I needed, and it was a skill set that made all the difference in my career.

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Even if you aren’t one to use words like “polemic,” you’re likely to be familiar with the meaning behind the word itself, since it’s pervasive in society today. A “polemic” is rhetoric that is not intended to advance an idea or an argument on its own merits, but rather to “win” by aggressively undermining an opposing position.

In other words, you don’t have to be right, in fact you can be dead wrong. And your opposition doesn’t have to be wrong, in fact they can be dead right. You can be wrong, and they can be right, and you can still win. All that has to happen is for you to discredit the opposition. For a polemic to work you have to effectively paint the opposition as “bad,” in such a way as you want to define it or frame it.

Ethical? No. Machiavellian? Yes. For those reasons, I don’t practice it, and don’t recommend it, but I do recommend being prepared for it should others try to do it to you.

A polemic can be the embodiment of using a double-standard with mal-intent. For ages, politicians on every side of the aisle have mastered the art of using polemics. What may heighten this art form, however, is social media and its relationship with traditional media.

For better or worse, every time you log on to social media, chances are you’ll find more than a few examples of polemics. It’s a short leap for someone aggressively undermining the opponent’s position on an issue to attempt to undermine the opponent at a personal level, attacking character and assigning fictional motives and intents.

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The Challenge for PR People

What makes this pattern a challenge for today’s public relations practitioner is when journalists actively engage in or are complicit in polemics, taking a position on an issue and pursuing a story polemically, trying to undermine the subject of the story, for no other reason than to marginalize that target.

This is often accomplished by publishing selected facts, omitting important details, working to connect events or facts that are unrelated (correlation is not causation). And then to imply nefarious intent when the worst thing that might have happened was an honest mistake or an innocent oversight, if that.

I’ve run into this a few times but one situation that stands out was a time when a client was covered by a reporter whose social media posts indicated his disdain for my client’s industry that reached an almost religious fervor. Since my client was a group of environmental activist groups and energy companies, this reporter sharpened his polemic axe.

The first thing he did was pour through a series of blog posts and social media posts, and then selectively pull those he felt he could totally recast out of context. He never contacted the subject of his story for comment. His reporting was published as news analysis, not opinion, yet his “report” was pure fiction and speculation that included a scant number of facts to make it look like he actually did research.

What were my client’s “crimes?” They were working to find common ground to create public dialogue that would lead to holding energy producers to a higher standard of environmental stewardship. This reporter clearly preferred an us-versus-them dynamic where energy companies could be painted as the enemy, and no such thing as dialogue or common ground would be possible.

I’ve seen this dynamic to varying degrees in other situations. As a result, I myself have made a habit of studying the social media posts reporters who cover my clients. This is one of the simplest windows to a reporter’s feelings about certain subjects, and it sometimes provides a good indication of just how professional that reporter might be when working on a story involving you. You can do this, too.

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Is this just a one-off?

I wish these situations are rare, but it appears an increasing number of communications pros at organizations now have to face polemic media coverage. Sadly, I’ve seen more than a few PR pros and PR programs employ polemic strategies.

From a business standpoint in the media, as some news organizations identify the ideological leanings of their bases, they tend to play to that base to build and preserve their followings, or just to serve an ideology. So, rather than attempt to educate and inform, they play to confirmation bias.

They identify the emotional mindsets of their largest numbers of followers and seek to reinforce those biases, and not to correct any that might be inaccurate or unfair. In some cases, the confirmation bias itself has become a part of newsroom decision-making, so that editors and producers can’t even see that they themselves aren’t open-minded or receptive to alternative points of view. To do so would be to disrupt a somewhat un-challengeable assumption. It’s become a team-driven media world, where you’re either on “our team” or “their team,” and facts and truth don’t matter. Winning matters. Defeating the other team matters.

It is within this context that we in the corporate communications operate and navigate with our organizations and clients.

If you step back and look at patterns in content and coverage that you see in digital and traditional media, you’ll find that the pendulum has swung decidedly toward the emotional as opposed to the factual.

Consider the issue of student loan forgiveness. On the one side, those on the receiving end of the forgiveness see the issue of one of compassion where the government is alleviating the pressures of paying back unreasonable amounts of debt. On the other side, those who did not take out student loans, or who have paid their college loans off, see the issue as one where the government is taking from them (in the form of tax dollars) and giving it away to others who actually have gainful employment and very good jobs, and they have benefited from a college education, but they did not “keep their promise” to pay the debt off.

In both cases, emotions are equally, if not more powerful drivers in shaping their view of the issue.

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Stories like that do two things. First, they enrage and polarize readers and viewers on both sides of the issue and that means traffic, the life-blood of any media organization. Second, they feed the echo chamber of social media, where “shares” and retweets further accelerate the constant movement of eyeballs from one page to the next. The highway for all of this traffic is emotion.

With this in mind, here are some tips for effectively managing when simply laying out the facts does not seem to be as effective as emotion in making your case:

Pay Attention to Optics

Optics are symbols and visuals that you can use to send the right message, or that critics use to taint your reputation. When you see someone with a master’s degree, or a Ph.D., who works for a college or a government agency demanding student loan forgiveness for themselves, it can quickly create the perception that they are out of touch, expecting some taxpaying plumber, restaurant server or carpenter to essentially pay off their debts (through taxation) for them.

As important as it is to consider optics, it is equally important to be prepared to respond to attacks from critics who seemingly can turn the most mundane visuals, such as a social media post, into a negative statement about you if that’s how they want to portray it.  If your critics are dead set towards finding something about you to make an issue, they will do so.  You just need to be prepared for it and know, at least in general, how you will respond. The one mistake to avoid is to automatically accept the premise of the criticism.

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Exaggeration is King

From click-bait social media headlines to sensational TV news teasers, media thrive on exaggeration. Often, when you present most developments as accurately as possible in the proper context, it can be quite boring.  This is because when you communicate clearly, people get an understanding of the who, what, when, where, why and how of the story. Once they get the context, they are not as likely to be alarmed. If they are not alarmed, shocked surprised or angered, they won’t respond at an emotional level, which means they may not respond at all.  In media terms, this means they may not click, read or watch.

Generating an emotional response through exaggeration is highly effective. The tabloids have been doing this for decades. By exaggerating and selectively omitting certain aspects of a story tabloids sell newspapers.

Did you ever click on a headline about an explosion in a factory or a nasty car accident only to find out buried deep in the story the fact that no one was hurt? Those are common examples of how exaggeration is used to get you to click. If you knew no one was hurt from the headline, you may not have clicked on the story from the start.  Buried or missing facts are often by design.

It’s much easier for originators to create caricatures of people and simplistic “good” versus “bad” scenarios rather than to delve into the complexities and nuances of a situation. These are major ingredients to creating an emotional response.

As with any professional discipline, the way crisis communications is practiced can follow different approaches, or different schools of thought. This is particularly the case when it comes to crisis communications planning.

In a speech before a group of college students not long ago, I told an old story for me of how I once had to rewrite a crisis communications plan where there was so much tutorial information up front that its Table of Contents appeared on page 36.

As a point of reference, imagine if the emergency manual at a power plant was equally packed with background information, so that when an accident occurred, the emergency responders would have to plow through 36 pages of background before they could even tell what was in the plan.

This is rare, of course, but it was a sign of things to come.

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This old crisis communications plan had something in common with so many others, though, which was that it was also dense with volumes of hypothetical press releases and statements. There was a template news release in the event of workplace violence, another one in the event of a flood impacting operations, and another in the event of a product recall.

That’s a school of thought that persists.

For some organizations such template documents give them a sense of comfort that they feel they have thoroughly anticipated every possibility and are prepared. This can be a false sense of security, to be sure. The effort to think through and develop all of this content can often be distracting and wasteful of time, money and resources. But perhaps worst of all, organizations can tend to feel so burdened or even overwhelmed by the crisis communications planning process that managers look for every excuse not to participate, which can have a direct impact on the organization’s readiness when a crisis hits.

The truth is, you cannot anticipate every possible crisis situation in advance to the point where you can write a passable first draft of a news release. Once the crisis happens, there are usually so many distinguishing factors tied to time, place and the people affected, among other things, that you inevitably have to start from scratch on actual content development. This does not mean you start from scratch, however, in the actual crisis handling.

If the template release is helpful at all, it may be in the first five minutes of the crisis, and after that, the many hours spent on developing, editing and approving it are quickly devalued.

What really matters is that a solid communicator be in the loop directing that part of the crisis response process. That there is a team involved in information-gathering and strategic planning and response. That a reliable spokesperson has been designated to assure the organization speaks with one voice.  And that an organizational commitment is made to responsible communication and accountability.

From a content-development standpoint, you need a quick and efficient message development process. And by “quick and efficient” I’m talking minutes not hours.

You need a plan that is strategic in framework and designed to finalize initial messaging, strategy, communications channels, and prioritization of key stakeholders in that first 60 minutes so that your first, customized communication is, ideally, before the public in an hour or less.

Just as with anything done right, this just can’t be handled with a template. Rather, the sense of security has to come from knowing there is a quick-start process in place, that the organization is practiced in it, that it’s tied to the way the organization already works and makes decisions, and that good people are involved in the crisis plan’s implementation.

I didn’t write this blog post to plug my book, but if you want a full explanation of the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of what I just covered, feel free to check it out on Amazon. It’s called, “The Essential Crisis Communications Plan: A Crisis Management Process that Fits Your Culture.”

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Over the years when we’ve handled workplace communications issues, we have done research. Sometimes it’s been qualitative. Think employee focus groups.  Other times it’s been quantitative. Think employee surveys.

When we do employee research, the purpose for each project may change but one thing almost never does. There is usually a credibility and trust gap between hourly or line employees and their immediate supervisors or front-line managers.

The workplace could be a manufacturing plant, a job site, or it could be an office. Regardless, when front-line managers speak to their people, they are either trusted completely, or, they are all too often not believed or trusted.

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Why?

While every workplace has its own communications issues and characteristics, generally speaking, front-line managers can get caught in the middle. They don’t have the power or authority to make policy decisions, but still they are charged with enforcing them.  This means they can’t make spot changes based on the direct feedback they may get from subordinates.

This can be frustrating for line employees and those front-line managers.

Further compounding the issue is how front-line managers are assigned and judged. Many front-line managers are promoted from within. This means some may still feel and act like line employees, neglecting their management responsibilities.  While others may allow a taste of power to change the way they interact with their subordinates.  This can lead to or exacerbate an “us” versus “them” mentality within the workforce.

Whether they are really effective as front-line managers or not, most know that some of their managers don’t want problems bubbling up in the organization. So, the course of action for many front-line managers is to keep things quiet.

Front-line managers tend to have a choice. They can manage so as not to get on the wrong side of their superiors, or they can manage to make themselves look good to their team members. Either way, this often means that grievances, complaints or even suggestions, and good ideas can come to a halt when originating at the very front lines of the organization.

Usually, once we detect a pattern like this, we set about creating an internal communications program that helps to bridge the divide between senior management and the entire organization. One important thing is to do is find ways to bolster the credibility of those front-line managers.  After all, they are the voice and face of the company to your line employees.

Some ways to do this are:

• Empower front-line managers to make more policy decisions within their work groups.

• Encourage and incentivize them to share complaints, suggestions and ideas that they receive from their people upward in the organization, and recognize those contributions.

• Respect the valuable role front-line managers play as both managers of their people and as advocates for their people.

In the end, you will be helping to forge a stronger bond between front-line managers and the people they manage.

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