Honesty: not the best policy?

In last week's edition of PR Week an audience of PR professionals and students voted against a motion that 'PR has a duty to tell the truth.'

Leading the debate against the motion was the infamous Max Clifford. Memorable quotes: "I've been telling lies on behalf of people, businessmen, politicians and countries for 40 years." "All PROs at all levels lie through their teeth." "PR is about getting the right results for the client.  I get results, but they are sometimes based on lies."

Ouch. I can imagine Max Clifford saying those things. But I found it incredibly depressing that so many PR people in a room agreed with him. No wonder Edelman's Trust Barometer Survey shows the most credible spokesperson for information about a company is 'someone like me' at 53%. The CEO comes in at 32%. A PR person, 15%. As Simon Cohen, founder of ethical PR agency Global Tolerance said in PR Week, "It's bad PR to say you're in PR now."

Internal comms - tarred with the same brush?

Fair enough, we like to think the PR and internal comms worlds are different, but I don't think we can kid ourselves that we're seen as whiter than white. Once upon a time we were immediately seen as the independent ones that would listen with an open mind to both senior leaders and the front line, and help build the relationship between the two. Someone once said to me "Internal comms people are a bit like priests. I trust you enough to tell you anything."

How times have changed. Yes, thanks to carefully-developed relationships and personal integrity, you can still be seen as a trusted independent. But it no longer comes with the territory. As far as a lot of people are concerned, we're just internal spin doctors. I'm routinely asked to 'put a positive spin' on things. (But only once. After that people learn to avoid my best glare and a mini lecture.) In a manager training workshop last week, when I'd run out of time to convince someone why answer A was better than answer B, I resorted to "trust me - I'm a comms person". He looked politely but pointedly back and said "That is one very good reason NOT to trust you."

What are we here for?

I guess it comes down to your definition of what your job is all about. I've always liked the CIPR's description of public relations as being about building mutual understanding and relationships between groups. Building understanding of the strategy so that people can translate it into individual actions. Building human relationships and getting dialogue going so that groups actually work together instead of against each other (easier said than done).

But Lee Hopkins reports in his blog an argument by Ragan's David Murray that we've forgotten how to be mediators and facilitators and become instead 'the official (and unrespected) mouthpiece of management, complete with a toolbox of management jargon and rhetoric'.

Is he right? Is that what we're really up to? Is it what people perceive we're up to even if we're not? And if the answer to any of those questions is 'yes', what should we be doing about it if we don't want to be seen as the Max Cliffords of our organisations?

Sue

 

 

Comments

[Timm]

What a sad (but poignant) post! Although spin has always been there, and will likely never go away - it's hardwired into personal and social psychology - too much of it will lead to parallel informal communications systems and networks. Think about it: Bullshit detectors are very in demand nowadays, from spam filters to community-based product reviews and media watchdog groups, all of them filtering the useful from the useless. When these mechanisms emerge on a smaller scale inside companies (they are slowly growing), the cost of spin will go up - either because it produces backlash or because it's just not relied on anymore.

[Liam]

"Fair enough, we like to think the PR and internal comms worlds are different" - Not me, well not in all respects!

I think the fact is that it's harder to get away with dishonesty in internal communications. A journalist writes the story and moves on whilst an employee will make life changing decisons based on what he or she is told at work. They are therefore more critical, suspicious and have longer memories of the last time you tried it on!

I have no doubt that management teams would try to pull the wool over their employees eyes if they thought they could get away with it - but you can't.

However, it's an interesting continuum from lying at one extreme to total candour and truthfulness at the other. Along the way we have pass - lying by omission, lying by distraction, lack of candour, mild dissembling, putting things in the best possible light, highlighting the positive, before we arrive at the imaginary world of total openness...

And I bet a lot of people find it difficult to know when they are moving up and down the line. We'd all like to pretend that we're normally honest, but I wonder how many of us have drawn the line so clearly that we can tell when we're crossing it?

Liam