A must read article here.

While it comes as no surprise to me that PR professionals are good ethical thinkers - after all, our jobs are about getting reporters and companies on the same page and making both camps understand the 'bigger picture' - what I found fascinating was that journalists were up there with PR folks on the ethical scale.

Now, I don't find this surprising, but I did find it fascinating how the two professions that are most often viewed as being at odds - PR folks and journalists - are both highly regarded for their ethics.

It may also explain why I find that journalists and PR folks are working better together than ever before - perhaps enough time has gone by and enough interaction has taken place that they finally see each other in a realistic light. That the PR person understands that (the majority of) reporters are not out to malign you just in the name of a good story and reporters understand that (the majority of) PR folks are not looking to manipulate the press for a short-term gain (especially at the cost of their organization's long-term reputation).

I think this also explains a lot of the stress that PR folks experience in their jobs - it's an almost intangible stress. Their self-imposed standard of living up to a level of ethical commitment to the truth can sometimes be an impossible task - because as I stated in a previous post, sometimes all you have to work with is a whole bunch of people with different opinions. 

From personal experience, I can say that 95% of the stress associated with doing PR has been trying to live up to the highest standard of honesty and trust in my communications activities. Any PR person will tell you, the pursuit of this goal (which I genuinely believe is in the best interest of any organization) will often cause you to come to (metaphorical) blows with colleagues.

I've known a lot of PR folks in my time who would openly admit going home after a long days work with a genuine sense of guilt that they failed to fight harder to change the 'hearts and minds' of colleagues who collectively had decided to cut corners that shouldn't be cut.

But PR folks are human and sometimes you are in a lose lose situation - you can either get drained from swimming against the current or you can get drained from the personal toll you feel from not living up to your sense of what is right.

I think the key for most PR folks is to 'fight the good fight' - to be a voice for what you think is right and accept that it's not always going to change 'hearts and minds' - but being OK with losing that fight knowing that there will be days where you win a couple. The alternative to this view is either becoming apathetic, demoralized or angry - all of which will make you ineffective in your job and cause your career to spill over in a negative way in to your personal life.

It never really sunk in that, when I think about it, almost every single time I've spoken with a PR person who was on the verge of throwing up their hands and saying 'Screw this!" - their complaint has always been that the environment they are in is not living up to their perception of what is 'right'. They take it to heart and really get stressed and burned-out having to fight people to do the right thing.

In my view this 'reality of the job' should be taught in public relations education because for most PR folks whose careers explode, or who simply stop performing well in their job, it almost always (in my opinion) ties back to their sense of ethics and being unable to cope with those ethics being compromised (or worse, being seen as a negative by colleagues).

A very common phenomena in corporations is group think. PR folks are used to sitting around a table of say 10, 15 or even 20 people (often with a C-level executive there) and watching them all come to a consensus that makes no sense (or that only partially makes sense) - but they drive to that consensus because they want to get on with their day. A decision has to be made after all. Yet one of a PR person's greatest values to an organization is to have the courage to go against group think - to stand up and say 'Folks, this is not going to fly in the public arena.'

It's a tough thing to do, but if you aren't prepared to do it, you're going to hate your job because you're going to go home at the end of the day with the knowledge that you don't believe in what you are communicating. Learning how to go against the group without being a 'negative nelly' is one of the most valuable skills a PR person can develop - and one that benefits organizations tremendously in the long run.