Laboring to Communicate

Teachers at three eastside Portland-area districts have threatened strikes this spring. Next week employees at Reynolds School District actually may be on strike. An arbitrator’s decision on Monday has stirred up memories of the tough transit negotiations during the last two decades.

Communications for labor relations is a touchy, sometimes nasty business. That’s on a good day. Pulled into strike mode, the communications job can become painful. Regardless of whether you represent labor or management, here are eight basic survival tips:

1. Don’t waste time:

Contract negotiations on the horizon? If an organization has the luxury of time, take full advantage of it to research the talks from previous years, then get to know the issues both sides will put on the table this time around.

Pull together a media strategy, create fact sheets making your arguments, find the personal stories that humanize your case and identify the credible spokespersons you’ll rely on to carry messages. Note: Your spokespersons most likely aren’t occupying an executive office suite, but may be frontline service providers.

2. Understand the role of the media:

Are your executives up to speed on what to expect from the media during tense labor talks or a strike? If not, consider media training for a core group, grounding them on the key messages and preparing them for interviews.

3. Managing the messages, speak through your brand:

Craft your messages to support your labor relations goals. Speak to your audience, not to your membership or executives. Keep it simple but memorable. Speak through your brand. View the public debate about your organization as a way to remind the audience of your brand promise and who you are.

4. Manage communications for the long-term:

Avoid succumbing to the passions of the moment. It may feel good to zing the other side with wit or a damning broadside, but that’s a tactic serving no long-term goal and yielding no benefit. Your labor communications campaign should fit into the organizations broad communications program. Manage your public comments for the long-term, keeping in mind the goal of maintaining or restoring relationships.

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Views on Government Falter

There are a lot of fists flying out there during election season and all levels of government seem to be getting their noses bloodied as a result. This fall would be a good time for government agencies to get back to basics and make a robust effort to reach out to citizens in all the many forms that takes.

Why? During the past several years government agencies have fallen in esteem, especially federal agencies.

“Just a third of Americans have a favorable opinion of the federal government, the lowest positive rating in 15 years,” says the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press based on an April survey. Although held in higher public regard by comparison, state and local government have experienced a fall from favor during the recent bad economic years.

What voters say

“While the balance of opinion toward state governments is favorable, majorities say their state government is not careful with people’s money (56 percent), is too divided along party lines (53 percent) and is generally inefficient (51 percent),” the Pew report says.

“But much larger percentages fault the federal government’s performance in those areas. Moreover, while more say their state government is mostly honest rather than mostly corrupt (by 49 percent to 37 percent), a majority (54 percent) says the federal government is mostly corrupt.

Ouch. How do you dig yourself out of that hole?

Some outreach steps

A fall offensive on the part of public affairs managers is worth considering. Needed is a mix of traditional and new tactics. Your program might center on a “No agenda community assessment.”

Governments often wait until there is a big project or major new policy before touching base with the general public or significant interest groups. But a quiet time during the first few months after the general election is a good time to gather public opinion when no particular agenda is being pushed. Possible tactics in an “active listening” campaign may include:

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Managing Mangled Moments

The word “embarrassing” pops up a lot in headlines about this year’s presidential campaign.  There are enough gaffes, awkward moments and misstatements to fill a book on “How not to get elected.” For instance, there was:

 Mitt Romney’s comment that he likes to fire people.

Or when a top Romney advisor accidentally spoke the unintended truth about the campaign changing direction after the primaries, resulting in the now famous Etch-A-Sketch comment. 

Who can forget Texas Governor Rick Perry forgetting the names of the three federal departments he’d eliminate.

And there was President Obama’s statement about the Supreme Court’s limit of authority, a statement that was softly retracted after confusing attempts to clarify.

So, there seems to be plenty of ways candidates, or anyone working in a public environment, can mess up. The question isn’t so much how did the faux pas happen, but how a person can recover, putting the awkward moment in the rearview mirror. 

First, get used to the notion mistakes will happen. It’s a human trait. Next, have a survival plan. Before continuing down the campaign trail, create a protocol — or triage — for assessing how serious the situation is and what remedies are best. And, develop the discipline to carry out the recovery steps quickly. 

The first part of the plan should be realizing what it is a speaker can do in the seconds after a misstep. If we can borrow a page from the world of music, then the advice of Noa Kageyama may apply. He’s a performance psychologist and Juilliard faculty member who has made a study of how musicians may recover from a mistake during a performance, What he says about playing music might be applied to delivering a speech.

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Blaming the Media a Loser Tactic

Blaming media coverage for your public discomfort is a lot like complaining it is too sunny in Hawaii. If you don't like the sun, stay out of the sunlight.

The media's job is to dig up the truth. Your job is to tell your story as accurately and powerfully as possible. If you don't do your job, blame yourself, not the media.

GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain is the latest to pin his flagging political fortunes on negative media coverage. He called reporting of his alleged serial sexual harassment a distraction. His attorney openly suggested that the 13-year extramarital affair Cain carried on with a woman who stepped forward on her own with a stack of emails and receipts was a matter between two consenting adults, not the public.

Bashing the media or pontificating about what the public has a right to know are loser tactics in the world of protecting your reputation — your most valuable asset.

In Cain's case, he would have been better off to admit his previous sexual indiscretions and explain how he had mended his ways. This is what rival GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has done and, perhaps ironically, is the beneficiary of Cain's collapsed candidacy.

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Turning Strawberry Crisis into Opportunity

"Strawberries are the angels of the earth, innocent and sweet with green leafy wings reaching heavenward." Unfortunately, Oregon strawberries from a farm in Washington County appear to be the angels of death for an elderly woman and sickness for as many as 15 other consumers, two of whom remain hospitalized, according to state health experts.

Tests confirm strawberries from the farm contained the E.Coli 0157.H7 bacteria. Experts link the E.Coli contamination to deer feces.

News of the E.Coli outbreak has put an understandable damper on consumer enthusiasm to buy those red, sweet delights of summer — and maybe a long-term dent on the reputation of the Oregon strawberry industry.

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The Long Tail of a Tall Tale

President Obama and new GOP rival Jon Huntsman – more than a quote apartOne of the advantages of digital communications is their enduring quality. Your information might get pushed down in Google ratings, but it doesn't disappear — even if the information is untrue.

Matt Bai, writing this week for the 6th Floor, the New York Times Magazine blog, describes how hard it is to erase something on the Internet.

The subject of his observation is a quote attributed to David Plouffe, President Obama's 2008 campaign manager, who allegedly said newly declared GOP president candidate Jon Huntsman makes him feel "a wee bit queasy." Bai included the quote in an article on Huntsman that will be published in the magazine on Sunday. In the blog, Bai admits the quote is not accurate.

Bai traces the "quote" back to 2009 in a U.S. News and World Report article "where Plouffe spoke admiringly of Governor Huntsman and singled him out as a strong presidential candidate" for 2012. This was before Obama appointed Huntsman, a former two-term governor of Utah and diplomat who speaks Mandarin, as U.S. ambassador to China. Reporter Nikki Schwab attributed the "a wee bit queasy" comment to Plouffe, but didn't put it in quotation marks.

From there, the "quote" has achieved a life of its own, despite efforts by Plouffe to correct the record.

"The 'queasy' quote has endured," Bai says, "largely because your average Google search turns up way more examples of the widespread misperception than it does any effort to correct the record."

"It's not that you can't find the complicated truth in a case like this," he adds. "It's more that you really have to go looking for it."

The lesson for Bai is that media outlets "need to do more to correct an error than simply attaching a line to the piece. In this case, I thought it was worth explaining how the falsity got started in the first place."

The lesson for everyone who communicates via the Internet is to exercise care in what you say and take responsibility when you make an error. That lesson extends to sending sexually explicit pictures of yourself or publishing untruths. What you post will have a life of its own. Your reputation depends on your integrity.

Pounding Out Dents in Your Reputation

George Bernard Shaw wrote, "My reputation grows with every failure." That may have worked for Shaw, but not for the rest of us. Failure usually puts a dent in our reputation.

Pounding out that dent can be hard, unremitting work. But hard work alone won't get the job done. It also has to be honest work.

The greatest barrier to reputation restoration is an unwillingness by individuals and organizations to admit they made a mistake.

The next greatest barrier is the lack of courage to fix the mistake, so it doesn't recur.

Reputations accrue sometimes undeservedly, and they can be lost just as capriciously. In a world spinning without an axis, it shouldn't take a wise person long to figure out your reputation demands some quality personal attention.

What others think about you matters, especially when you face a crisis of some sort. How you react, more than what you did, often determines ultimate public perception. Many reputations soar when actions are taken in advance of a crisis to avoid a crisis – especially when those actions put customers and community first by enhancing safety or protecting the environment.

We all experience failure at some point. More people and organizations should experience the toil of pounding out the dents in their reputation caused by that failure. Sincere pounding will go a long ways toward having people once again admire your fender.

Getting Off to a Good Start With New Clients

Starting a relationship with a new client, or launching a new project for an old, repeat customer, is a lot like dating. At first, groping in the dark may yield some quick, mutually satisfactory results. But eventually roles and expectations must be expressed if the relationship is to be sustained and a success.

Try this check-off list as work begins for a new client:

1. What does the client really want?

The client may say it wants lots of positive stories in the media. Determine why. Selling product may be one simple reason. Or there may be deeper, more complicated, unspoken reasons to consider – legal, mergers, employment issues, for instance? The answer may change your recommended strategies.

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Save the Lipstick

What do you do if Moammar Gadhafi calls asking for help to spruce up his image? Unless you are prepared to tell him to his face to give up being a dictator, you should decline the opportunity.

Monitor Group, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, finds itself in the embarrassing situation of explaining why it accepted the assignment of a Gadhafi makeover.

The truth is too many public relations firms sign up for work that demands extreme candor without ever intending to be candid with their client. That's unfortunate and probably unprofessional.

Assisting an organization or individual in managing their reputation requires a accurate assessment of public perceptions and a realistic set of the client's vulnerabilities.

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Sheen, Wu and Reputation Management

The recent media surges by Charlie Sheen and Oregon First District Congressman David Wu serve as a painful reminder that preserving your reputation requires more than just talking. It demands discipline and a realistic strategy.

Sheen has shown up from dawn to late night on talk shows. Whatever his intention in his media availabilities, Sheen has come across as someone deep in denial. He may have set a record in racking up Twitter followers, but after a week of gab he now appears estranged from two ex-wives and his four children. No matter how much you might enjoy the TV sitcom "Two and Half Men," the most prevalent public reaction to Sheen is pity, not respect.

He needs help, and not just medical attention.

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