The Ethical Optimist

After 25 years in the PR business, I’ve become fairly adept at the spoken word. My family and friends will tell you I’m passionate and rarely run out of things to say.

Yet, when it comes to speaking up on certain issues with clients, I often stumble all over myself. For example, I don’t do money discussions well, but with age and experience, I’m getting better at it.

I found myself in a quandary recently and tripped over my tongue a bit, but since it was an interesting ethical dilemma I’d like to share it with you.

We have a client that we started with several months ago. We believe in their business and truly feel that PR can be a tremendous asset to them. However, it quickly became apparent that this was a tough relationship at the onset. Within just a few weeks, getting our client contact on the phone regularly was a mammoth effort. When we did, we found we were not getting the information, feedback and response time we needed to do our job effectively.

At first, we attributed it to the fact that the client was new to PR and extremely busy. So, we did what any good agency would do, we confronted the issue head-on in a meeting. We walked away believing the client contact had a better understanding of our needs, and we theirs. However, after another week or so, the issue remained status quo.

We became increasingly concerned because without information, feedback, approvals and the like, we weren’t able to get the results we knew this client’s management team needed. A second call to action via a conference call yielded little in the way of progress.

Here’s where the ethical dilemma emerged. At this point, as the CEO of Utopia, I felt that the client company’s CEO would quickly wonder what they were getting for their money and might not know about the issues we were facing. However, not knowing what the internal issues/politics were, I wondered if we should contact the CEO of the client company directly with our concerns. After all, we might risk damaging the relationship we had with our primary contact. I did not want her to think we went over her head, but it might be perceived as such.

Our group met internally and came to several conclusions in determining how we should handle the situation:

1. We tried repeatedly to resolve the situation with our existing contact, to no avail. We couldn’t ascertain why, and we had no idea if our concerns were being effectively relayed to the senior management team.
2. We had a fiduciary responsibility to our client not to waste their budget dollars, and generating results were a key factor in living up to that responsibility.
3. Utopia is a results-driven culture and treading water was taking its toll on the team.
4. If we are to promote ourselves as an ethical agency, we must tackle the problem head on and be completely transparent about the issue…even if it meant losing the account (not an easy call in tough economic times)
5. Everyone on the team believed that the problem stemmed from a lack of interpersonal interaction with the client (since they are a virtual company, in-person meetings can be a challenge) and we had to push for a meeting to confront the issues.

The wind up? I called the CEO and asked to speak to him privately to express my concerns. I’m glad I did. The client company had been experiencing tremendous growth and the senior management team had been unable to focus on what was happening with the PR program. Moreover, the CEO explained that our direct contact had a very full plate, and they were constantly reprioritizing her responsibilities. It helped us to understand what was going on over the fence, so to speak.

He thanked us for bringing the issue to his attention and we had an in-person team meeting shortly thereafter where we were all able to discuss our concerns and brainstorm ways to resolve them.

The lesson, which I continue to learn, is that sometimes the toughest conversations are the best conversations to have.