By Mary Beth West, APR

With 20 years in public relations both as a student and professional, I’ve become a big believer that ethics in any organization begins with its culture.

The same holds true for the culture of a profession.  And in the public relations sphere – where pockets of bad examples still persist – the Public Relations Society of America seeks to foster a culture driven by the best of what this profession has to offer.

Part of promoting this potential is PRSA’s September Ethics Month, when the 21,000-member organization’s 110 chapters nationwide turn their sights toward spotlighting ethical issues for focused discussion, with its Code of Ethics as a resource for solutions.

Ethics is tough stuff.  In fact, it seems to get tougher the more a company or organization wants to do the right thing.  What factors can make the right choices hard? 

To name a few:

• The desire to avoid admitting a mistake
• The dread of initial public backlash
• The risk of poor sales
• The profitable ease of short-term gains when “no one is really watching” the means to an end

As countless case studies show, each of these above outcomes plays out in mammoth proportion when the wrong decision is made – ironically, with the intent of avoiding these very outcomes at what might have been a negligible fraction of the impact had the right decision been made. 

The voice of strong public relations expertise in an organization’s management often pays its biggest returns by preventing poor decisions from the get-go – particularly those decisions that we know run counter to ultimate public expectations.

As a profession, public relations experts are well-trained – and often have sufficient war wounds from managing previous fallouts – to know what public and media reaction is going to be to an organization’s policies and decisions three steps ahead of when a decision is actually made. 

That’s why public relations professionals who know the formal constructs of ethical decision-making are so vital toward informing strategic decisions . . . and more so today than ever before, given that online communication has taken ethical challenges into a new stratosphere.

So this September – we challenge all organizations to turn up the volume in making ethics a shared value and priority:

• Take a look at the PRSA Code of Ethics, as well as other ethics codes that may exist through your industry’s professional organizations.
• Understand what ethics really means to all your stakeholders.  What is “right” to institutional shareholders may not hold water with customers, employees or community members. 
• Commit to ethical practices in a way that holds everyone – every single person in the organization – accountable.
• Share standards of conduct as well as best practices and case examples with all employees in management and throughout the front lines.

You can get the process started by reviewing a range of resources available   all of which are useful tools toward getting a conversation going in your organization.

Tags: ethics, PRSA Code of Ethics, Public Relations, Public Relations Society of America

This entry was posted on Friday, September 3rd, 2010 at 11:10 am and is filed under Public Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.