The Moral Compass: Ethics Gets Hard Before the Scenario Does
At NSPRA in July, I facilitated The Moral Compass for a packed room of school communicators for a frank conversation about school PR ethics. One of the scenarios we worked through wasn’t particularly complicated. You’re asked to write a press release. Some of the facts you’ve been given aren’t 100 percent true.
What do you do?
On paper, that sounds easy. In the room, it wasn’t. And that was the rub.
School PR ethics gets complicated quickly
Ethical decision-making doesn’t suddenly become difficult when we’re presented with some extraordinary, once-in-a-career crisis. It can become difficult in the middle of an ordinary workday.
Someone you work for asks you to do something. You understand what they’re trying to accomplish. You may even understand why they want to say it the way they do. But you also know something isn’t quite right.
Now what?
During The Moral Compass, we use ethical decision-making frameworks to slow that moment down. Instead of jumping immediately to What would I do?, participants examine the facts, values, principles and loyalties involved before deciding how they would respond.
And even with a relatively straightforward scenario, that process generated a lot of conversation.
The conversation became personal
What struck me wasn’t the disagreement in the room. It was recognition.
As participants worked through the scenarios together, the conversation became frank and, at times, vulnerable. People talked about experiences they’d actually lived.
They talked about the times professional obligations competed with organizational expectations. They talked about loyalty. Truth. Responsibility. The obligation to provide good counsel. And what happens when doing your job well may require telling someone something they don’t particularly want to hear.
That’s when an ethics session stops being theoretical.
The question is no longer simply, What does the code say?
It becomes: What will I do when this is my situation?
Practice before you’re under pressure
That’s one of the reasons I believe so strongly in practicing these conversations before the ethical dilemma arrives. The first time you seriously consider your ethical obligations shouldn’t be when you’re sitting at your desk with somebody waiting for you to hit send.
You need a framework. You need practice applying it.
And, perhaps most importantly, you need to understand that feeling uncomfortable doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t know what to do. Sometimes it means you recognize that the decision in front of you carries competing responsibilities.
The goal of The Moral Compass isn’t to tell experienced professionals what to think.
It’s to give communicators a framework for thinking through the situation—and an opportunity to practice using it before the stakes are real.
A room with different levels of experience
One of the things I especially appreciate about this session is that it works for communicators at very different places in their careers.
For Accredited in Public Relations professionals, The Moral Compass can satisfy ethics continuing education requirements while creating an opportunity to revisit familiar principles through the lens of years of professional experience.
For those newer to school public relations, the same exercise provides something different but equally valuable: practice. They may not have encountered some of these situations yet.
That’s precisely why we should give them an opportunity to think through them now.
And when those two groups are in the same room, something else happens. The framework provides a common language, but the conversation brings experience to it. Newer professionals get to hear how seasoned practitioners think through difficult situations, while experienced communicators are challenged to examine the assumptions that years in the profession can sometimes create.
That’s professional learning worth making room for.
The Moral Compass can travel
I’ve now facilitated The Moral Compass three times, in both half-day and 60-minute formats. In October, I’ll facilitate it again—this time virtually for NSPRA.
If your school PR chapter, association, district communication team or professional group is looking for an ethics session that can serve experienced APRs while also building the professional judgment of those newer to the field, I can bring The Moral Compass to you.
Because the ethical dilemma doesn’t have to be extraordinary to be difficult. Sometimes it’s just a press release. And that’s the rub.
Want to bring The Moral Compass to your group? Just ask me.
