How to Prepare for Ethics Counsel: Mentors, Training and Other Resources
Senior public relations professionals have learned that the advice and guidance of a trusted mentor can be invaluable to effective ethics counseling. Formal mentoring relationships typically partner a more experienced executive with a junior employee, and informal mentoring relationships develop more organically through the consent of both the mentor and protégé (Jablin 2001; Tam, Dozier, Lauzen, and Real 1995). Most public relations professionals have several mentors, sometimes for different stages in their careers. When examining the impact of mentors in the academic environment, Peluchette and Jeanquart (2000) found that professors in their early and mid-career stages who had mentors from multiple sources (e.g., formal internal and informal external) experienced the highest levels of both objective (e.g., research productivity) and subjective (e.g., work role, interpersonal, financial, life) success. By contrast, professionals in later career stages benefited more from internal mentors. As might be expected, more senior professors were less likely to have mentors (Peluchette and Jeanquart 2000).
Young professionals can find mentors through professional associations such as PRSA or by personally reaching out to a respected member of their local communities. Many of the senior executives we spoke with agreed with this PRSA Fellow that a crucial characteristic desired in a mentor is experience:
It’s important to have ethical mentors who are more senior than you, because the more seniority somebody has in this case, the more experience they’re going to have in dealing with ethical concerns. I don’t think this is a place where you can have an ethics mentor who’s the same age as you or younger when you’re trying to learn.
Through survey research with Millennials who are associate members of PRSA and members of the “New Professionals” section, Neill and Weaver (2017) found 69 percent of the participants have a mentor with whom they could discuss ethical concerns, and almost 63 percent indicated they would be comfortable discussing ethical concerns with a mentor who did not work at the same organization. The study also revealed that Millennial practitioners who have a mentor were significantly more likely to report that they felt prepared to offer ethics counsel compared to those who do not have a mentor. Finally, “Millennials who have confidence (e.g., are comfortable discussing ethics concerns with supervisors, mentors, and clients) are more likely to provide ethics counsel” (Neill and Weaver 2017, p. 342).
Another related resource for young professionals, as one PRSA Fellow pointed out, is their own professional network.
I…have reached out to other colleagues, you know PRSA’s great for that. You build a network of other professionals and as we know, there’s a right way to handle things, but there’s more than one way to be right. And getting opinions from others I find is quite valuable…How would you handle this? Or have you ever faced this? And what can I expect on day two, day three, day four?
Another public relations professional said formal mentoring relationships are not always required:
I didn’t have a mentor, but I had colleagues and I could bounce ideas off of them…When I was a junior pro, I could learn from the senior pros by watching and asking questions of them as well. And reading the paper and…seeing the mistakes people made and then watching the pros and going hey, they handled that well and learning from observation. (Neill and Drumwright 2012)
One source of ethics training that was often described as a milestone in many of the senior professionals’ careers was studying for the accreditation exam (APR). The Universal Accreditation Board (UAB) is a partnership between nine professional associations (http://praccreditation.org/), which administers the APR exam. Both PRSA and SPRF are members of the UAB. Ethics and law account for 13 percent of the questions on the computer-based exam, and many senior executives, including this PRSA Fellow, strongly recommend that young professionals make plans early in their careers to take it when ready:
I think that studying for the APR exam with its requirements for you to understand the code in-depth and be able to speak to it are amazing and will stand a professional in very good stead going forward in their career.
A senior executive working in higher education said studying for the accreditation exam helped him understand how ethics fits into the bigger picture:
I don’t want to say because I’m accredited I’m an ethical strategic professional, but I think that the process of accreditation—going back to the idea of ethics oftentimes being paired with something else…whether there’s evaluation or research, whatnot. But I think that accreditation was one of those things in my professional career that helped me connect the dots between those more readily. I mean I knew that research was out there, I knew the evaluation was out there, I knew ethics was out there, but I think accreditation…put it all together in more of a color pallet as opposed to just a spattering of different assets or tools or whatnot, in the public relations industry…I think it’s important to understand that ethics doesn’t have a singular place in that process, but should be integrated into each of those major steps of the public relations process. So I did feel like accreditation to a strong degree has probably helped me articulate the need for ethics much better than I could have before. (Neill and Drumwright 2012)
Recent survey research provided evidence and support for the value of ethics training as the results showed that accredited professionals were more likely to say they personally felt prepared to provide ethics counsel and to report that they were likely to provide ethics counsel when compared to the general PRSA membership (Neill 2016a).
While not a formal requirement, most PRSA leaders would recommend that public relations professionals have a minimum of five years of experience prior to taking the APR exam. Rather than waiting five years, however, recent graduates can still prepare by taking the Certificate in Principles of Public Relations (CPPR) exam. Ethics and law account for 12 percent of the questions on the CPPR exam.
Other Training
Some of the senior executives we spoke with, including the Page Society member below, reported that their employers provide ethics and compliance training or provide support for them to attend professional conferences:
Being in financial services, I had to take a lot of internal ethics training and compliance training every year…I would attend ethics seminars again predominately with Ethisphere, which is how I got to know them. They have a global ethics summit every year that I would go to, and there would be others.
A survey of PRSA members revealed, unfortunately, that 63 percent of the respondents were not offered ethics training through their employer (Neill 2016a). Approximately a third, however, reported participating in ethics professional development programming provided by PRSA, with the most common examples including accreditation (24.6%), chapter meetings (24.3%), and webinars (14.8%).
In response to our latest survey, SPRF members equally rated college ethics courses, employer training, and religious upbringing as their most common sources of ethics training, followed by personal study, and the APR exam (see Table 7.1). Members of the PRSA College of Fellows listed the APR as their number one source of training, followed by PRSA chapter meetings, conferences, and personal study.
Table 7.1 Most common sources of ethics training
SPRF members |
PRSA College of Fellows |
College ethics course—17 |
APR exam—29 |
Employer training—17 |
Chapter meetings—23 |
Religious upbringing—17 |
PRSA conferences—23 |
Personal study—14 |
Personal study—20 |
APR exam—12 |
Employer training—15 |
Chapter meeting—11 |
Religious upbringing—15 |
Other Resources
While it should come as no surprise that many senior professionals regularly consult the PRSA Code of Ethics, several of them also said they read the ethical standards advisories (ESAs) produced by the PRSA Board of Ethics and Professional Standards (BEPS). One PRSA Fellow recommended that professionals check the advisories routinely:
I think the first step is going to the PRSA best research and see what the particular standards are and they continually upgrade and change those because of sociology and the society changes. For example, there’s a new one out I believe in the last year or so on social media, and how you deal with social media in various areas. So the study of ethics by itself is not a static study, and I’m glad BEPS generally upgrades their advisories to find out where the issues are.
Other resources available on PRSA’s website include case studies, an ethics quiz, and app. In addition, PRSA annually recognizes “Ethics Month” each September by sponsoring various webinars and Twitter chats and publishing blog posts about ethics.
Another resource that was mentioned by professionals, and the PRSA Fellow quoted below, is the Institute for Public Relations website (www.instituteforpr.org), which includes blog posts and research reports:
I would certainly go to the Institute for Public Relations and see what kind of case studies they have on a particular kind of issue and see how the issues may jive or be separate and apart from the kind of things I might be confronted with, so absolutely on both the research and the case studies.
Another PRSA Fellow pointed to the Arthur W. Page Society (www.awpagesociety.com) as a helpful resource:
I’ll cite them again, because a lot of the content they put out is not just about how to—what is the chief communications officer of the future going to look like, but they’re very much about the integrity of the profession. And there’s a lot of people that blog in Arthur Page, and they write white papers, and they do things that really raise the bar very high. And I like that, because that just educates yourself about what other people think…how should people be handling these types of situations when they arise? Some of them are quite sticky and you don’t really always know the right thing to do.
Personal Reflection
While all of these resources can be helpful, senior executives also recommend that young professionals take time for personal reflection and self-inventory, an exercise endorsed by this PRSA Fellow:
I would have them [students] know what ethics is, I would have them know what their own code of ethics is, what PRSA’s Code of Ethics is, so that those values are inside them…if the values are not their values, then they don’t see it as an ethical issue. So they’ve got to line up their own values. And it’s all reflective and internal.
Another Fellow recommended a rigorous personal assessment, as tough as it might be to complete:
You start with yourself and you have to do a self-inventory, did I ever lie, did I ever cheat, did I ever steal? Pretty much everybody is going to have to say yes to those. But then it’s looking—so what have you learned about yourself with regard to doing those things…and in effect you have to decide yourself first that you are going to be…straight and narrow with regard to ethics. And only then can you start to teach somebody else about ethics, the code and the right things. And I think you have to have a framework of values and whether it’s PRSA values or your own, you need to sort of mush together, but the whole thing starts with the value statement in your head, and then I think that it’s a degree of honesty that says well Ok, I made some mistakes in the past, but I’m going down the straight and narrow now.
Ethics training and personal assessments are not enough, though, according to a senior professional working in a nonprofit organization, who emphasized that they must be paired with a strong work ethic:
I think it’s an everyday thing. You’re there; you’re engaged in the organization or the company. Obviously, you’re working for the good of the company or the organization, that’s not questionable. There’s no performance issues at all, you’re meeting your goals and objectives or exceeding them, that all builds your cache, your credibility within the organization, which helps you to become eventually a trusted adviser. (Neill and Drumwright 2012)
Summary
Public relations professionals rely on a number of resources to help them provide ethics counsel. On a personal level, many consult mentors or their professional network to seek advice when faced with difficult decisions. Several senior professionals said personal study for the APR exam was as a turning point in their career in understanding ethics in public relations. Other ethics resources they use include the PRSA Code of Ethics, ethical standards advisories, and professional development opportunities such as conferences and webinars. Finally, public relations professionals should regularly complete a self-assessment to make sure they are acting ethically and that their job performance is meeting or exceeding expectations.
Questions to Ponder
1. How would you go about identifying and recruiting a mentor?
2. What is the value of accreditation for ethics training?
3. What types of free ethics resources are available online?