Alberta Health Services' CEO, Stephen Duckett, made a bit of a slip up with the media recently. Instead of saying 'no comment' he chose a more colorful response of 'I'm eating a cookie."
He's catching a lot of flack for the response.
I think part of the problem in situations like this is that we've crammed it in to spokespersons heads that you never ever say 'no comment'. So when they find themselves in a situation where 'no comment' is actually appropriate - like this one for instance where media questions were to be fielded at a specific time - they don't know what to say.
Really his response should have been 'I'll take all your questions in 30 minutes at the media Q&A sess6ion."
This to me is the fault of the PR profession. I'm not saying the folks who work for Duckett, I'm talking the industry as a whole. We tend to make the media an 'entity' and set out all these 'guidelines' for how to deal with the media - we make media relations this impersonal, procedural event (and to a certain degree it has to be). But as a result, spokespersons often react in a robotic manner or shoot themlselves in the foot by accident when caught off guard.
What we should instead be doing with spokespersons is telling them that the media doesn't exist! That when you get a question from the media don't think of it as a question from the media but think of it instead as a question from a citizen, or a shareholder, or an employee.
If Duckett thought of media relations in this light he would not have said what he said. I can't imagine he would respond to a citizen asking him a question with "I'm eating a cookie."
Tony Hayward probably would not have told a fisherman whose lost his livelihood that he wanted to get the mess cleaned up become he too "Wanted his life back."
The problem is that people see the media as a 'thing' - as reporters sticking mics in your face and asking you tough questions - and so it's easy to become defensive or frustrated in such a situation (they don't look anything like a simple concerned citizen would look like).
But all it really takes to deal with the media is to not think of them as the media - to remind yourself that the questions they are asking are questions that your core publics would ask you if they could.
If you respond to the media the way you would respond to a concerned citizen, you'll never run in to problems. But that requires that you pretend (to yourself) that there isn't a camera and mic in your face, that you aren't dealing with a reporter firing tough questions at you, and that you are actually responding to the questions of a concerned citizen. What would you say if the questions were coming from a nice little old lady instead of a reporter pushing up in to your face?
So much of the mistakes made in the media come from seeing the media as, well, the media. And they could almost all be avoided if people took interactions with the media as really interactions with their key stakeholders.
Kudos to Duckett for immediately issuing an apology on his blog. Which goes to show he has excellent PR folks working for him because that was exactly the right thing to do in this situation.
He's catching a lot of flack for the response.
I think part of the problem in situations like this is that we've crammed it in to spokespersons heads that you never ever say 'no comment'. So when they find themselves in a situation where 'no comment' is actually appropriate - like this one for instance where media questions were to be fielded at a specific time - they don't know what to say.
Really his response should have been 'I'll take all your questions in 30 minutes at the media Q&A sess6ion."
This to me is the fault of the PR profession. I'm not saying the folks who work for Duckett, I'm talking the industry as a whole. We tend to make the media an 'entity' and set out all these 'guidelines' for how to deal with the media - we make media relations this impersonal, procedural event (and to a certain degree it has to be). But as a result, spokespersons often react in a robotic manner or shoot themlselves in the foot by accident when caught off guard.
What we should instead be doing with spokespersons is telling them that the media doesn't exist! That when you get a question from the media don't think of it as a question from the media but think of it instead as a question from a citizen, or a shareholder, or an employee.
If Duckett thought of media relations in this light he would not have said what he said. I can't imagine he would respond to a citizen asking him a question with "I'm eating a cookie."
Tony Hayward probably would not have told a fisherman whose lost his livelihood that he wanted to get the mess cleaned up become he too "Wanted his life back."
The problem is that people see the media as a 'thing' - as reporters sticking mics in your face and asking you tough questions - and so it's easy to become defensive or frustrated in such a situation (they don't look anything like a simple concerned citizen would look like).
But all it really takes to deal with the media is to not think of them as the media - to remind yourself that the questions they are asking are questions that your core publics would ask you if they could.
If you respond to the media the way you would respond to a concerned citizen, you'll never run in to problems. But that requires that you pretend (to yourself) that there isn't a camera and mic in your face, that you aren't dealing with a reporter firing tough questions at you, and that you are actually responding to the questions of a concerned citizen. What would you say if the questions were coming from a nice little old lady instead of a reporter pushing up in to your face?
So much of the mistakes made in the media come from seeing the media as, well, the media. And they could almost all be avoided if people took interactions with the media as really interactions with their key stakeholders.
Kudos to Duckett for immediately issuing an apology on his blog. Which goes to show he has excellent PR folks working for him because that was exactly the right thing to do in this situation.
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