When the boss is wrong!

One of the hardest things to do now or, for that matter, is to tell the boss that you disagree with them and believe they are wrong with their conclusions. We seem to have morphed into a culture where the boss is as close to a deity as anything else. What ever the boss says is like Moses coming down from the mountain top with commandments. More often than not the boss is wrong and can make poor decisions based on incomplete information or information that is just out and out wrong.

As a marketing and public relations person you have a very strong need to hold the fort as it were and make sure that nothing is done to harm the brand, which we are responsible for defending. In many circumstances, higher ups will wish to please their own higher ups and will say "hey, just do this." All marketing and public relations people have an obligation to push back when needed and say, "no that is not really in the organization's best interests." Now of course it goes without saying that you need to have your facts and arguments ready if you are going to do this. It should not be a fight over ego or territory.

Of course one has to set a limit regarding what they are willing to do. Trying to turn back the tide is of course a fool's errand and it is more likely than being bombastic and picking fights every time, one should choose the course of education. Being able to point out an example of when the wrong choice was made and how you might have handled it differently is an ideal teaching moment, to use a phrase from last week.

One thing marketing and public relations people also need to do a better job on is educating higher ups on what their role is. One example is from an organization where I previously worked. They were very news release happy. To the point where they were doing 2 to 3 per week. All of it was white noise and senior executives, including the CEO expected full front page coverage for each announcement. Needless to say nothing happened and I was able to tell them why.

At first I met a lot of resistance and the always laughable, "you don't know what you are talking about." So I put them on a diet and limited releases to 1-2 per month. This resulted in a more deliberative fashion to the development of news releases, a more strategic usage of PR and in the long run, strong relationships with the news media.

So the key here is education, fact and ultimately endurance. Educating the boss is not a sprint. Far from it, this will be a marathon and not a sprint! But ultimately if you have strength and perseverance you will prevail!