How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching and Counseling in Difficult Circumstances | Page 149

This book is in B&W, not color - Print page in Grayscale for Correct view! But what do you do when your stakeholders’ perceptions are accurate? Especially when they’re negative perceptions about you or your organization, I don’t think it’s enough just to bring those perceptions into the room. And it’s certainly not right to dispute them. You owe your stakeholders confirmation. If they’re speaking their minds, no problem – then the empathic response is agreement (#6) or at least partial agreement. But often your stakeholders won’t speak their minds. They rightly (or somewhat rightly) see you as a colonial exploiter, but they’re too courteous or too embarrassed or too cautious or too strategic to say so. Then empathic risk communication requires you to say so for them. This isn’t in Havens’s typology. For want of a better term, let’s call it “proactive acknowledgment.” Suppose for example your state health department has withheld information about a local bird flu outbreak. You were pretty sure it was a low-pathogenic strain, not the dreaded high-path H5N1, but until you knew for sure you didn’t want to reveal the outbreak at all. Now it’s come out. Sure enough, it’s a low-path strain just as you expected. But even so, you can tell that people are feeling mistrustful, upset that your agency sat on the news, and worried that if it had turned out to be a high-path strain the delay could have been deadly. They’re not expressing their concerns overtly, but you can sense the ill-feeling. We’ve talked about a variety of empathic ways to get that feeling into the room – empathic statements along the lines of “Some people might feel we withheld potentially important information.” But such statements leave unstated the fact that “some people” would be right! I think that fact deserves to be acknowledged. Honesty requires that it be acknowledged. Empathy requires that it be acknowledged. And your own self-interest requires that it be acknowledged – partly so you can more readily apologize, explain why you did what you did, and talk about what you might do differently next time; and partly so your stakeholders can more readily put their feelings and your behavior into perspective and begin the process of moving on. It’s not all-or-nothing, of course. Your agency had its reasons for withholding the information; you may even feel that your reasons justified what you did (though I would tend to disagree). Since there are two sides to the issue, proactive acknowledgment doesn’t necessarily mean prostrating yourself in a total mea culpa. You might say something like this: When we first learned of the outbreak, our agency made the debatable decision to wait to announce it until we could firmly establish which bird flu strain was involved. There are probably some people here today who feel that was the wrong decision. Some people inside our agency felt that way too; it wasn’t an easy decision. Even though we were pretty confident it was a low-path strain, if we’d turned out wrong we would have lost valuable warning time for nearby poultry farms. And being completely candid is usually the best policy. But we were worried that announcing the outbreak without knowing the strain could start a shockwave of fear and end up having huge, harmful, and unjustified effects on poultry markets. So we waited. We turned out right this time – it was a low-path strain, with no human health implications. Still, by deciding to wait we forfeited some of the public trust we have earned in years past, and for that we apologize. And here’s what we plan to do next time a situation like this arises…. This example embodies many principles of risk communication and crisis communication – sharing dilemmas, acknowledging opinion diversity, apologizing for misbehaviors. From the perspective of empathy, what’s important about the example is that it doesn’t just bring stakeholders’ mistrust and disapproval into the room. It validates those reactions and expresses partial agreement with them. My clients generally find proactive acknowledgment profoundly counterintuitive, almost incomprehensible. Albeit reluctantly, they get that it’s important to acknowledge the truth (or partial truth) of accusations that people are actually leveling against them, when in fact those accusations are true (or partially true). The only alternative would be a dishonest denial, and they know that’s unwise as well as wrong. And after a short struggle they get that it is useful to respond empathically to people’s unarticulated feelings, to bring those feelings into the room. The only alternative would be to let the feelings stay underground, where they’re likely to distort everything else that’s happening in the organization’s stakeholder relations. But they rarely get that it can make sense to plead guilty before they’re accused. Isn’t that doing their detractors’ dirty work for them? And yet the principle that underlies proactive acknowledgment is one of the best-established principles in all of social science. It goes back to research in the 1950s by Hovland and others into one-sided versus two-sided For [email protected] Property of Bookemon, do NOT distribute 151