Chapter 7: Your Staircase to Respect
Chapter 7: Your Staircase to Respect
OVERVIEW
Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are, to some extent, a gift. Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it piece by piece ”by thought, choice, courage and determination.
”John Luther
What does it mean to respect others? We talk about it all the time as if it were truly something laudable. However, viewing the nightly news each evening might lead us to the defensible conclusion that there is an
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Even soul star Aretha Franklin sang for it when all she was asking for was ˜a little respect. Rodney Dangerfield has relied on his line that he can't get any. All they were asking for was to be treated with consideration, for their human qualities to be held in high regard. If we
In this discussion of respect, we'll examine three levels of respect that might provide each of us as individual PR
Figure 7.1:
The staircase to respect
STILL THE MORAL CHILD
Consider the following scenario. Julia has been working for a large, national public relations and marketing firm since she received her PR degree five years ago. She considers herself to be a ˜go-getter. ˜Driven is how most of her
But a new client's file has just landed on her desk and she knows how she can solve their public relations problem and come out looking like a creative genius. There's only one catch. The solution she
After work on Friday, Julia meets two of her old friends from university for a drink at a downtown bar. While they're happily sequestered in a private
˜You can't do that, says one friend, the PR director of a small IT company. ˜It's wrong.
˜I agree, says the other friend, a media relations consultant. ˜What would you do if you got caught?
It seems that Julia's friends, both in the same field as she is, are in agreement: using that piece of proprietary information for her own gain, or even the gain of a client, shouldn't be done. Are they right? Their answers might be the same, but their motivations for them are quite different. Is one of these friends more right than the other? The answer depends upon how important it is to you to do the right thing for the right reasons. And the reasons we act ethically depend largely on the level of moral development that we are demonstrating at that point, limited by the extent to which we have developed at all.
