Dim lights

COUNSELOR/COUNSELING/ADVISING

INTERVIEWER: The aim of the Arthur W. Page Center at Penn State and at the Arthur W. Page Society is to help individuals become counselors to leadership. How can individuals best prepare themselves for that role?

WRIGHT: There are two schools of thought in the answer to this question. One of those schools is that well, we’re sort of born into the nurturing business. Whether or not you’re going to be an effective counselor will be determined at birth. The other is that you can learn it as you go along, and I’m very much in the latter school. A good word for counseling is coaching. We tend to, the term coaching—certainly in the United States—we tend to reserve only for people in athletic endeavors. But I think coaching is a good word for counseling, and I think we need to develop good coaches who are not only coaching executives, CEOs, CFOs and other members of the C-suite, but also good at coaching people who report to them, like people at entry and second level positions, I think that that’s important. There are lots of things we can study to do this better. One of the things that I’d like to see is a little bit better relationship between some of the schools of business and schools of management and then some of the schools of communication, because I do think that you are going to be a much more effective counselor if you understand both the management marketing side from the business school, and if you understand the science beneath the art aspects of communications schools, plus the communication techniques that we teach. I think it’s helpful, if going forward, interviews of the nature that you and I are participating in now, addressed this question, because we need to deal with it. I think historically sometimes—well if you go way back historically, we used to hire…the main prerequisite for a job in public relations was that you worked as a journalist. That’s not the case anymore. The main prerequisite to be the physician in the Wild West was that you once worked in the drugstore, and I don’t know too many physicians today that have on their resumes that they used to work at a drugstore. So I think that the education and the training of people who aspire to be senior communications officers in corporations and other organizations should involve some education and development in those areas.

INTERVIEWER: I think that you have to some extent answered this next question already but I’d like to ask it discretely again. What do you see as the status of the counseling role of public relations in the corporate world today? Is it growing in importance or diminishing?

WRIGHT: Yeah, definitely growing. There’s no question that it’s growing. I don’t see how you can practice public relations without involving counseling. One of the weird things about public relations is that we tend to call everybody who does anything even slightly related to public relations, a public relations person. So the person promoting the circus is a public relations person, and then the person counseling the president of the United States on communication matters, also would be referred to as a public relations person. We don’t do that in law enforcement. We don’t look out the window right now and see somebody writing a parking ticket and call that person a lawyer, even though that individual is performing a legal job. And we distinguish…we have…on the legal side we have judges, and we have attorneys—actually we have prosecutors and defenders—we break these categories down so much. It’s the same thing within the other traditional professions. Certainly medicine, we could give all kinds of examples of that, and within divinity, the clergy and so forth and so on. You’ll have bishops and priests and deacons and all sorts of other types of titles. But in public relations—boy, anybody doing anything is classified as a public relations person. I don’t think that way. I think that to be involved in public relations, you must be involved in that part of the practice that involves research and planning and communication and then evaluation at the end of it. So I would take all of these one-way communication people; individuals who are only involved in media relations, only involved in event planning and so forth and so on, and I would call them publicists or I would call them press agents or something like that. And I would strongly argue that counseling is a very integral part of public relations.