Category: Jim’s Wisdom

7 Strategies to Wage Peace and Reduce Contention

Wherever there is conflict, confrontation, and crisis, there is contention. In today’s social media-dominated world, working to resolve important issues, the questions and decisions often become very contentious and ends only after one side is beaten and leaves the field; there is a mutual withdrawal; or most commonly, one side wins and the other side stays angry.

Winning, it turns out, is rarely about getting 51 percent of individuals or groups to concur or comply; it’s about getting 51 percent of those who matter. This thinking leads to an Axiom and a Law.

Lukaszewski’s 1st Axiom of Winning in Contentious Situations:

Almost every decision of any consequence is made despite serious, often powerful collateral contentiousness. The media can be mad or support someone else, some of your neighbors can be irritated, even your employees can be against you, but stay the course, be optimistic, be constructive in your approach, and you can win.

Lukaszewski’s Law of Success and Survival: 

Neither the media, your severest critic, angry neighbors, irritated legislators, nor regulators can truly stop what you have set out to accomplish. The most significant damage is almost always caused by the intervention, timidity, or hesitation of an overoptimistic boss or Board; well-meaning friends, “supporters,” or relatives; and failure to address the true issues raised by those who feel victimized.

These seven principles and components of a strategic approach for winning:

  1. Wage peace every day: Reduce the production of critics, enemies, and victims at every opportunity. Talk tough, act tough, or threaten and you will have war for sure. War produces casualties, victims, and new critics, all of whom will live long enough to destroy, delay, or deny your best efforts.
  2. Reduce contention: Contention is the absence of agreement. Work for agreement, incrementally, every day. Stop causing contention. Offer constructive options.
  3. Seek permission rather than entitlement: Getting permission depends upon gaining public agreement and consent. Avoid and resist anything, anyone, or any decision that delays, denies, disables, or damages the permission process. Act like you’re entitled to a public decision and you’ll really be stopped cold.
  4. Control testosterosis: Anger, irritation, frustration, and confrontation cloud judgment, damage relationships, cause misunderstandings, create critics and naysayers, and rarely accomplish anything good. Stop taking contrary views and negative messages personally. The only one who is suffering from this is you. No one else cares. Remain calm and carry on, constructively.
  5. Be democratic: Recognize and leverage from the patterns of democracy, and avoid political games and game players. All those people have their own egos and agendas. They will dump you in a minute.
  6. Work as directly as you can: Like most everything that matters in life, agreement is generally achieved when the principals commit to sit down face-to-face, bring in other affected parties, and directly work out their differences. Engagement builds stakeholder support and reduces the production of critics.
  7. Communicate intentionally: Success depends on simple, sensible, positive, declarative, and constructive communication, common sense, direct, prompt action, empathy, transparency, and engagement. Explain and constantly remind everyone of your communication and behavior intentions so they will know what to expect and how to behave in return.

Over the 40 years I’ve been helping clients get public permission, communities, critics, individuals, and organized opposition have consistently grown more intense and powerful in their ability to stop or significantly alter the plans of even the worthiest projects and powerful companies. With social media and the ability to marshal the power of AI, the number of dedicated human opposers will continue to grow.

The big lesson is that you can often achieve your objectives with people being upset, the media angry, your employees split, and in communities that may be more divided than unified. This document is the recipe for success.

Winning depends on altitude (keeping calm), attitude (focusing on the goal), and avoiding distractions.

  1. Candor: Public trust depends on receiving information well ahead of their actual need for it. The most toxic strategy is to fail to answer every question, provide key information after it is truly needed, or work to disparage, demean, or discredit those who oppose or have concerns about the project, and go to the trouble of making them public. Or, refuse to communicate. Silence will be toxic to you.
  2. Patience: Accomplishing your goals is going to take longer than you ever imagined, even to achieve interim milestones.
  3. Resources: Success will defy financial management. More money will be spent, requested, or required for things one never imagined would happen.
  4. Stomach Power: Set your stomach for all the lies, misunderstandings, deceptions, bad behaviors, and misrepresentations created by angry, frightened, unqualified people and victims with real power, combined with a willing media, and the outrageous motives they will ascribe to you, with all of your explanations, good work, and intentions just bouncing off.
  5. Staying Power: Community decision making is slow, sometimes silly, even stupid, sloppy, expensive, confusing, and emotionally driven. Settle back and go with the flow. Kick up, kick out, and you’ll go nowhere pretty quickly.
  6. Pragmatism: Winning means constantly waging peace and re-acquiring community consent daily. It means relentlessly doing the doable, knowing the knowable, getting the getable, and achieving the achievable. 
  7. Recognize Victory: Contention often masks victory. Be alert, be helpful, to ready to capture victory when it first appears.

If democracy is one thing, it is a process. Those who propose, if they can stay the course, can expect to achieve less than they had hoped (sometimes far less), but usually wind up with more than they need to successfully achieve their objectives, which are likely to change as the community has its say. If you believe that you are entitled to get what you are asking for, you are entitled only to disappointment.

Your goal is to help work preemptively, constructively, and productively to shorten the timelines and lower the barriers that are inevitable byproducts of public decision making. Wage peace and win earlier, if winning is possible at all.

©2026, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

For more than 40 years I have been teaching and pleading about ways to handle crises effectively. Given that the number of crises has remained the same during that time frame, I’m going to take a different approach.

But first, let me share my philosophy about crisis management and mismanagement.

How Problems Become Crises

Almost all crises begin as smaller, manageable organizational or leadership problems. Problems migrate into crises for three crucial reasons:

  1. Management ignores problematic issues in their formative stages before actual crises begin happening.
  2. All crises create victims, and they are intentionally ignored, and often defensively attacked. It is a behavior that is learned both in management school and as a practice by upper-level managers and leaders.  I refer to this often as “cohort domination.” It’s like calling your cohort member or mom before you call the fire department.
  3. Knowing intuitively what the correct steps are likely to be, but refusing to go in that direction, because it’s irritating, it’s an admission of failure, or you want to try something different just for the hell of it. That’s called, “Risk addiction.”

The Seven Intentional Bungles

  1. Offensive Defensiveness: It feels good to stick it to the media, it’s okay to look like a perpetrator, and smart people will admire this approach. Even though there will be criticism, I’ll take that risk. The risk is taken because the odds are only 50/50 that the situation will even be seen as a crisis.
  2. Stalling: Look, doing nothing is equal in potential outcomes to doing something. Even though there will be difficulty in explaining why it took so long to talk, to explain, to respond, to care for victims, you’re tired of having people you don’t know (particularly the media) fail to commiserate with your problems about which they know absolutely nothing.
  3. Denial, Denial, Denial: Taking action is too often a demonstration of weakness and lack of confidence. You can’t let a bunch of questionable victims, people you don’t believe, and money grabbers dictate your response activities and those of your organization.
  4. Ignore the Complainers: Reporters and activists are bellyachers and make things up. People fail to take into consideration all the things we contribute to the economy–jobs and opportunity. The victims just want money and attention, which they haven’t earned and do not deserve. We are real Victims, too. Why don’t the media and our critics see that?
  5. Testosterosis: “My attorney is right to suggest that we need to punch back rather than cop out.” Refusing to give in to specious demands, especially to people who simply have uninformed views, is a legitimate management response. Landing the first punch will keep them off-balance and make them go away faster.
  6. Being Decisively Indecisive: If we appear to take responsibility, bad things are going to happen to us. We will look like weaklings to our industry, colleagues, and cohort. We don’t want to be the one to set a precedent that burdens the industry or triggers copycat behaviors.
  7. Empty Empathy: There are worse perpetrators. The real culprits must be defined as people who can and should take the blame for what’s happening. It can’t be us. No one is going to be allowed to stick this on me, or on my company. Who is looking for them?

    There are many more eligible bungles; but do even one or two of these listed above, and your crisis status will only accelerate and become more complex.

    ©2026, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

If you’ve ever read any of my stuff, attended my webinars, speeches, or public presentations, you know of my strong belief in the power of positive language and the destructive nature of “no,” negative language, and negative thinking. 

This is a story about one of the most remarkable salespeople I ever worked with and learned from in my life, Andy Johnson. 

Andy’s story is quite remarkable. He never finished high school. His first job was moving boxes in the shipping department of the Music Den in downtown Philadelphia in mid-20th century. 

One summer there was a brutal flu outbreak that affected thousands of people. In fact, so the story goes, at the height of the epidemic, just a handful of employees showed up to run the five-story Music Den’s downtown headquarters store. Andy was assigned to the first floor – where both sheet music and small electronics, such as radios, were sold. 

Andy was instructed by Mr. Schmitt, the founder, to only sell boxed radios and not the display units that belonged to the vendor company. When Mr. Schmitt checked in a couple of hours later, he was stunned to see that all of the radios in the display cases were gone. Before talking with Andy, he took a slight detour and checked the storage rooms where new merchandise was waiting to be sold. Turns out that those rooms were empty, too. Mr. Schmitt then went looking for Andy, who was on the sales floor talking to customers.

Instead of chewing Andy out, Mr. Schmitt asked a question that changed Andy’s life, “What are you doing in the loading dock hauling boxes when you can sell so well?” Andy answered simply, “Nobody asked me.” Andy’s career was a bit meteoric after that.

When I met Andy in 1966, he was selling stereo components and breaking all previous sales records in the department. After reading his personnel file and reviewing his sales records, I was very curious about his award-winning sales methods and being the busy father of seven children.

Andy’s approach was quite simple. At the beginning of each year, he sat down with his wife and figured out how much income they would need. Andy would write that number at the top of a sheet of paper, and using a formula the company gave him, he converted the commission rate into a gross sales number for the year. Seven and a half percent commission from every sale – from a $25 headset to a $3,000 stereo system – was subtracted from the big sales number he had to reach. When I saw this, I made the remark that it was a pretty negative way to motivate himself to make his sales goals. I was 24-year-old learning how to be a department manager. I will remember his response for the rest of my life.

Andy said that every single year, he made his sales quota and his commission quota by the end of August. That left September, October, November, and December, the heaviest selling months for musical instruments and musical anything. His way over-the-top sales in the last four months of every year made him the super salesman that he was.

Despite his truly amazing and systematic approach, and great memory of his customers, his batting average at the point of sale was average for retail sales, about 10% to 15%. I asked Andy how he handled all the “no” responses he got as a salesperson. His answer was quick. With a laugh he said, “I believe that a no is simply a short stop on the way to yes.”

Andy had learned that he could have a longer-term relationship with many customers. Even those who said “no” were likely to buy from him eventually. He stayed in touch with everyone he talked to periodically. Andy Johnson showed me that even “no” can become a powerfully positive and constructive “Yes!” “No is just a short stop on the way to yes,” has been a major driver of my career, my attitude about life, and my optimism about most everything that happens to me and those I care about. Who knows, it could probably work for you.

©2026, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

2026 Edition

The Personal Search for Ideal Behavior

Now is the time of year when senior public relations practitioners are beginning work on applications for selection to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) College of Fellows. As I begin my 32nd year as a PRSA Fellow (I’m also an International Association of Business Communicators [IABC] Fellow), it’s interesting to reflect on the experiences of all those I have coached and mentored over the years, on my way to becoming a Fellow in both organizations. Just about everyone comes to the Fellow’s process with few clues about what being a Fellow is.

It’s About Your Footprint.

Becoming a Fellow is really all about the footprint applicants leave and have left on our profession, the community, and perhaps in even larger communities. There are Fellows who worked their entire careers in a single market and left a powerful footprint. There are Fellows who worked in a single state and left a significant footprint. There are Fellows who worked regionally and nationally and, in the process, left meaningful footprints everywhere they practiced.

What Are You Leaving Behind for Those Who Follow?

Gone are the grades, points, likes, ratings, gold stars, and constant competition and competitiveness of the applicant’s former daily practice. Your life becomes about what you leave behind through your time, talent, energy, and choices invested in, but often not acknowledged, the success of others… and the success they invest in the achievements of yet others. Now your best of show is about the best of show others achieve with your guidance, interest, energy, and coaching.

Step Out of the Limelight to Make Room for Others.

Your career’s focus shifts to taking a step out of the limelight so others can take or own their share of success, just as you did yours, and likely better because of you.

Find the Most Important Things You May Ever Do.

You’ll routinely be doing some of the most important, interesting, and personally rewarding career work known only to those you help and those they help.

A “footprint” is about the quality of practice and the level of influence rather than how many projects are done, for whom, or for what organizations they are completed. This is the hardest part of understanding what becoming a Fellow really means. It is such a mindset shift from counting projects and activities and raising your hand for recognition to really understanding personal impact, ideas, behaviors, and ethics that help others become better practitioners, citizens, public officials, leaders, more honorable advisors, and people of professional and personal substance.

Understand Your Personal Impact and Influence.

The footprint goes beyond activities within the public relations profession. It is about the impact and influence of the applicant in their vicinity, marketplace, industry, and profession. It’s about how applicants use their influence, experience, insights, and presence to make change happen – bringing reality and/or sensibility as well as reducing contention and bringing peace to contentious parties. It’s about helping start things that matter and often about stopping those things that don’t. It could be the preservation or introduction of core community values and interests. Or it could be finding and applying ideal behavior through the guidance of the PRSA or another organization’s Code of Ethics.

The Shift Is from Proficiency and Skill to Leadership and Impact.

I think sometimes it’s easy to mistake proficiency or expertise for leadership or impact on others. Those who wish to analyze their careers, to assess and develop their footprint, ultimately go through an interesting and introspective analysis of their lives and work. These are the steps I recommend:

  1. Examine one’s life for the lessons that were shared with others. What did others learn from the applicant?
  2. Reach back and contact those whose lives the applicant has affected. What value came from knowing the applicant?
  3. Ask those who have known, worked, and benefited from the applicant’s efforts, presence, and insights to answer five basic questions:
  • What is/are/were the most important things, ideas, or concepts that these individuals learned from the applicant?
  • What is/are/were the most interesting things, ideas, or concepts learned or remembered?
  • What is/are/were those things these individuals feel they might never have learned had the applicant been absent from their lives? What do they know now that mattered that they didn’t know before because they met the applicant, whatever the circumstance?
  • What meaningful questions did the applicant help others to confront, consider, or explore that might not have happened had the applicant not been present?
  • How has knowing the applicant changed people’s lives?
  • How has the applicant’s life sought, found, and applied Ideal (ethical) Behavior? *

Your Impact and Impressions on Others Will Grow.

These questions matter because once a practitioner becomes a Fellow, all of these impacts and significant impressions on others continue and intensify. It is more than an honor to be selected as a Fellow. This selection is a personal and public recommitment to helping our profession and our professionals find ways to improve their skills. Yes, but also to begin to look at their practices and their practice circumstances from larger and broader social and cultural perspectives.

You Will Reinterpret Your Achievement Metrics from a Deeper Perspective.

Becoming a Fellow is about reinterpreting your professional metrics from entirely different and deeper perspectives. It’s about understanding what matters, what is helpful, what is sensible, and often, what is powerfully simple and true. Helping others do the same. It is about intentional professional integrity, honesty, and having a truly meaningful personal and professional life.

It’s your advocacy and modeling of ideal behavior that earns the distinction of being a Fellow.

You know who you are. Reach out to those who really know you and a Goodfellow to help.

So, go for it!

Get an application. Start your application today.

Feel free to share this document with anyone you think should apply to be a Fellow.

* American Philosopher Will Durant’s, “Plain Language Definitions of Ethics,” in the Introduction, page xxvii, to The Story of Philosophy © 1926-1961, Simon and Shuster paperback edition.

(And You’re Missing an Enormous Credibility, Trust, and Integrity Building Opportunity)

Asking people to ask questions often is irritating and disappointing to clients and audiences. No matter how sincere you are, this question implies laziness or feels like you don’t care. Worse, to some you appear to be holding back information you know that they probably should have. To be a better leader or a truly successful and important Trusted Strategic Advisor, take control of all question opportunities. Rather than asking people to ask questions, suggest questions people should be asking and, if you can, answer them. Clients and audiences will be totally surprised, pleased, and grateful. They will remember you.

Asking people to ask questions shuts off the conversation, and a powerful opportunity to communicate, educate, and energize the people you’re helping is lost. As a leader or Trusted Strategic Advisor, you want to do more in every aspect of your work for the people you’re advising. This is a powerful moment for recipients. 

Ending a conversation with, “Let me know if you have questions,” happens so frequently to just about everyone that we are only slightly angry or irritated when it happens. We shrug our shoulders and make our way through our lives without the information we were hoping to obtain.

My wife of 56 years, Barbara, had cancer toward the end of her life. She had two really wonderful oncologists – one was medicine-related and the other was a surgeon. Barbara really loved these two people as she worked through the terrifying cancer experience.

It is hard to believe how accidentally callous smart people can be. “If you have any questions, just call me, I’m available 24/7.” Shame on you.

In my case, it was very stressful. We were new to the cancer trail. We were always left sucking wind, not knowing the questions we’re supposed to ask. Out of frustration, I called our helpful general practitioner. These doctors leave the scene when the experts show up. I complained that we just don’t know what questions to ask. His response was, “Do you have a pencil?” He gave me 54 questions, none of which we would ever have thought of. The way he structured the questions, we could see how helpful it would have been had we known and expected these questions and answers earlier in the process.

At our next oncologist appointment, I mentioned our concern about not knowing what questions to ask, and that, perhaps, our experts could think about what we should be asking. They instantly responded and were quite generous in helping us know more sooner. They were constantly suggesting things we should think about.

I tell this story because it gets the point across clearly. Barbara survived her cancer.

I’ve used this technique in all the consulting that I’ve done. I anticipate the fact that potential questions may be building up in the minds of the people I’m helping, but that they are reluctant to voluntarily interrupt what we’re doing to get the questions answered. Or worse, they can’t listen because they’re preoccupied trying to figure out what they should be asking.

I want to replace that frustration with the surprise that someone could actually be so thoughtful.  

Here are some of the personal interrupters I use as a speaker or presenter to help the audience with questions:

  1. “At this point in the conversation, I almost always get these three questions. You might want to consider them as well.” Then I provide the questions. And since I know what the questions are going to be, I already know what the answers are. You can actually pull a double surprise – you help them resolve their stress about having questions and answer the questions, or tell them how you plan to get those questions answered.
  2. Another technique I use is to say, “If you have a question, please interrupt me so we can respond, answer, or work on them right away. I love being interrupted.” The most important reason I use this technique is because it almost always triggers additional questions, which I might never have heard and they might never have asked. People almost always comment on how unexpectedly helpful what we’re talking about became when I interrupt myself with my little Q&A gambit.
  3. At some point, I do ask if there are any more questions. If no hands go up, I say, “Well, I can think of a few more.” Then I ask and answer them.
  4. Another way I interrupt myself is to do just that, pausing and saying, “Let me share how I think about this or how I came to these ideas to help you better remember why they might be valuable for you in your situation.”
  5. Take control of the questions. Use them to build confidence in you.

What you’ll find if you behave this way is more access, more impact, more cooperation, and more trust. It’s a simple way to wear your empathy, integrity, and trustability on your sleeve.

©2025, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

“How do I get these good people I have been so loyal to over the years to hear me again and do what I tell them?”

The most frequent question I’m asked by senior practitioners is: “Jim, how did you get executives and bosses to change their minds and their ways? I have been with my leader for many years, I trust her, I like her, we work well together, but it’s impossible to change her mind on so many things. I think she knows what’s right but persists in doing something else. She’s consulting me less and less, and there are more surprises. How would you, America’s Crisis Guru®, convince her to change?”

At this point, I usually ask how long these individuals have been seeking changes. Many say, “From the day they arrived.” “How long ago was that?” “Eons,” is the response they say with a sigh.

This quote from a frustrated boss says it all: “I have enjoyed working with this person for a long time, but they insist on new ways to do things. It’s frustrating. The reason I’m here until nine at night is because I haven’t gotten today’s and yesterday’s work done. A new idea has to be somewhat sensational to get my attention.” Do you get it?

I have a 10-day rule on proposing or persisting in proposing new ideas:

  1. If they don’t jump on the proposal immediately, I wait 10 days.
    Then I provide a not-so-subtle reminder.
    If there is no response or acknowledgment, I forget that idea and move on to another. One thing about creative people is that we waste ideas, actually throw ideas out in the trash every day. Grab one out of the trash and give it a fresh start.
    Way too many senior people have a collection of persistently ignored suggestions in the hopes of having some kind of breakthrough… which almost never happens.
  2. Senior leaders make decisions on suggestions and ideas almost immediately. These are adults making adult decisions. They are paid to quickly decide everything. And they do. When they see you coming down the hall, they duck into the first doorway to avoid talking to you, take the hint. Their decision not to talk with you is immediate, intentional, and generally permanent.
    Too many senior people have stuck around in the belief that, over time, change will occur. This is simply a false assumption. It’s based on the equally false assumption that if we are good, smart, loyal, and pleasantly persistent, at some point they will again start listening to us. That’s one of the times it’s important to consider moving on. Once they turn you off, they will rarely turn you on again.
  3. There are countless, disappointed, truly good senior people who believe, sadly and falsely, that they will be listened to at some point in the future. Some crises will befall their leader and the leader will be forced to turn to the trusted helper for assistance. What really happens is the leader ends up hiring outsiders, fresh faces, a new team is formed, and you’re not invited. Some loyal subordinates have spent years waiting.
  4. Loyalty has limits always controlled by somebody else. Time to set your own.
  5. There is one situation that demands your immediate and decisive action. If the behaviors to be changed are outrageous, unconscionable, questionable, borderline illegal, actually illegal, clearly stupid, hurtful, or abusive, you have only one choice: get out of there as fast as possible. Leaders who behave this way will never change and will always try to co-opt you into doing something you can never tell your mother, wife, or daughter about.
    If you stay, despite your good intentions, you become an enabler, a co-conspirator, and a collaborator. When behaviors get corrected, which usually involves the departure of bad actors, you will get the boot too, and you should.
  6. Loyalty is a two-way street. The moment it becomes obvious you are on a one-way path out, as hard as it is, it’s time to move on. Too many good people have stayed on for what seemed to be good reasons, but wound up disaffected, disappointed, dissatisfied, trapped by false, unreturned loyalty. Once this happens, your heart, your gut, and your friends may tell you, “Staying will be worth it in the end.” It never is. In fact, the end happened some time ago. But the feelings of sadness, betrayal, and failure remain forever.
  7. When there is avoidance, excuses, doubt, and exclusion, leave. You’ll immediately be happier, sleep a lot better, and you will suddenly become a happier, better parent, partner, friend, and neighbor.
    Life is about happiness, which only you can create for yourself…Some place else.


You might find it useful to review Insidious Unethical Behaviors.

Original © 2006, James E. Lukaszewski, The Lukaszewski Group, Inc. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting forbidden.

Senior executive staff ranks are full of strong-willed people who choose or learn how to be loyal to a CEO. That loyalty may be situational (by choice or pathological-sucking up).

In the case of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, the relationship with a senior leader is less about blind loyalty and more about a higher level of objectivity and perspective. By keeping perspective, I mean always remaining at some altitude, some constructive distance to ensure that the advice given or taken is truly the most valuable, objective, helpful, and ethical.             

The key question for you as the Trusted Strategic Advisor is, what are the indicators that should cause you to question your loyalty, or at a minimum, raise serious questions of those to whom you have provided advice? There are patterns of suspect organizational leadership behavior to look for that, ironically, generally begin inside the top executive ranks.

The presence of even one or two of these indicators in your working environment is a very serious matter. The Federal Sentencing guidelines of 1991 list fifty of what are called Predicate Behaviors, inappropriate activities to look for that signal serious potential trouble. Here’s a sample:

  1. Lack of tough, appropriate, centralized compliance within areas of the company.
  2. Leadership that allows supervisors to overlook bad behavior.
  3. Structuring incentives in such a way that they can compromise the ethical behavior toward the quality of products and services.
  4. Permitting shortcuts.
  5. Doing “whatever it takes” to achieve inappropriate business and financial goals.
  6. Demeaning and disparaging compliance efforts and those doing compliance work.

Establish a Personal Integrity Barrier, Your Own Loyalty Limits

Write them down and be prepared on a moment’s notice to explain those limits. This exercise alone will prepare you to provide a service of extraordinary value to those you advise. Especially if it prevents, helps detect, or deters activities or plans that will be regretted later… or that would cause harm to others.

Original © 2006, James E. Lukaszewski, The Lukaszewski Group, Inc. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting forbidden.

Eight Steps to Rebuilding and Rehabilitating Trust

Seeking Forgiveness is society’s requirement for relationship, trust, and credibility restoration. Adverse situations using this template remediate faster, cost a lot less, are controversial for much shorter periods of time, suffer less litigation, and help the victims come to closure more quickly. Obtaining forgiveness involves completing the nine steps below. To achieve success in the shortest possible time, these steps should be initiated and completed as quickly as possible: like, start them all today. Skip a step or be insincere and the process will be incomplete and fundamentally fail.

Step #1  Candor:  Outward recognition, through promptly verbalized public acknowledgement (or outright apology), that a problem exists; that people or groups of people, the environment, or the public trust are affected; and that something will be done to remediate the situation.

Step #2  Explanation (No matter how silly, stupid, or embarrassing the problem-causing error was):  Promptly and briefly explain why the problem occurred and the known underlying reasons or behaviors that led to the situation (even if we have only partial early information).

Step #3    Affirmation:  Talk about what you’ve learned from the situation and how it will influence your future behavior.  Unconditionally commit to regularly report additional information until it is all out or until no public interest remains.

Step #4  Declaration:  A public commitment and discussion of specific, positive steps to be taken to conclusively address the issues and resolve the situation.

Step #5  Contrition:  The continuing verbalization of regret, empathy, sympathy, even embarrassment.  Take appropriate responsibility for having allowed the situation to occur in the first place, whether by omission, commission, accident, or negligence.

Step #6  Certification:  Promptly ask for help and counsel from “victims,” government, the community of origin, independent observers, and even from your opponents.  Directly involve and request the participation of those most directly affected to help develop more permanent solutions, more acceptable behaviors, and to design principles and approaches that will preclude similar problems from re-occurring.  Accept outside oversight or independent monitoring to certify that what you say you will do is what you do.

Step #7  Commitment:  Publicly set your goals at zero.  Zero errors, zero defects, zero dumb decisions, and zero problems.  Publicly promise that to the best of your ability situations like this will never occur again.

Step #8  Restitution:  Find a way to quickly pay the price.  Make or require restitution.  Go beyond community and victim expectations, and what would be required under normal circumstances to remediate the problem.

*©2006-2025, James E. Lukaszewski. All rights reserved. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting forbidden.

The Roadmap to an Ethical Culture

By James E. Lukaszewski – ABC, Fellow IABC, APR, Fellow PRSA, BEPS Emeritus

This document was originally developed some 20 years ago following an incredibly serious incident involving a very reputable medical product company and their illegal altering of two key medical products, that were sold to the public without FDA approval. A couple dozen patients died and several hundred needed to have the devices that were inserted in their bodies surgically removed and their bodies repaired.

It was, at the time, a disaster for the company. But amazingly, the company hired an ethics expert who I advised. A tremendous number of employees and many stakeholder groups were interviewed to determine just how management should have behaved in this crucial and catastrophic event. The results of a couple of years of work were boiled down into this single powerful page. I commend it to you as a model based on real-life experience for how executives should act in an ethical manner during an ethical crisis, and, well, every single day.

The Roadmap to an Ethical Culture

  1. Find the truth as soon as possible: Tell that truth and act on it promptly.
  2. Promptly raise the tough questions and answer them thoughtfully: This includes asking and answering questions yet to be asked or thought of by those who will be affected by whatever the circumstance is.
  3. Teach by parable: Emphasizing wrong-way/right-way options. Brief true stories, that are people-oriented, in plain language, positive, with self-evident truths, constructive lessons, morals, purposes, and powerful action instructions.
  4. Vocalize core business values and ideals constantly: Many core value statements are ideas thought up on a management golf outing, brought in on the back of a clubhouse napkin, then printed and posted without another word being spoken. The values and ideals of a business should be what employees and others bring to work every day.
  5. Walk the talk: Be accessible; help people understand the organization within the context of its values and ideals at every opportunity.
  6. Help, expect, and enforce ethical leadership: People are watching their leaders; people are counting; people know when there are lapses in ethics causing trust to be broken. When bad things happen in good organizations, it’s those occasional lapses that deepen the troubles.
  7. Preserve, protect, defend, and foster ethical pathways to the top of the organization: Constantly identify, explain, explore, and warn about situations where ethical processes can be compromised, especially among more junior executives who are on upward career trajectories.
  8. Be a cheerleader, model, and teacher of ethical behavior: Ethical behavior builds and maintains trust. In fact, to have trust in an organization requires that its leaders act ethically constantly.
  9. Make values at least equal to profits or personal gain: Most people seem to enjoy working more in organizations they respect, people they trust, and leadership they can rely on.
  10. Value everyone and be respectful: Being respected has a more personal impact than any perk, recognition, accolade, or even raises. Feelings of acceptance and respect are the two principle forces that drive employees back to work every day.

The Lesson

The main lesson of this roadmap is that it is continuously used, reused, explained, and reinterpreted at every meeting, gathering, event, and circumstance where employees and perhaps their families are gathering. Where, the most junior executive or manager in the room steps up and picks one of these pathways and tells a story, solicits other stories from the people in the audience. The habit is developed where one of these values is talked about at every opportunity.

The Script for the Conversations

  1. What are the most important aspects we should consider about this particular pathway?
  2. What are the most interesting things we can think about when employing this pathway?
  3. What are the most memorable aspects of this particular pathway?
  4. What questions does this pathway raise that our organization needs to respond and clarify?
  5. What will be done differently tomorrow based on what we talked about today?

©2024 James E. Lukaszewski

For information on reprinting or for the use of this material, editing is not permitted, contact the Copyright holder at jel@e911.com.