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:
- Examine one’s life for the lessons that were shared with others. What did others learn from the applicant?
- Reach back and contact those whose lives the applicant has affected. What value came from knowing the applicant?
- 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.