Media Training Tip #14: Take Your Own PR Medicine
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Recently, we conducted media training for executives of a start-up that has “phenomenal success” written all over it. The executives are bright, committed and determined to make their company take off. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that after we finished the first of two mock interview sessions we swallowed hard trying to find something positive to say about their performance. Other than no one swore during their interviews, we came up empty-handed with accolades and knew we needed to apply some of our media training to ourselves.
We began and continued with telling them the truth about their current interview skill level. And we used bridging, flagging, anecdotes and examples in our debrief. In essence, we employed all of the media training tools that we had just spent the afternoon discussing.
They took the comments well and were eager to keep working at it until all were satisfied that they could take maximum advantage of the opportunity that an interview would afford them.
And we averted a potential crisis in the making by speaking the truth and not sugar-coating a situation that could have caused everyone, including us, a disaster that would have been tough to turn around.
Being direct with people is the best way to help a client like this. We had a similar situation with a potential design employee this week. Although he was a great person and had the drive and motivation, his portfolio needed a lot of work, and we told him so. It wasn’t so much that we were being harsh on the poor guy – we just wanted to give him something constructive to work with so that someday perhaps he can work here at Orange Element. Nice post!