New and scary job duty: hopefully a hypothetical scenario

Let’s say your boss announces this week that he’s resigning. You like this boss, as do most of your co-workers, so he will be missed.

But that’s not the first thing that comes to mind when he announces he’s leaving. No, the first thing that comes to mind are the job duties he’s bravely taken the initiative to do. Job duties that, depending on who is his replacement, will probably get broken up and distributed amongst the group.

One of the job duties that has a serious likelihood of dropping into your chute is to do the biannual press conference on the state’s water quality. Out of everyone in the office you would be the logical choice based on your job duties.

Now, you aren’t averse to public speaking. You’re pretty good at doing prepared talks. But you are horrible–I mean, absolutely HORRIBLE!–at answering questions off the cuff. Especially (you imagine) with microphones and cameras all up in your face, and reporters trying to trip you up with “gotcha” questions! Especially when most of the questions will not be scientific in nature, but more related to policy and stuff that people will be able to relate to (like, “Is it safe to swim in X River? What about the little boy who died this summer? Will that happen again?!” Whatever you say that goes off the agency script can be turned into a headline. You can be demoted or fired based on any little thing you answer incorrectly.

If it were a matter of giving talks in front of small civic groups or something, you wouldn’t be that worried, even if there was some Q&A involved. But representing the agency in front of the state-wide press, seeing yourself on TV and in the paper and on the radio? That’s a whole 'nother can of beans. Scary beans that you feel like, if you were told you had to do this, you’d either consider quitting (which wouldn’t be wise) or at least ask for some more compensation (a request that wouldn’t be granted in this present climate).

So what would you do? Right now you have no new boss and no one has proposed anything. Chances are the new boss wouldn’t even know about the press conference–not even his supervisor knows about it because she’s new as well. The new boss would likely be clueless about a lot of things, so he or she may not be the best choice to do the press conference. On the other hand, the press conference would not be until early spring, so it’s not like you don’t have time to prepare. There’s Toastmasters and stuff like that, although that kind of thing would be an energy-sucking chore to commit to, requiring you to amend your work schedule to attend the meetings and do exercises that will make you stabby and probably depressed. But maybe you wouldn’t even have to do the damn press conference. Maybe the new boss will take on the task because he/she would believe that as the department head, he/she should be the face of the agency, not some underling making half his salary. So there’s some hope, simply because you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Anyway, what would you do? Would you simply not mention the press conference to the new boss? Would you back out of it or boldly “step up to the plate”, even though you don’t feel your current salary would be adequete compensation for such an important task? You are not the ambitious type, so it’s not like you would want to reap the extra benefits that might come with having done a job well done. Not even money. You just want to keep your job, and the best way to do this would be, in your estimation, to stay out of the spotlight and simply assist the person who is brave enough to face it.

It’s your boss’ responsibility, and also his/her (from hereon, just “his”) prerogative to delegate. But any decent boss won’t delegate to the unwilling or the unable, so just be one of those.

I would do all the work to set up the press conference for the new boss to preside over.

You can be the puppetmaster!

I would suggest this person get some media training so they would feel more confident answering off the cuff questions.

I have to think that a “step up to the plate” attitude will serve you best in the long run. You don’t have to jump up and volunteer for it, but should your new boss ask you to handle the press conference, do it. Be honest about your self-perceived shortcomings and see if you can do Toastmasters or something similar on the company’s dime. Then handle whatever your boss assigns you to the best of your ability.

The wrong answer is “I’ll do it if you pay me more,” but know that next time your salary is up for review, you’ll have something impressive to point to when arguing for a bigger-than-usual raise.

Good luck!

What is the fear regarding Q&A? If someone asks “Is it safe to swim in the water,” if the answer is not officially “yes” or “no,” can’t you just say “we can’t comment at this time” or something? How would you get fired because of that?

If you need ideas about what to say if you have no clue, I would suggest watching all of Christine O’Donnell’s interviews. She doesn’t know the answer to anything anyone asks her.

Right, you need some training. This is a skill which can be taught. And if your employer is any kind of decent, they’ll find you the exact course you need.

You might even come to enjoy it!

You’ve never been a boss, have you? If everyone only got to work on tasks they liked, no one would clean shit for a living.

Both are wrong answers.

The “right” answer is one where you aren’t committing you or the agency to any position.

If I say “X River is safe to swim in” and someone goes swimming in it and gets sick, then that leaves the agency open for lawsuits and embarrassing headlines. Imagine the headline “Family mourns while state official insists water is safe”.

So you say, “No, the water is not safe to swim in.” Suddenly people start panicking because they just went swimming in it and how dare the state not do anything about it OMG!!!

What you should say is, “You take a chance whenever you swim in any body of water, and this goes for polluted as well as clean waters.”

I don’t like such canned responses, but I can handle them.

My problem is the inevitable follow-up to this PC answer. “So is X River polluted or not?” The truth is not easy to give and in a panic, one might be tempted to say “yes” or “no” or “I don’t know”. But the truth (“Some parts are polluted, others are not, and for the rest we have no idea”) is not satisfactory either. I’m not sure, but I believe the “right” answer is, “Our report and the links on our website have the details needed to answer this question.”

There’s another reason you don’t go deeper than this. You are not going to know X River’s intimate details, because the state has thousands of X Rivers. And Y lakes. And Z estuaries.

Really, I’m more worried about how I sound versus what I say. When I get flustered, I really get flustered. I sound like I’ve just had a lobotomy or something. I really hate it!

I think if the topic gets brought up, I will say I will do it, but I need the appropriate training and a lot of it. And I will need prepping by the public relations guy as well as my division director. They cannot expect me to perform well in something clearly out of my comfort zone, outside of my work plan, without providing some assistance.

This sounds like the right answer.

If I were you, and I knew that this issue was a serious possibility, I’d go proactive and frame it as a positive, as in: “I expect that there will be a need for public speaking, and it would be a good investiment if you pay for this and that course for me”. That way, it looks more like your initative, even if it is merely a dreaded inevitability.

Fair enough (and I should have used a more specific example), but isn’t making that judgment what you’re there for? You can say “you take a chance whenever you X” and it’ll always be true, but not that useful. That’s not a criticism of you; I know that’s what you have to say, and it’s the government after all, but have we really reached a point where we can’t say “Yeah, it’s probably okay, but there’s a slight chance your brain might get eaten by an amoeba” without fearing the response?

ETA: With respect to referring people to the website, also curious why there’s a distinction between a representative saying “Yes, the water might be unsafe” and writing it on a web page.

The press conference is just to provide a general overview. The State of the Commonwealth’s Waters. And it’s to announce that EPA is going to be looking at our findings. It’s not to go into details because there’s not enough time and you can’t know everything. Saying “I don’t know” more than a couple of times is not good.

You are right that the canned answer is bullshit. You know it, the press knows it, and the public knows it. But it’s the safest response. And to be truthful, it’s not actual bullshit. Some waters are polluted but are still safe to swim in. So if you say, “Sure, it’s safe to swim in!” and someone roots around and finds out that the water is impaired for a variety of toxic substances (which do not affect the “swimmability” of a water), then you’ve got to deal with some shit. Either shit on the blogosphere, some reporter thinking you’re pulling the wool over the public’s eyes, or some irate citizen writing the governor, saying we don’t care about the dying children and all. Stuff like this happens even when you say the “right” thing.

Also, we provide the people with a snapshot of a water. If it’s clean in that snapshot, that’s what we report. That’s all we can report. Even the most pristine waters can receive stormwater full of fecal coliform. If a person just happens to go swimming in a fecal plume right after a storm, it doesn’t matter if the water was “clean” when the state examined it. At that instant, the water ain’t clean. People need to know that, but you don’t want to scare them. The press is notorious for picking out the big details and leaving out the qualifiers. So if you say, “Chances are slim that you will get sick swimming in this water, but people still need to use caution,” the press will turn this into, “State official says swimmers need to be cautious in X River.” That’s bad for the towns and counties along that river. And unless you’ve done a risk analysis, you can’t know if the chances are “slim” or not. If there’s a poultry farm upstream, it probably isn’t slim, especially after it rains. It’s easier just to give the wishy-wash answer and not deal with the fall-out.

The few training courses I’ve had in public relations have emphasized the importance of providing succinct, non-detailed information when talking to the public. You come across as terse and robotic, but you keep your job at the end of the day and the agency doesn’t look incompetent. Besides, if someone is really curious, they can simply contact you away from the cameras to get the details they desire.

Good heaven’s, why? Given current computing capabilities, you can give them trends back several decades - if not a full century - with gradually narrowing confidence intervals - which, of course, mean nothing except that computing capabilities have been improving, but even the people who know that will be subtly impressed.

You can bury them in data, so they won’t know what the best questions are for three or four days.

You can also give them potentially useful information, like water quality plotted as a function of days after the storm - “Don’t go swimming until three days after flood high water” is useful.

Anyhow, back to the original question, I would collate the data, develop several charts for the present to select from, and, when asked, admit I really did not want a higher profile, I just wanted to keep making my boss look good.

If forced to do the press conference, learn to Stay On Message. But insist the Boss define the message.

I do media training as part of my job and here is my best advice as quick as I can give it:

  1. Be your company on it’s best day

  2. Talk to the target audience, not the camera (for example, if you are making an announcement about the water, speak to the families that are concerned about their water)

  3. Don’t be condescending/patronizing. It’s the fatal sin, the major thing no audience can forgive.

  4. Speak in soundbites - twenty seconds or less

  5. If you don’t know the answer, say you don’t know

  6. NEVER say no comment. If there is a reason you can’t answer something (classified) then say that

  7. Don’t speculate, and don’t let someone lead you to speculate, stay within your lane

  8. Have some key messages written up in case you need them

If you have more questions, I would be happy to help. No one likes talking to the media. It’s just something you do to get your message out.

As a matter of fact, yeah, and as a boss, I know that “willing” and “like” aren’t the same thing. :rolleyes:

To expand a little more Poysyn’s comments…

  1. The PR agency can train you in this
  2. The PR agency can be asked to rehearse with you
  3. The PR agency can give you a list of potential questions to practise .

I remember one of the “better” ones we did - it was for a tech company being interviewed live on Bernama or the like -

The segment was 8 minutes, we sat down and went through potential questions with the spokesperson, then we added to them - at the end of the day we had something like 140 questions, with canned answers that he rehearsed.

Come the interview he smacked it out of the park.

Sorry. Forgot to address this.

It’s because we don’t assess X River. We assess parts of X River. So I can’t say anything about X River in toto; I can only say “Some parts of X River show this, some parts show that.”

Because there are so many rivers in the state and it’s impossible for a single person to know everything about all the different parts of them, it’s just better for a curious person to go to a report where they can look up a particular stretch of a river and find out its status.

Also, the key is “succinct and concise.” Let’s say you do know that most of X River is polluted for E. coli and low dissolved oxygen. Well, once you start giving this information, people want to know why. Where are the E. coli coming from? Is it because of the local factory or something the town is doing? Could be, could be not. Tracking down the source is not in your purview, and even if you knew, blaming a specific discharger would be a major no-no (firing or demotion in your future). If you say, “We are currently investigating the sources” but the agency isn’t (which can easily be found out), then you’ve just said something wrong. If you start speculating as to the cause, well, that’s not what you’re supposed to do. Whatever you say, someone’s going to have a problem (municipalities won’t like it if you blame stormwater run-off or waste water treatment facilities, farmers won’t like if you blame agriculture, industry won’t like if you point the finger at them, residents with leaky septics will start talking about the evils of Big Government). So it’s best not to provide that opening.

I agree with j66 to bury them in data. The public won’t care if you’re boring or pedantic, they expect that. Its not up to the government to dress things up to make them more fun.

For the explanation you’re giving us, say the same with the public. If a particular river can be dangerous, say it can be dangerous but immediately follow up in the same breath that the danger is only localized and applicable for a specific amount of time. Tell them the water is clean when you examined it at whatever date, then in the same breath tell them that it only applies to that date. You don’t know what has gone on there after the readings were taken. And if only same parts of the river shows X, and some parts don’t, say that, and tell them not to assume any parts of the river will show X if you didn’t specifically say it.

I appreciate the advice. But burying people with data is exactly the wrong approach when dealing with the public and I can’t believe people are actually thinking this is an ethical or effective thing to do. Do you really want your government officials to come across as patronizing nerds? They aren’t talking to fellow scientists. They are talking to people (this also includes the press) who have the average reading comprehension level of a tenth-grader, with many of them thinking environmental science is a load of anti-Christ bunk. Burying people with data is the best way to get my ass fired. If you don’t simplify and interpret the data for folks, then the press can come up with any crazy headline it wants to.

I can’t even say something like, “We have found a statistically significant decline in water quality in X percent of our waters” because most people do not know what “statistically significant” means. If someone asks for clarification, I am then forced to become a stats professor. Which is not what the agency wants me to be (nor what I want to be!) It is much better to say (pointing at a nice map at the same time), “We have found X percent of our waters are impaired and X percent of our stations indicate that these problems are getting worse.” If someone asks what’s the most common cause of impairment, I can answer this. But drilling any further is a bound to be problematic. I just need to know where the line is.

I was talking to a coworker today about how to convey what we do to the public, and he flatly told me, “I’m a scientist. I want to be understood, but I don’t want to dumb myself down to do it.” I feel like this as well and would love to stay in my nice cloistered office, out from the public’s gaze and remain “pure”. But hey, I gotta keep myself employed too. Always doing what you want to do is a luxury.

I’ve emboldened myself over the past couple of days, stewing over this matter. I think I can do this if I just practice.

I think it depends on what your department’s purpose with the news conferences is. If its to provide accurate info, then you do it without regard to whether people understand it.

If its to soothe their fears, then maybe you omit some unnecessary or prejudicial information.

If its simply to be accurate without regard to anything, then you do so, and let the press blow it up however they like.