Do the Right-est Thing
I’ve been comfort-re-watching a lot of Ted Lasso lately. There’s an episode in which Sam (a player) protests the team’s sponsor because its parent company is an oil company causing environmental destruction. The sponsor contacts the team owner, Rebecca, and demands that she fire Sam, but Rebecca refuses, as she’s reminded by her goddaughter to “do the right-est thing.”
This episode brought me back to a bizarre situation when an employee I managed was ambushed by an undercover journalist posing as a student in crisis. The “journalist” was recording with a hidden camera and (in my opinion) using less-than-ethical tactics to get the soundbite he wanted for his “exposé” on a controversial topic. The piece was published on the internet a few days later, and due to the inflammatory way the recordings were presented out of context, it created a bit of a public relations problem for the several institutions involved.
The first impulse of the PR response team at my institution was essentially to throw my employee under the bus. This reaction was understandable as a damage control technique, because technically the employee did deviate slightly from the prescribed process and that was captured in the video. But this strategy felt really unfair to me, because the employee has acted reasonably and compassionately under a very odd set of circumstances.
To the credit of the supportive PR team and other administrators, my hesitation and merely asking the question of “Are there other options we can consider?” opened up a productive discussion and collaboratively resulted in a work-around in which we acknowledged a misstep while also rejecting the notion that the institution had operated outside of its required scope.
My point is, I’m seeing a lot of questions lately about how to “do the right-est thing.” The answer isn’t always going to be the first or the obvious one. In my experience, with some open-mindedness, creativity, and adherence to institutional values, an effective path forward will present itself.
