Activate the "Cone of Silence"

by Hal Brown

Let's pretend I am the President and CEO of a farming cooperative beset by financial problems and grower/owner unrest. I'm certain that dissension, especially if made public, will be detrimental to the company, and will undermine plans already set in motion to remedy the very problems which are causing the uproar. What would I do?

Assure that those under my direct control, i.e., employees, do not talk to the media on threat of termination.

Have "Legal" and "HR" draw up "paper" for fired employees to sign as part of their severance agreements that forbids them to "go public" about anything related to their employment or termination.

Make sure that the most adept spin meister is at the helm in public relations.

Utilize my perceived, but not actual, authority, to play on the psychology of the grower/owners so they believe I can actually tell them they have to help control media coverage by referring all inquiries to the aforementioned "spin meister".

We hate to admit it. But most of us tend to behave in a subservient way when confronted by someone who convinces us that they know what's best for us and that they have some kind of authority over us. The reality of the authority is often irrelevant. So are the consequences of defying the dictates that we perceive as coming from "above". This is all a residual from our childhood. In certain circumstances, we become children trying desperately to be adults. Here are several examples:

Doctors make the worst hospital patients. Ask any nurse. They are used to exercising unquestioned authority. But when they are sick, nurses are extensions of their own doctor's authority, and as "doctors who are patients" they resist the childlike compliance demanded of all other hospital patients.

Police officers who are stopped by other cops, and don't get away with it, whatever the "it" may be. As rarely as this happens, police officers can be even worse than doctors.
Anybody who is used to giving orders and having them obeyed without question, but especially lawyers, who sees those flashing blue lights in the rear view mirror. They usually hide it when asked for "license and registration", but when they know they've been speeding and see those lights, and before  their own authoritarian personalities take over, they too become scared children.

And the classic, symbolic conflict over who gets to carve the turkey at a multigenerational Thanksgiving feast.

Psychotherapists and journalists have a lot in common. Both are ardent truth seekers. Both deal with people who, for one reason or another, feel it is in their own best interest to withhold, bend, color, distort or deny the truth. People do this because they believe, at one level or another, that it is the right thing to do - for themselves, their families, friends, colleagues or companies. Psychotherapists and journalists believe that people generally overstate the need for secrecy.