There is the principal - the leader, the official, the person you work for. In government, this is the term of art for the boss. And then there is principle - the core tenets that guide how you serve them. The tension between these two words, which sound identical and are separated by a single letter, is at the heart of what makes communications work noble when it's done right, and corrosive when it isn't.
Early in my career, I worked for Maine Governor Angus King. He once told me that one of the things he valued most about having me on his team was that he never had to wonder what I really thought. At the time, I took it as a high compliment. As I've matured, though, I've come to see how much that revealed about his leadership philosophy. He actively wanted to be challenged and intentionally built a team where dissent wasn't just tolerated - it was expected. He taught me something fundamental about leadership: if everyone around you agrees with you all the time, you're not leading - you're merely performing, and you're doing it with blinders on.
The best leaders I've worked with recruit for candor. They nurture an environment where the people around them feel not only safe, but obligated, to say what they really think.
Conversely, the worst leaders just want agreement and validation. And they usually get it - right up until reality intervenes and they're on the hunt for a scalp because no one warned them about the quicksand they walked into.
We communications professionals get paid to give advice. Not to agree. Not to nod. Not to find clever ways to say “yes” to ideas we think are flawed. We get paid to tell the principal what we really think, especially when it may be unwelcome. That's why generals cost more than soldiers.
This is where a lot of otherwise talented people stumble. Telling the boss something they don't want to hear is truly uncomfortable and can be really lonely. In many organizations, it carries real career risk. The culture in many companies and institutions implicitly punishes dissent, even when the stated values claim to encourage it. So I understand why people stay quiet - the incentives all point toward keeping your head down and going along.
I know how hard this is. I've lived a great many moments when my heart was pounding before I opened my mouth, and a lot of them got worse after I did. Many of you will recognize the feeling of finally saying what you felt needed to be said, and the silence that follows is so thick you feel like you can see it.
Understanding the good reasons people stay quiet is not to excuse it. Advisory roles - particularly in communications, where your counsel directly shapes how a leader or organization is perceived - carry a particular duty of candor.
Some people feel that delivering bad news or dissenting advice is unkind - I disagree. You can be both kind and candid! Withholding your honest point of view to preserve the comfort of the room is what's truly unkind. When you do that, you're placing your own comfort above the principal's best interests - and that can mean letting them walk into an avoidable blunder simply because you were afraid to rock the boat.
There's a practical reality, too: bad news does not improve with age. A positioning problem that gets flagged before the press conference is a revision, a rethink; the same one discovered later is a crisis. Candor isn't just about principle - it can often be preventive.
I've seen this play out many times, but here's an example that came to mind this morning.
I saw the cost of this failure up close at a great company where I was an executive. Our CEO was someone I really respect - he is intellectually rigorous and a genuinely good leader who welcomed debate. Always open to the possibility he could be wrong, he was exactly the kind of principal who deserved honest counsel. So this isn't an anecdote about a bad boss; it's about a good boss being let down.
A fellow executive and I had discussed a strategic direction for the product that we both believed in. We agreed on the rationale, agreed it was important, and agreed to make the case together at the next executive team meeting. So at the next meeting, I laid out our reasoning and made the case.
The CEO was very open-minded about it, but did push back on a few points. But my colleague, the guy who completely agreed with me in private, folded like a lawn chair. He didn't defend our position at all - he went quiet and left me alone to defend the position we came up with together. And this was a good, smart guy facing a principal who encouraged dissent!
I was pretty pissed, but the damage was not to me. The damage was to the principal and, by extension, the company and its shareholders. By going silent, my colleague deprived the CEO of the full picture. The CEO deserved to know that two of his senior leaders arrived at the same conclusion and believed the same thing.
Here's the part that gives that anecdote extra sting: the very capability I was advocating for was something a competitor had already built into their product. They were continuing to improve it and as a result were capturing an increasing share of a particularly lucrative market segment. That competitor would later IPO at a valuation ten to fifteen times what our company sold for, and is now trading at about 150x. I'm not claiming one meeting would have changed everything or anything. But I still believe the direction was right, and the case never got a fair hearing. The CEO was listening, but the person who was supposed to help make the case folded at the first sign of friction.
This is the real damage that yes-people inflict. It's not just sycophancy - it's a failure of information. When key advisors lack the courage to say what they think, leaders aren't challenged when they most need it. Their blind spots stay blind and they make decisions in relative darkness. And when things go wrong (and they will) everyone looks around and wonders why no one saw it coming. Well, someone surely did - but they were too afraid to say anything!
Here's where this gets more complicated. Having said everything above about the duty to challenge and dissent, once you've had your opportunity to make your case and the principal has made a decision, your job changes. Now your job is to go out there and not merely explain that decision, but defend it wholeheartedly.
This is the part of communications life that doesn't get discussed much. Most writing about communications ethics focuses on either “speak truth to power” or “know when to quit your job.” But a big piece of a communications professional's career is spent in the middle ground where the decision didn't go exactly the way you wanted. Maybe you didn't get everything you argued for. Hopefully your counsel moved the needle meaningfully, but the final call belongs to the principal.
In these moments, loyalty means putting your full professional skill behind articulating and defending the decision with genuine commitment. The principal heard you out, weighed your input, and made a judgment call - that's their right and their responsibility. And your ability to influence future decisions depends heavily on your willingness to execute the current one.
There is, of course, a limit to the above.
If a decision crosses a genuine line of personal principles - for example if you're asked to deceive, act against your core values, or do something you believe is fundamentally wrong - then you are duty-bound to say so. And if that decision stands, you are equally duty-bound to leave. Respectfully and professionally, of course - but for good human beings, this can't really be a negotiation.
But that line should be reserved for true ethical boundaries, not policy disagreements or wounded pride over losing an argument. Knowing the difference between “this isn't what I recommend” and “this is something I cannot defend” shouldn't be difficult, yet it's one of the most important forms of professional judgment.
This isn't just a code of conduct for great advisors - it's an important covenant between leaders and those of us who counsel them. A great leader's obligation is to build a culture where honest advice is demanded, not merely tolerated - and certainly never punished (passively or actively). The advisor's obligation is to deliver that candor clearly and respectfully.
Great leaders understand that one of the most valuable things in an advisor is the courage to say “I think you're wrong about this, hear me out” before the decision is made.
And great advisors understand that delivering this kind of candor isn't a betrayal of the principal - quite the opposite; it's the highest form of service to them.
Anyone paying attention to how some institutions around us - in government and in business - are being led right now can see what happens when this covenant breaks down. When leaders want agreement, fealty, and obsequiousness instead of honesty. When advisors eagerly offer loyalty of the worst kind - the kind that tells the boss what they want to hear, but never shows them what they need to see.
The word “loyal” gets used a lot these days. It's worth being very precise about what it means.
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