On the Art of Being Good People
How One Young Professional Deals with Everyday Dilemmas
Ben Hoekstra joins this week’s Mode/Switch from a sometimes dicey profession: marketing and strategic communication. He started out working in nonprofits—marketing for a rescue mission—and today’s he’s a full-on public relations guy. He told me about a time he was on a panel discussion. He asked the crowd how many believed the marketing profession was manipulative. Every hand went up. But if mass communication is complicated, interpersonal communication is dilemma-dense. In this interview (edited for brevity & clarity), Ben takes us to the wick of moral overwhelm, especially in matters of race in the American workplace.
Craig: What's a good day for you at work?
Ben: I often sit in on interviews with a member of the press and help facilitate. You have all these things you gotta keep in mind. They might ask about this, and if they do, you can talk about it, but be careful not to say this. Those are fun days.
Craig: Fun? I mean, it’s hard enough to keep your own messaging going in the right direction. But if you’re having to guide someone else’s--? Whew. Your brain must be firing all available synapses. But you call those the fun days. Ok. What are the not-so-fun days like?
Ben: The days where you drop the ball. You didn't think something all the way through. You assumed something was going to work fine, and then you found out---. Those are not fun days. Those are days you find ways to be done with.
Craig: Finding ways to be done with a day. Sounds like a contemplative practice.
Ben: I often tend to jump straight past the overwhelm to the way it worked out. I have to learn to hang out there a little bit longer and think about it.
Craig: Good for you.
Ben: It's a work in progress. I was talking with someone I was working with at an event about some of the consulting I did on the side, and she's, like, Oh, my dad needs help like that! You should connect with him. When you're starting, anytime you can get a client, it's a big win. So, we scheduled a time to get together and—no one had told me what this company does. At one point, I was like, What do you do?
I got an answer that gave me pause: it was a high interest short term loan company. A payday loan company. Having worked in the nonprofit world, having some strong ethical commitments, I was wondering if I was going to diplomatically say, I don't like what you do, so I can't work with you. And I had this overwhelm. Is this gonna be OK? How do I handle this new situation?
The way that this company did things—they had ethical and even legal constraints for how they would do things. So that checked off one box. But then there was another one. I'm building this company website: normally, as a marketing professional, I'm going to build the most compelling, convincing website that I can. I wasn't sure if I wanted to do that here.
Craig: Did you have in mind people you had been working with at the rescue mission?
Ben: Exactly. How do you communicate something effectively but in a more informative way? Which is a fuzzy gray line.
Craig: If you did the hard sell, if you worked hard to make this website super persuasive, then you could lure somebody into a harmful service. So, how’d the story end?
Ben: I worked a lot with the client making sure there wasn't any possibility of someone’s getting far in this process and then getting blindsided by the interest rate.
Craig: I like that. It feels like a thumbnail for ethical communication: whatever message you’re designing, make sure it enables others to deliberate well, make good decisions, take responsible action.
All right, let me ask you to play the sage for a moment. What kind of advice would you offer to people as they're coping with ethical overwhelm on the job?
Ben: Have sounding boards outside of yourself. It's easy to think that if I lock myself in a room for enough time and with enough coffee, I can figure it out. I might be working on this by myself. But how I do it is influenced by the people I talk to. For me, my faith and prayer are a part of those decisions.
It's easy to think that if I lock myself in a room for enough time and with enough coffee, I can figure it out.
Craig: What about those situations where the people around you don’t prove trustworthy?
Ben: One other experience of overwhelm was around race in the workplace. I think of a communication to go out after the 2016 election. I knew many of my colleagues of color were struggling with the way that people were talking about it at the organization. I had to say, I don't think this is the right tone to strike right here.
Craig: Could you describe that tone?
Ben: I think that there was a tone of, Everyone should be fine now. And everyone should move forward and be really happy with where things are at. I think anyone could have understood that everyone might not be OK the day after. You might feel lost. You might feel angry. You might wonder if your coworkers have this totally different view of the world than you do, or this vision for the way the world should be. I think that not acknowledging those fault lines can get you into trouble quickly.
It has helped me understand that, especially as a white man, I don't often have to be uncomfortable. I can find places where I’m comfortable all the time. I have grown in being willing to have hard conversations.
Craig: As I think about your two stories of vocational overwhelm, I’m wondering if there was any way you experienced them as gift?
Ben: For the second one around politics or race—I didn't experience that as a gift for a long time. To me, it felt like a very hard and ugly situation. Later, it helped me understand that, especially as a white man, I don't often have to be uncomfortable. I can find places where I’m comfortable all the time. I have grown in being willing to have hard conversations, to speak up when I'm worried that something is communicated that is not respecting my colleagues of color. And that's something that, now looking back, I look at as a really big gift. We often grow most in these experiences of overwhelm. It gives us this Kairos moment, this cliff’s edge: it’s going to go one way or the other. In those moments of high stakes, I think those are the moments that we learn a lot about who we are and about where we still need to grow and maybe the areas we have some gifts to offer.
WHO I’M LEARNING FROM
Ben got us thinking about personal overwhelm as gift. If you’re looking for ways to reimagine life’s too-much-ness in similar ways, try Amit Majmudar’s novel Partitions about an unlikely quartet of refugees: an aging Muslim doctor, two Hindu boys, and a Sikh young woman fleeing across an India torn asunder in 1947. You might also read his novel The Abundance. Having just started reading this guy this summer, I don’t know another author today who better dramatizes bewilderment and gift.
I have to share one quotation from Partitions. Dr. Masud and his fellow refugees hear an approaching vehicle. It’s an undecidable sound. Is it a truckload of soldiers approaching? Is it peril arriving at full speed? "It isn't a truck, though. It's a passenger bus. Masud waves his arms, sensing, as he did before, a detached kindness, guiding the courses and intersections of people, which violent men try to disrupt but succeed in disrupting only for a time."