'Take Away Your Enemies' Ammunition'
Doing this legally and morally as a reputation risk management strategy
Sometimes we carelessly or recklessly put our reputation well-being at risk and that burden is entirely on us yet another truism is that there are people in the world who will, through little or no fault of our own, pursue attacks on our reputation and us. That’s an entirely different situation, problem and potential crisis.
Recently, I came across an important directive and honestly, wise advisory, that inspired this article: “Take away your enemies' ammunition.”
This doesn’t mean through any means necessary, as in committing immoral or illegal acts or reactively impulsively or planning rage-driven revenge. No, that is stupid.
It does mean responding wisely in a responsible, legal and more so, moral manner.
Think, identify or otherwise determine a plan of action to precisely take away an enemies’ plan of attack or mitigate its impact to a degree that it makes it, if not harmless, then impotently weak.
There are sharp, dangerous facts to learn in life and one of them associated with reputation is that, "People lie about many things,” writes Rob Henderson in his smart and interesting newsletter. “Some lie about being a victim if they can obtain an advantage by doing so."
Although Henderson was talking in a different context than I am today, what he communicates remains true in disputes, ongoing conflicts and people's reputation.
"Relatedly, as I’ve discussed before,” Henderson writes, “people who score high on the Dark Triad personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) are especially likely to engage in victim signaling. In other words, people with ‘dark’ personalities are more willing to feign victimhood to extract rewards."
That is worth knowing, remembering and taking into consideration when listening to claims, because it happens. It’s a powerful, negative force in society that causes tremendous damage and harm, yet surprisingly so, it’s not often detected and disregarded as a manipulation.
“Con artists can be very convincing,” is a quote I happened to read today.
Smart people don’t believe they can be duped, conned, made to look the fool but it happens every day somewhere. Some honestly don’t care yet there are people who are decent and most likely would be offended and embarrassed, if not ashamed, if they knew they willingly allowed themselves to be outsmarted and bread crumbed into a trap that hurt others and made them, in a sense, an unwitting “accomplice.”
So how do you take away an “enemy’s ammunition?”
That is largely dependent on what the ammunition is, how an unsavory person or group plans to use it for immoral purposes and what the most effective way to “defuse” the “bomb” that it could prove to become. Be encouraged: There are smart, effective, exciting strategies for different types of attacks. The “ammunition” just has to first be clearly, accurately identified.
Learning the highest probability responses can be made easier by working with one or more knowledgeable professionals that can be helpful.
That could be a public relations professional, crisis prevention (or crisis management) specialist, a legal team or a reputation advisor — or maybe a team made up of those people. Regardless of the individual or team you choose,
The good news? Know that you can disarm corrupt people with “ammunition” intended to harm you and create collateral damage.
Michael Toebe is a reputation consultant, advisor and communications specialist at Reputation Quality, assisting individuals and organizations with further building reputation as an asset or ethically protecting, restoring or reconstructing it.
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