3 common blunders top executives commit in media interviews

Top executives make many of the same media interview mistakes the rest of us do—but their missteps are often magnified, becoming headlines on news and business websites worldwide.

Although every executive is different, we’ve observed clear trend lines in our work with hundreds of top-tier executives since we started Phillips Media Relations in 2004. In this post, I’ll share three of the mistakes we commonly see executives make—and offer advice to help prevent them.

1. They’re too focused on internal structure.

In our media training sessions, I usually lead off practice interviews with a seemingly simple question: Can you tell me about your company? Roughly 95 percent of the time, the executive gives me an answer rooted in their company’s structure:

“We are an association based in Washington, D.C., that represents more than 50,000 small-business owners in the United States who are trying to expand trade into foreign markets.”