Social media complaints: Engage or ignore?
What a Coaching Scenario is
Not quiz style. This is judgement practice — you're put inside a real situation from human-services work and asked what you would actually do. It draws on the knowledge you use on the job, not the kind you can look up.
Every choice changes what happens next, and every choice gets a coaching beat straight after it: what drew you toward that option, and how it played out. What's held back is the verdict on your path, so you stay with what you'd genuinely do rather than working out what you're supposed to say.
- 4 decisions
- Each one shaped by the one before it. No two paths through are the same.
- Coaching as you go
- A beat after every decision, naming the pull behind your choice and where it led.
- A full debrief
- Your whole path replayed at the end, with the reasoning behind each decision you made.
- Evidence you can keep
- A completed scenario is recorded in your PracticeLab and appears in your downloadable ProofKit.
Scenarios are made to be talked about. Most people finish one still turning it over, which makes them a ready-made prompt for supervision, a team meeting or a conversation with a colleague — everyone walks the same situation, and comparing where you each landed is often where the real learning happens.
This one ends with
When someone wants you to respond quickly to protect the organisation's reputation, ask yourself: who needs to be in the room before anything public happens?
The situation
It's a Tuesday morning and you're midway through a supervision session with Jean, one of your case workers. She holds her phone out to you and says, "Have you seen this?" On the screen is a lengthy Facebook post from a woman who left the refuge about six weeks ago. The post names the refuge by its full name, describes her experience there as unsafe and dismissive, and says she was treated 'like a number, not a person.' She names 'the staff who were there on Thursday nights' as uncaring and says she was denied help she had asked for.
Some of what she's written doesn't match what you know of the situation. The specific help she says she was denied was actually offered to her and declined. The timeline she describes doesn't line up with the records. But there are also things in the post that are harder to read — a sense of real distress and feeling unheard that sits alongside the factual inaccuracies.
The post has 47 comments already. Several are supportive of the former client. Two are from people who say they've "heard similar things" about the refuge. One commenter has tagged a local journalist. Jean looks shaken. "This isn't fair," she says. "People are going to think we did something wrong. Can't we say something?"
As the manager on duty, the next move is yours.
What you're practising
Before you start, notice
Real-world decisions in scenarios like this are shaped as much by feeling as by reasoning. People often notice one of these pulls — naming what you feel before you decide is half the skill.
- Protective anger — the urge to defend your team from what feels like an unfair attack
- Fear of reputational damage — watching the comment count climb and feeling like every minute without a response makes it worse
- A sense of injustice on behalf of staff who can't defend themselves publicly
- The pull to fix the facts — to set the record straight because inaccuracies feel like they can't just sit there
Policies this draws on
- Privacy Act (AU) / Privacy Act 2020 (NZ)
- Your organisation's social media policy
- Your organisation's complaints procedure
- Your organisation's media and communications policy
- Your own organisation's policies take precedence — check them where they apply.
Heads up — coaching scenarios work differently. You'll make a sequence of decisions as the situation unfolds, and after each one you'll get a coaching beat: what drew you toward that choice, and how it played out. The one thing held back is the verdict on the path you took — that lands in the debrief at the end, with your whole walk replayed alongside it.
New to Good Practice Hub? Coaching Scenarios come with PracticeLab Pro, or browse the practice library to see what else is there.
More Coaching Scenarios
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