Crisis Communications: Avoiding the Biggest Mistakes Part 1 All organizations are vulnerable to crises. You can’t serve any population without being subjected to situations involving lawsuits, accusations of impropriety, sudden changes in ownership or management, and other volatile situations on which your stakeholders — and the media that serves them — often focus. The cheapest …

Watch the following situation occur in conversations among consultants. Many consultants place extreme value on people’s feelings, beliefs and perceptions. That’s their natural “lens” on organizations. Many of them are from fields of psychology, human resources and coaching. In my experience, they often conclude their clients have problems primarily with, for example, interpersonal conflicts, emotional …

(This post has been moved to https://management.org/trng_dev/evaluate/evaluate.htm#roi.)

Is your great idea actually a great idea? Feasibility testing is how you find out. Start with your goals. Sure, everybody wants to make a million dollars. But how will you define success? Finish this sentence: I will consider this business successful if after three years, at a minimum, it ______. List just two or …

DON’T make the media your primary means of communicating on pending or current litigation in progress. Journalists are not a reliable means of ensuring that your key audiences receive your messages, nor is it a reporter’s job to make sure everything you think is important gets to the right people. DO communicate directly with your …

With 15 years in public relations, occasionally it helps to stop and ask, “Why did I get into this profession?” Before answering that, a bit of pre-PR background. I was on the other side of the desk in the world of journalism before making a career change. Specifically, pop culture — music, comedy, the occasional …

I live in the Kansas Flint Hills. It’s ranch land, no more than 4 people per square mile. (No surprise, then, that I do most of my coaching by telephone.) But we are a community. And we have no shortage of issues requiring leadership. Leadership is not the same as Authority. As we blog about …

Everything in coaching hinges on listening – it is the key to the coaching session. Listening is also essential for personal and professional success. Even though we know listening is important – active listening is not always a common practice. Active listening shows respect and that you desire to learn and understand the speaker. Here …

A common misconception with employees and managers is that of the “paper trail.” It is believed that in order to make a termination decision, a manager must create this “paper trail” of documentations until they have enough evidence to satisfy the Human Resource (HR) Department. Unfortunately, this very notion typically brings great frustration to everyone …

There’s just no way to avoid it. You might fail with your social enterprise. Lose your shirt. Wish you’d never started it. There’s no safety net for social enterprise, and there never will be. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that half of business startups with employees are gone five years later. Social enterprises probably do …