Over course of my years as a career coach, I have cautioned many clients against taking ill-suited jobs or joining forces with partners where there may be a mismatch. I have seen a pattern with many female entrepreneurs where two insecure women team up together with same weaknesses and a shaky business plan. Disaster usually strikes and may even end in courtroom. If you are considering doing contract work or becoming an employee of an organization, do your research. If company jerks you around in hiring process or your intuition tells you that it's all too "perfect", beware. You want to be connected to best people, products, and services. Desperation and impulse "to just get it done" reap dangerous liaisons. As a business owner, there are huge differences between collaborations and official partnerships. You can fulfill your needs for collaboration with a variety of networks, team projects, success teams, and other modalities. You don't have to make an alliance official unless you have road-tested it and it makes sense legally and professionally.

So if you have "urge to merge", ask yourself these key questions:

1) Are you an introvert or an extrovert? How much alone time versus group time suits you?

2) What is your relationship pattern? Do have a string of collisions in your past or a steady track record of positive connections?

Get PR Off Bench

Something that results in your most important outside audiences doing what you need them to do should not be warming bench.

But that’s exactly what’s happening at organizations that allow their public relations people to play games with tactics like newsletters, press releases and brochures instead of aggressively pursuing major benefits PR can provide.

If this describes your public relations program, why not give real PR a chance, especially since you’re already paying for it?

Tell your public relations counsel you want to see plan for how s/he will take advantage of fact that people act on their own perception of facts before them leading to predictable behaviors about which something can be done.

Ask her/him how aggressively s/he will create, change or reinforce those perceptions by reaching, persuading and moving-to-actions- you-desire those important external audience members whose behaviors really affect your organization?

That’s fundamental premise of public relations and you should be getting your share of that action.

Fact is, this sequence can help you alter perceptions, and thus behaviors of your most important external target audiences making achievement of your business objectives much easier.

This is good news for managers like you because, when behavioral changes become apparent, and meet your public relations program’s original behavior modification goal, your PR effort has succeeded.

Done right, that’s when you’ll notice customers making repeat purchases; prospects starting to do business with you; community leaders seeking you out; businesses proposing beneficial joint ventures; and legislators and political leaders viewing you as an important member of business community.

And that key target audience is just for starters because other external audiences of importance to you can also be monitored for perceptions, behaviors and corrective communications as needed.

Now, while there’s more than one way to peel an orange, here’s one high-impact, problem-solving sequence that can work for you.

Start by listing your most important audiences whose behaviors affect your operation in any way. Rank them by how severely their behaviors impact you, and let’s work on target audience at top of your list.