If I Were Coaching You…

If I were coaching you as a business, non-profit or association manager on how to get biggest bang for your public relations dollar, I would sum it up for you this way.

Use fundamental premise of public relations to produce external stakeholder behavior change – kind that leads directly to achieving your managerial objectives. Usually, that outside behavior change can be created in financial, marketing, crisis resolution, reputation management and other sectors of public relations discipline.

Thus, you do something positive about behaviors of those outside audiences that MOST affect your organization. And you do so by persuading those important external folks to your way of thinking, then move them to take actions that help your department, division or subsidiary succeed.

The reality is, your public relations effort must involve more than press releases, brochures and special events if you expect to get your money’s worth.

And that’s what fundamental premise of public relations really says when it points out that people act on their own perception of facts before them, which leads to predictable behaviors about which something can be done. When we create, change or reinforce that opinion by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired-action very people whose behaviors affect organization most, public

relations mission is accomplished.

Happily, this kind of public relations approach can deliver results like capital givers or specifying sources looking your way; enhanced activist group relations; expanded feedback channels; new proposals for strategic alliances and joint ventures; community service and sponsorship opportunities; rebounds in showroom visits, membership applications on rise; not to mention new thoughtleader and special event contacts.

You could easily see improved relations with government agencies and legislative bodies; prospects starting to work with you; customers making repeat purchases; promotional contest overtures, and even stronger relationships with educational, labor, financial and healthcare communities.

Still, question remains, who makes blueprint really work? Will your workers be regular public relations staff? Or people sent to you by a parent entity? Or possibly a PR agency crew? Regardless of where they come from, they must be committed to you as senior project manager, to PR blueprint and its implementation, starting with target audience perception monitoring.

Now, simply because a PR person describes him/herself as a public relations specialist doesn’t mean they’ve bought into whole program. Convince yourself that your team members really believe deeply why it’s SO important to know how your most important outside audiences perceive your operations, products or services. Be certain they buy reality that perceptions almost always lead to behaviors that can help or hurt your unit.

Many companies today try to foster a sense of community (and employee loyalty) by claiming to be one big happy family. The irony is that even without company's efforts to create a sense of family in workplace, we do experience our professional environment as a family. Of course, family our company resembles is our family, complete with same dysfunctional dynamics we experienced growing up.

Our Authority Blueprints are based on our relationships with our parents. The Male Authority Blueprint is based on our relationship to our father and applies to our interactions with men in authority. Our Female Authority Blueprint is based on our relationship to our mother, and applies to our interactions with women in authority. When we are in a position of authority, we're most influenced by blueprint of our same-gender parent. The thing is, when we relate to our superiors at work, we are not only influenced by our relationship to our parents--we actually experience it. On an unconscious level, we project our unresolved issues with our parents onto our supervisors. We expect our supervisors to provide us with kind of love and support that we didn't receive from our parents.

If we have specific issues with either one of our parents, we will get to work through these issues in our professional relationships to authority figures. If we never felt able to disagree with our father, for example, we may also have trouble disagreeing with our male supervisors. We may not feel entitled to voice our opinions, which means that we rarely get acknowledged for our contributions. This, of course, can have adverse effects on our ability to advance, be recognized, have our validation needs met, and feel safe. If we were able to ignore our mother's rules and requests as children, we may not completely respect authority of our female supervisors. We may unconsciously test their authority and see how much we can get away with, because we need them to provide us with safe and strong boundaries that our mothers didn't. Of course, this can also have a negative impact on our prospects for career advancement and job security.