Sound Like Your Situation?

by Robert A. Kelly

What a shame! Potentially productive public relations people resting on their oars in a large organization. Just kind of tinkering with tactics and leaving target audience perceptions (and behaviors) to pretty much do their own thing.

Big pain on way!

Unattended, key public perceptions can morph into painful behaviors that hurt organization.

Just plain shouldn’t happen.

In military-speak, all it takes is some ongoing “intel.”

First, insist that that potentially productive public relations team get busy by prioritizing your most important audiences. They can’t work on everything at once. So for starters, they can identify that really key target audience.

Then monitor perceptions by interacting with some folks who make up that audience, and do it on a regular basis. Same with other important external publics, when time allows.

What’s on their minds? Any negative feelings? See or hear anything that needs correcting? Is there a problem on horizon that may come your way?

The answers to those questions help your crew form public relations goal – altered perceptions leading to altered behaviors. For example, correct impression that you sell shoddy merchandise; or a perception that you favor one particular ethnic group; or a belief that your services aren’t worth price you charge.

Setting public relations goal let’s your public relations team focus on which strategy they want to employ to reach that goal.

How to Walk L.I.N.E of Effective Management Sheri A. Callahan, Horizon Consulting Group, LLC 803-606-3650 Keynote Addresses * Training * Performance Consulting www.onthehorizon.net

Management is no easy task. As managers, we dedicate ourselves to managing all of responsibilities that we are handed down. There are a host of reports, budgets, conference calls, policies, procedures, analysis, hiring, firing, documentation and list goes on and on and on. How is this humanly possible? Have managers been forced to accept that in today’s economy corporate America requires that we all work two jobs for price of one? I would venture to guess that it has been accepted as a “new challenge” for those managers that want to retain employment.

These circumstances then beg question, “Who is managing people?” Where do we find time and what can we do to be most effective managers? The answer must first be qualified by saying; we can’t simply hope that our staff can manage themselves or each other. After all, as managers our first priority must always be to manage our people. Yes, we do lead first. We do mentor, guide, direct and coach, but ultimately as managers it is our responsibility to manage people that in turn manage their tasks and priorities. In taking that role we also ultimately agree to play a number of other roles. I offer to you that there is a specific L.I.N.E. that managers can walk to get most out of their staff.