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How to Stay Focused on Your Home Business Goals
When you are the owner of a home business, you will find hundreds of distractions that vie for your time, energy and focus.
Common distractions include: children, family, friends, neighbors, pets, phone calls, mail, household chores, video...
Ideas and ideologies.
While the inception of penicillin brought a bit of a stir, and the television warranted some focus, it is somewhat easier now to fashion an idea into something sustainable. Easier again is the ability to make an idea into a business without leaving...
Managers and PR Genius
The real public relations geniuses might be managers. You know, managers who pursue their objectives by reaching, persuading and moving those outside audiences whose behavior most affect their organizations, to actions those managers desire.
...
Recessions Don't Last Forever!
Recessions Don’t Last Forever!
It could, but what if it doesn’t?
Will you be prepared?
Will those key external audiences of yours, whose behaviors REALLY affect you, look favorably at you and your business?
Because, once the...
Why Do You Want PR?
To get someone’s name in the newspaper or a product mention on a radio talk show?
If that’s all you expect, fine. But that response tells me that, as a business, non-profit or association manager, you may have overlooked an important...
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Communication: Management's Responsibility
Communication: Management's Responsibility
By: Robert F. Abbott
I've just watched, again, an episode in the Back to the Floor television series, which aired on the BBC (United Kingdom) and PBS (United States). Once more, communication turned out to be a key issue, as it often does in business stories.
If you're not familiar with the series, it features real-life CEOs who leave their comfortable offices (well sort of comfortable, these days) and go work on the front lines of their organizations for a week. Cameras follow the CEOs and record their interactions with staff, and their responses to those interactions.
In this episode, the managing director of London's Heathrow Airport took the plunge and worked in customer service for five days. That meant facing customers and dealing with their problems, including problems created by the airport.
Once more, we saw a CEO suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, so to speak. This CEO was rebuked by employees on the front lines, as well as customers. Employees tried to convey to him the difficulties they experience because no one at head office listens to them.
And, that's a fairly constant refrain in all episodes, as one CEO after another finds out he or she doesn't know much about what happens when the organization comes face-to-face with real customers and their needs.
As most of us know, this is no anomaly. In many organizations, employees feel management doesn't know what's going on in the real world, and perhaps what's worse, feel that management doesn't care.
In some senses, this perception reflects a divide in the abstract-concrete spectrum. Workers deal in very concrete situations and matters; management deals in abstractions. That's both
logical and appropriate, even if it does keep each side from understanding the other.
Management simply can't function effectively if it gets bogged down in details or specifics. Nor can it make important decisions if it stops to consider how each decision will affect individual persons in the organization.
Still, there's much management can do to bridge the divide. And the first step in that process is for management to accept responsibility for better communication. Unless management takes the initiative, there's no way for communication up and down the hierarchy to take place.
After all, employees can -- and often do -- express their ideas and emotions. But nothing can happen unless someone in management allows it to happen.
For example, in the Heathrow program, the managing director spots some trash in an out-of-the-way spot and calls in a cleanup crew. The customer service manager, who supervised the managing director for the week, chastised him for incurring an expense that wasn't in the budget (an appropriate response because the customer service manager would be chastised by his immediate superior if he had done that). The CEO responded by making an important policy change on the spot, yet what he really needed was a mechanism to get and give information about such problems, and a policy about when exceptions could be made.
By creating a mechanism that allowed workers at the front lines to communicate about that kind of problem (trash), he would get both results and greater employee loyalty.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert F. Abbott offers unique and useful business communication ideas in the complimentary online ezine, Abbott's Communication Letter http://www.abbottletter.com .
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