Month: March 2012

Posted on

Crisis Management from the Marine Corps

soldier-military-uniform-with-rubber-gloves-face-protection-mask-guarding-hospital-gesturing-stop-sign

A four star apology

Early last month, the United States Marine Corps issued one of the most concise and effective apologies we’ve ever seen. No, you didn’t read wrong, I said the USMC! Standing the years-long tradition of stodgy communication full of niche terminology on its head, the Marines, much like fellow government agency FEMA, have embraced communication for crisis and reputation management.

On February 9, a photograph of a U.S. Marine recon group posing in front of a flag bearing an “SS” symbol surfaced and drew national attention.

Within 24 hours of the crisis breaking, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General James F. Amos, issued an ideal response. Here’s the full text, straight from Marines.mil:

WASHINGTON — On February 9, I was made aware of an internet photo depicting Marines posing with a flag containing a Nazi symbol. I want to be clear that the Marine Corps unequivocally does not condone the use of any such symbols to represent our units or Marines.

The local command to which the Marines in the photo were assigned investigated this issue last November. They determined that the Marines in the photo were ignorant of the connection of this symbol to the Holocaust and monumental atrocities associated with Nazi Germany. To ensure the Marines involved fully understood the historical use of the SS symbology, a formal instructional class was prepared and delivered by unit leadership.

In order to ensure that all Marines are aware of the Marine Corps’ position on this issue, I have directed that:

  • My commanders investigate the prevalence of the use of SS or other unauthorized symbols within the reconnaissance and sniper communities.
  • The Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps immediately detach from his current duties in Washington, DC and personally meet with every senior Staff Non-commissioned Officer and Marine from our sniper and reconnaissance communities to reinforce my message and expectations.
  • The commanding general of our training and education command review the current sniper school curriculum to ensure it contains prohibitions on the use of the SS symbol and other inappropriate symbols.

 

 

 

 

On behalf of the Marine Corps and all Marines, I apologize to all offended by this regrettable incident.

The best way to come across as decent and human is to act like you’re decent and human. It really is that simple. Apologize, say in specific terms how you’re going to prevent the same situation from happening again, and stakeholders will forgive your mistakes.

——————————-
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
——————————-

[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Manager’s Guide to Crisis Management and Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training. Erik Bernstein is Social Media Manager for the firm, and also editor of its newsletter, Crisis Manager]

Posted on

Managing Your Boss to Manage Your Work

A-man-sitting-in-between-two-employees

In an ideal world, you would have an ideal manager: One who makes time for you, mentors you, defines her expectations, gives you feedback and supports you in getting your job done.

But in the real world, you might find that your relationship with your manager is less than ideal. In fact you might have several managers, all of whom have major projects for you to do and none of whom seem to have enough time to communicate a project’s priorities, answer your questions or provide feedback. Even if you like and respect your manager, you might find yourself feeling that you’re torn in a million different directions—and that your junior-level status precludes you from questioning her requests.

However, if your manager can’t or won’t manage your workload, then you have to. It will make your job a lot easier—and you might even get positive feedback for exhibiting a take-charge, pragmatic attitude. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Ask for deadlines.
When you receive an assignment from a superior, you might feel the urge to rush around like a crazy person as you try to complete the project in record time. But you don’t always have to do that. In fact, the eager assumption that something is due long before it actually is can lead to unnecessary stress and the possibility of hastily made mistakes.

Don’t be afraid to ask “when do you want to have it on your desk or turned into accounting or whatever?” If the answer comes back ASAP, then ask again. You can say something like: “I just want to make sure I get this to you on time. Would you like it by the end of today or by tomorrow noon?” This kind of request demonstrates that you’re organized and trying to plan your time.

2. Ask clarifying questions.
When someone is outlining a project for you, make sure you pay attention and ask any clarifying questions as soon as you can—even if she’s trying to rush through the instructions. If you say “no problem” to an assignment when you’re not entirely sure what it entails, odds are you might look foolish when you come back hours later without having made any progress.

3. Ask for priorities.
If you’re feeling overloaded and you know you can’t reasonably take on another project, there’s no harm in asking your boss how she wants you to prioritize things, or even asking for an extension on a deadline. There’s no point in being a “yes (wo)man” if you just don’t have the time to deliver your best quality work. Explain your situation by saying something like: “I have these five projects on my plate, and I’m concerned that I won’t be able to finish them all by next week. Are there one or two that are less of a priority that I could tackle two weeks from now?”

Career Success Tip:

Of course, make sure that you follow through on your promises. Your boss should respect your time, and you should respect hers. If you ask for a deadline or request to modify an assignment, make sure you stick to your side of the agreement. It’s not just about managing your workload; it’s about making sure you’re being effective, efficient and valuable to your boss and the organization.

Do you want to develop Career Smarts?

Posted on

Fundraising: If You Don’t Ask, You Don’t Get

Person trying to raise funds for her business

A couple of thoughts to start the new year:

The Fundraising Appeal

Donors tend to be (highly) selective in deciding whose name goes on the payee line of their checks. Non-Profit Organizations, therefore, must do all they can to get donors to want to give to them.

At most times, especially in a “less than terrific” economy, donors want to be sure that their gifts are going to support/help people in need. NPOs must be sure, therefore, that their marketing, their literature and their solicitations all focus on the people in need … not on the needs of the NPO.

And, in addition to talking about people and their needs, the best wording should also talk about how the NPO is helping those people, how cost-effective it is in its operations, how a donor’s gift to the NPO can/will help so many people, and how the donor will derive a great deal of satisfaction by making the gift.

Introduction To Major Gifts

A comment made by the executive director of an NPO on the brink of closing its doors suggested to me that many people think of major gifts as those you pursue after you’ve done all of the other fundraising.

The language that the E.D. used was to the effect that, “We have to be sure we can stay in business before we can think about going after major gifts.”

I would hope that I never said anything to any client, or in any of my classes or postings, that would suggest that !! I’ve often mentioned that many (start-up and ongoing) NPOs can (and do) create major gifts programs from scratch, and can (and do) operate quite nicely on that income.

Certainly, in tough economic times, NPOs should be making every effort to raise funds by whatever (legal/ethical) means possible … keeping in mind that one major gift can (and often does) exceed what is raised via other methods.

Any NPO not actively/vigorously working on obtaining major gifts is doing a disservice to the people it serves … or could serve.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Have a comment or a question about starting, evaluating or expanding your fundraising program? With over 30 years of counseling in major gifts, capital campaigns, bequest programs and the planning studies to precede these three, I’ll be pleased to answer your questions. Contact me at AskHank@Major-Capital-Giving.com

Posted on

History of Organization Development (Part 2 of 6) — “The Psychologists”

A group' of colleagues in A Wofk

(Guest post from John Scherer, Co-Director of Scherer Leadership International, with Billie Alban, President of Alban & Williams, Ltd. This is the second blog post in a six-part series about the history of OD.)

Introduction to this Blog Series

  • In our work as OD practitioners, whose shoulders are we standing on?
  • Whose ‘conceptual DNA’ runs in our veins?
  • What are our operating assumptions and where did they come from?

Believe it or not, there was a time when things like involving people in action-planning, group decision-making, action research, feedback, high-performance/high-satisfaction team-development, leadership and management coaching, the stages in the consulting process—and a host of other standard OD practices—did not exist. Who figured them out—and passed them on to us?

You may know some of the people on whose shoulders you are standing, certainly you have read the works of earlier ‘elders’ who have shaped your work, but many of those who developed ways to improve their social systems are lost in the mists of time. . .

NOTE: This site distinguishes the difference between “organizational development” and “Organization Development.” The former phrase refers to the nature and scope of change in organizations, i.e., the change is to the entire organization or to a significant portion of the organization. The latter phrase refers to a field of well-trained people with expertise in guiding successful organizational development.

In the first segment of this series, we looked at some of our ancient ancestors in the practice of OD, going all the way back to ‘Karg’, the Neanderthal hunter who was looking for a way to kill the mastodon without losing so many of his buddies. Thanks to several comments from readers of that segment, let’s say it was ‘Marg’, one of the women around the fire in the cave who stepped forward and made the suggestions regarding longer spears and a better strategy, the first ‘socio-tech’ intervention.

Then there was the ancient story of the Biblical conversation between Moses and his Father-in-Law, Jethro, one of the first recorded ‘executive coaching’ sessions. There were also the Egyptian ‘consulting engineers’ who maintained the Nile’s effectiveness, and even later, the court jesters, who made kings and queens laugh, finding ways to ‘speak truth to power’, affecting decisions from a ‘consulting’ position.

These historical attempts to have more effective organizations were missing several important ingredients, especially the distinction between content (where most of the above ‘consulting’ almost certainly focused) and process (something yet to be discovered). It was up to the unique exploration of more recent minds and hearts to discover and apply the principles that launched what we would recognize today as Organization Development. While many people’s work fed into the formation of our field, as you will see, it was primarily social psychologists (groups and larger systems) and psychologists (individuals and groups) who contributed the most.

In this blog segment we will name some of the psychologists whose thinking contributed their focus on changing individuals to our field, and in the next several segments we will look at ‘The Big Four (or Five)’ from several other fields who more directly shaped OD.

Psychological Branches in Our OD Family Tree

Since 1900, these psychologists have contributed concepts important in shaping our work:

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), was one of the first to postulate the existence of an inner world that drives what human beings do—something we hold today as obvious as gravity, and his concepts of Superego, Ego and Id led almost directly to Transactional Analysis’ concepts of Parent, Adult and Child.

Carl Jung (1875-1971) postulated the power of archetypes operating in the human psyche and emphasized the role of the Shadow, those aspects of who we are that have not yet been integrated. He also legitimated the world of dreams and intuition and suggested that we were more than rational beings living in a Cartesian or Newtonian world.

Mary Parker Follet (1868-1933) was a community leader and innovative organizer focusing on what happened in groups and how they functioned long before her better-known male colleagues. Although relatively unknown to many in our field, she was a pioneer in both how groups functioned and the key role of leadership in their effectiveness.

B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) took the Russian Ivan Pavlov’s salivating dogs to the next (human) level, theorizing that we are not making free-will decisions at all, but are products of what he called ‘stimulus/response-driven operant conditioning’. His principle: what gets rewarded gets repeated. (Today’s field of Performance Management comes directly from this school of thought.)

Erik Erikson (1902-1994) saw a human being’s life as a developmental journey with predictable ‘epigenetic stages’ or phases that must be successfully traversed in the process of becoming a healthy adult. All the life cycle and developmental models of today owe a debt to his thinking.

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) showed that what motivates people varies, depending on where they are in their ‘hierarchy of needs’, and that we should be investigating not just ‘sick’ people, but those who are doing ‘well,’ to discover what makes us tick. (Appreciative Inquiry, one of the more recent innovations in OD, is a direct descendant of Maslow in this regard.)

Carl Rogers (1902-1987), along with Maslow, initiated what came to be called Third Force (or Humanistic) Psychology, an alternative to the Operant Conditioning of Skinner and the Psychoanalytical model of Freud. Rogers also showed that increasing people’s effectiveness happened within a relationship between the helper and the helpee, and that the movement toward wholeness was accelerated by empathy rather than advice-giving.

Eric Berne (1910-1970), creator of Transactional Analysis, pioneered the current self-help movement by simplifying the principles of personal effectiveness and making them available to lay people. He saw the role of an internal Adult mediating between the internal Child and Parent, and showed people the ‘Games’ they were playing inside their ‘Life Script.’

But none of these extraordinary people have had more direct impact on the conception, birth and early growth of OD than the next four. Frederick Taylor, the first in chronological order, set the stage; the second and third (Kurt Lewin and Wilfred Bion) developed and applied the principles; and the last (Douglas McGregor), made them available to managers of organizations and the general public. They are also the first names on Billie Alban’s very useful Origins of OD Time-Line. Tune in next time for that time-line—and some fascinating facts about Frederick Taylor, ‘The Father of Scientific Management’.

? What’s your reaction to this history of OD?

—

Reference List of Books from This Series

For More Resources About Organization Development, see These Free Management Library Topics:

—

John Scherer is Co-Director of Scherer Leadership International, and Billie Alban is President of Alban & Williams, Ltd. This blog is an adaptation of their chapter in the ‘bible’ of the field of OD, Practicing Organization Development (3rd Edition, 2009, Rothwell, W.J., Stavros, J.M., Sullivan. R.L. and Sullivan, A. Editors). Many colleagues contributed, among them Warner Burke, John Adams, Saul Eisen, Edie Seashore, Denny Gallagher, Marvin Weisbord Juanita Brown and others. They have drawn heavily from Weisbord’s wonderfully rich, easy-to-read, and well-documented description of the origins of the field in Productive Workplaces (1987 and revised in 2012).

Posted on

Care and Compassion Scoopin’ Up Sh–

Two-ladies-working-on-a-video-test-project-together-

A dear friend of mine was really struggling at work last week. Her project was in chaos, her boss didn’t understand the complexity of what was happening, she was frustrated with herself for taking on too much of other people’s responsibilities. She was overwhelmed and pissed off.

One morning, as she was preparing for a meeting with the “Big Cheeses”, she unloaded on me. I got the image of her as a wild monkey flinging poop everywhere. It was actually sort of comical.

Luckily for me, for the last five years I’ve practiced NVC (Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg). NVC has saved me heart-ache and pain on many occasions. I didn’t take my friend’s poop personally. I let it fly by and not worry about it. I knew it was her sh—and not something I needed to deal with. I let her rant about work until she calmed down. I did my best to have her see that I understood her frustrations and that she was in pain and needing support. I asked her a few coaching questions to get her to think through how she wanted to handle her meeting. Then I let her be.

Later that morning I took our dog for a walk. As I was scooping up my dog’s morning mess, I thought to myself, “Well isn’t life like that. Sometimes we have to scoop up sh—that other people leave behind.” I just simply put my dog’s poop in a plastic bag and walked on. I wasn’t upset at my dog, I wasn’t angry, I just calmly cleaned up her poop.

Eliminating Poop

Last week I wrote a blog about doing Shadow work. It involves recognizing those aspects of yourself that you don’t want to admit or allow others to see. If we feel we must hide our shi—all the time, we don’t ever get to eliminate it. It seemed like a fitting metaphor for what happened with my dog and my friend that morning. Elimination and not getting hit by flinging poop.

Some times at work people get pissed off. It isn’t pretty, it isn’t nice. Sometimes it downright stinks! Yet we don’t have to own anyone else’s sh—. We can let them fling it while we calmly dodge it. Or we can choose to pick it up without judgment or responding in anger. It takes a lot of compassion and clarity to not let the sh—stick. If you respond in anger or judgments, you’re likely to have the sh—stick. Side stepping it is usually the best trick. Offering compassion for the person in pain likely will stop the poop flinging faster than arguing back.

After my friend calmed down, she called me back and said she was sorry and just needed to vent before her meeting. I knew that was happening. I told her I understood. I didn’t take her crap personally. She called me later in the day and said her meeting with the “Big Cheeses” went well and that she felt more clear going into the meeting knowing what she had to say.

Spirituality sometimes smells like manure

The lesson I want to share here is that spirituality at work isn’t always pretty. Sometimes it means attending to someone else’s sh–. It’s up to you whether you want to step into the crap or dodge it when it’s flying at you. Should you want to scoop the poop of another, best to do so with care, detachment, and non-judgment.

The greater compassion and understanding you can muster for someone who is flinging the poop, the better you’ll dodge it. Work to stay centered and not take it personally. It has nothing to do with you; the other is simply eliminating. Great spiritual practice takes place when you see through the other person’s action to be aware of their pain or stress. Compassion is always a spiritual practice you can offer for yourself or another when the poop starts flying.

And sometimes manure is needed to help a garden grow more fertile.

******************

For more resources, see our Library topic Spirituality in the Workplace.

——————

Visit Linda’s website- www.lindajferguson.com for information about her coaching work, keynote presentations, seminar topics, and books. Starting this fall Linda is going to offer retreats on Journey of the Soul.
Now available!! Linda’s new book, “Staying Grounded in Shifting Sand” – Click here to order.

Posted on

The Power Values that Drive Sustained Profitability

A clear glass full of coins and a growing plant

In their new book, Repeatability, Bain & Co partners Chris Zook and James Allen show that a small percentage of companies sustained profitability over long periods do so because they are able to control growing complexity which slows them down. These leading companies have repeatable models that allow the company to react to new situations in a systematic way.

Zook and Allen write in the Harvard Business Review:

Our findings show that the simplest strategies, built around the sharpest differentiations, have hidden advantages not only with customers but also internally, with the frontline employees who must mobilize faster and adapt better than competitors. When people in an organization deeply understand the sources of its differentiation, they move in the same direction quickly and effectively, learning and improving the business model as they go. And they turn in remarkable performance year after year.

Easier said than done. The three steps that are the recipe for success: 1) a well-differentiated core that is well understood, 2) a short list of non-negotiable business practices, and 3) robust learning and feedback loops, are the very places where strategy execution breaks down. After the intense efforts to evaluate and refine your company’s strategy for success, leadership often falls short on the implementation. It is in the nuts and bolts of making the plan operational where good strategies get bogged down.

Our work in values and culture has shown that there are three core areas, represented by three critical values, which must be effectively managed if an organization’s strategy will succeed to moving from the boardroom to the field.

Commitment –

Zook and Allen call for a “well-differentiated core.” Whether the strategy is narrowing the company’s focus to sustain strong product and service differentiation, or reorganizing to better manage costs, how much effort has truly been made to ensure that everyone is on board? Research has shown that in the 10 percent of companies that have achieved more than modest levels of profitable growth over a decade, there is clarity from top to bottom as to what the company stands for and how it will succeed. From Apple to IKEA, employees and customers know exactly what the company stands for. What are you doing to ensure that your employees are engaged and committed? Are the values of your people aligned with your organization’s mission and goals?

Integrity –

According to the Bain research, companies with repeatable models translate their strategies into a few simple values and business practices that everyone can understand and use to shape decisions and actions. Discipline in execution requires everyone to be on the same page. Consistency and predictability in how everyone does their job is essential. So make it simple. Work with leaders all the way down to front line supervisors to develop a very short list of business practices that become non-negotiable. There must be clearly understood consequences for not following these steps. Consistency and fairness is a critical foundation for commitment.

Transparency –

Things change quickly and companies must adapt. A learning organization that can gather inputs and self-correct must be built on a foundation of trust. Employees at all levels must first embody values that support collaboration, teamwork and innovation. And then the organization must be self-aware to know where and when those values are repressed and challenged.

Measuring and managing these three “power values” will ensure that great strategies can sustain great companies.

David Gebler is the President of Skout Group, LLC, business advisors helping global organizations measure and manage culture-based risks to performance. David’s book The 3 Power Values: How Commitment, Integrity and Transparency Clear the Roadblocks to Performance is available from Jossey-Bass.

Posted on

The Visual Communicator

coworkers looking at each other gadgets screen

The Visual Communicator/Designer is involved in the page layout, the framework, the elements on a page; it is never ending for a Visual Communicator. Creativity is everything for a Visual Communicator. As a Technical Writer, you also have to be a visual designer. You need to be up on all the popular tool sets as well as be aware of the more popular methods of presentation. Let me elaborate on that. Popular methods of presentation include webinars, blogs, mobile, classroom, meetings, storyboards, and online lecturing. Presentations are relevant for delivering information to the target audience and to keep them interested, you have to be prepared with dynamic deliverables.

It is a good idea to have viewed a lot of presentations yourself to see what is liked or disliked. Presentations can’t just be graphs and its components. It has to be visually appealing to maintain the audience’s attention. It has to show relationships between all the different elements on a screen or page.

Images

Use illustrations, tables, charts, graphics, and even print screens; let the image do the describing and make sure you note any exceptions to any process. For images that also involve text, separate the graph from the text. Keep the audience’s attention, for example, by not just presenting a graph or chart; add in light bulbs, colorful fonts, or other images or patterns to highlight certain key points or areas

Humor

Whether it is process that you are presenting or a new product, it is a good idea to include a little bit humor or cartoon to break up the material or else the audience will be on information overload. Have the cartoon do the pointing for you. They need this humor to digest it all.

Text

For a presentation that might involve a lot of text, use bullet points and make it simple; less verbiage. Also, use icons, numbers, and/or alphabetize. Include flow diagrams when moving from one point to another instead of verbiage.

White Space

To reemphasize, make it visually appealing, logical, organized and helpful by separating out data or material. In other words, use a lot of white space. The simpler the design, the better.

Mobile Devices

With mobile devices being so popular, once you create your visual design, test them out on certain mobile devices to see how they appear. You may need to make adjustments so that images will not be cropped or cut off.

As with technical writing, visual designs have to be clear, concise, organized, and provide what your target audience requires.

Posted on

Dream Investors

A female staff communicating a strategic plan to management

I had one of those rare opportunities yesterday that many of us BIG DREAMERS only dream about. I met with this amazing couple who not only believes in one of my dreams, but wants to invest their time, energy and financial resources in it!! When they asked me what I needed from them to help make this dream a reality, I was speechless. Over the years I’ve had many friends and family members invest in my dreams with their time and energy, in which I’ve been so grateful for. Yet for many, many years I (which includes my husband) have been the only one who has financially invested in my dreams.

What I’m forgetting to mention, however, is one of our greatest dreams investors that many of us forget about asking or including. That’s God. He is the greatest dream coach we ALL have available to us ALL the time. He has a BIG dream for your life and is waiting for you to ask Him to invest in your dreams. He longs for us to infuse His dreams for our lives with the dreams we have for our lives.

“Those who come to God with childlike faith must believe that He doesn’t give reluctantly or offer just barely enough, but that He is a wealth of resources waiting to pour out Himself and His blessings on those who ask. He always has more that we need.” – Chris Tiegreen

Take this dream for example. I’ve always dreamed about wanting to make a difference and wanting to make sure that other people know the difference we make in their lives. When I had the opportunity to make a difference in my best friend’s life when her mother was dying, I prayed to God and asked how I could do that. I believe He invested in my dreams as I received the divine inspiration to make a personalized recorded phone line in which people could call in and leave messages of gratitude and appreciation for my friend’s mother. Before she died, she was able to listen to these messages and I have since made them a personalized web site where they can access these cherished messages forever.

Recently this couple shared how they are in a similar situation with a loved one. Again, I prayed how I could help this family and the idea came to do the same thing that I did for my best friend. This time, not only did they want to do it for their loved one, they LOVED the idea as they had wanted to do something similar as well. So this time my divine dream coach connected me with what I needed – their encouraging support – to keep investing in this dream.

I’ll be sure to share with you when this dream becomes an official reality. In the them meantime, don’t forget to ask THE dream investor to help provide you with what you need to keep investing in the BIG dreams of your life!

*******************

For more resources, see our Library topic Spirituality in the Workplace.

——————

Janae Bower is an inspirational speaker, award-winning author and training consultant. She founded Finding IT, a company that specializes in personal and professional development getting to the heart of what matters most. She started Project GratOtude, a movement to increase gratitude in people’s lives.

Posted on

How to explain corporate governance shortcomings

Businesspeople standing in an office building

One of the enduring adages of corporate governance is that it is a philosophy and not a tick box exercise. Company secretaries and corporate governance experts can often be heard stating this line and, like many clichés, it is often repeated because it’s true.

A company can fulfil all the requirements of its relevant code(s) and not embrace the fundamentals of corporate governance and, more importantly, a company can deviate from its relevant code(s), but still have a sound approach to corporate governance at its heart. It is the second of these scenarios that I’m going to look at here.

Despite not being a tick box exercise, the various codes of governance across the world are there for a reason; because they provide a sound framework from which to run a corporate governance regime. They also give a benchmark from which the company’s stakeholders, directors and company secretary can judge the performance of the company.

In the UK, the main code is the UK Corporate Governance Code (in this article, the “Code”) but there are various other guidelines and codes that UK listed companies should bear in mind. These include the guidelines of various institutional shareholder bodies such as the Association of British Insurers and the National Association of Pension Funds.

What all of these rules have in common is that they are not mandatory. They are guidelines that applicable companies will look to adopt but are free to deviate from if they feel that such deviation is in the interests of the company. The Code itself differentiates between the Main Principles, which are mandatory, and the supporting provisions which can be deviated from if good governance can be achieved in other ways:

“A condition of [deviation] is that the reasons for it should be explained clearly and carefully to shareholders, who may wish to discuss the position with the company and whose voting intentions may be influenced as a result. In providing an explanation, the company should aim to illustrate how its actual practices are both consistent with the principle to which the particular provision relates and contributes to good governance.” – UK Corporate Governance Code 2010

Yet, for a minority of companies, this option to explain deviations from the Code has been utilised without due regard to the above principle or the concerns of shareholders. Many explanations given by companies are substantial and useful to shareholders, yet a few are brief and dismissive. This has caused some concern and has led the Financial Reporting Council (the governing body of the Code) to carry out a discussion with relevant directors and company secretaries and to report on what constitutes a proper explanation under the Code.

In the words of the report:

[An explanation should be] full andinclude reference to context and coherent rationale. They should explain how the company isfulfilling the relevant principle of the Code and also whether deviation from its provisions istime limited. Ideally explanations should be sufficiently full to meet the needs of thoseshareholders who could not simply call up the company and ask for information, but largershareholders also saw them as the foundation for further dialogue that should engender trust.

Even the best explanations though, are often considered to merely counter the deviation from the Code. Providers of company secretarial services often feel that a company that deviates from the Code and provides a good explanation should still only be considered on a par (form a corporate governance perspective) from one that has followed the provision.

Arguably this goes against the idea that corporate governance is not just a tick box exercise. If done properly, limited deviations from the Code, coupled with full and complete explanations can show that the company is truly considering and embracing good corporate governance and this should be encouraged rather than criticised.

Nick Lindsay is a UK corporate lawyer and director of Elemental CoSec, a provider of company secretarial services. This article is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific advice or acted upon without seeking legal advice.

Posted on

Basics of Satisfaction Survey Design – Part 4 of 4

Customer satisfaction evaluation

Avoid These Common Survey Question Design Pitfalls

Many times, survey questions are inherently designed to give unclear or less meaningful information. Familiarize yourself with these common mistakes BEFORE you design your questions:

Asking two questions at once (double-barreled questions)

Example:

How satisfied are you with the hours and location of our offices?

[ 1=very dissatisfied, 5=very satisfied]

You won’t be able to tell whether the participant is responding about the time, or the location, so you should ask this as two separate questions.

Leaving out a response choice

Example:

How many times in the past month have you visited our website?

[ 0 1-2 3-4 5 or more]

Always include an option for “not applicable” or “don’t know”, since some people will not know or remember, and if they guess, their answer will skew the results.

Leading questions

Based on their structure, certain survey questions can “lead” participants to a specific response:

Example:

This agency was recently ranked as number one in customer satisfaction in the federal government. How satisfied are you with your experience today?

[ 1=very dissatisfied, 5=very satisfied]

The first statement influences the response to the question by providing additional information that leads respondents to a positive response, so you should leave that text out.

Built-in assumptions

Survey questions that assume familiarity with a given topic:

Example:

This website is an improvement over our last website.

[ 1=strongly disagree, 5=strongly agree]

This question assumes that the survey participant has experience with the earlier version of the website.

After you design your questions, go back over this list and check yourself. Did you make any of these mistakes?

It’s worthwhile spending the time to edit now for more meaningful feedback.

(Many thanks to USA.gov for guidance on question design pitfalls.)

——————

For more resources, see our Library topics Marketing and Social Networking.

.. _____ ..

ABOUT Lisa M. Chapman:

Ms. Chapman’s new book has a name change! The Web Powered Entrepreneur – A Step-by-Step Guide will be available in April 2012. Lisa M. Chapman serves her clients as a business and marketing coach, business planning consultant and social media consultant. She helps clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa @ LisaChapman.com