Category: Organization Development

Leaders must step up during a crisis

Too often leaders are paralyzed during the crucial beginning stages of crises. When things start to heat up it’s important to keep control, or things can quickly get out of hand. In an article for the Harvard Business Review, leadership expert John Baldoni gave his advice for those tasked with steering their organization through troubled waters:

Take a moment to figure out what’s going on. An executive I know experienced a major disruption in service to his company. He was the person in charge and he told me that at the first response meeting everyone started talking at once. The chatter was nervous response — not constructive — so he delegated responsibilities and then called for a subsequent meeting in an hour’s time. This also helped to impose order on a chaotic situation.

Act promptly, not hurriedly. A leader must provide direction and respond to the situation in a timely fashion. But acting hurriedly only makes people nervous. You can act with deliberateness as well as speed. Or as legendary coach John Wooden advised, “Be quick but don’t hurry.”

Manage expectations. When trouble strikes, people want it to be over right now — but seldom is this kind of quick resolution possible. It falls to the leader in charge to address the size and scope of the crisis. You don’t want to alarm people, yet do not be afraid to speak to the magnitude of the situation. Winston Churchill was a master at summing up challenges but offering a response at the same time. As he famously said when taking office in 1940, “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory; victory at all costs; victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.”

Demonstrate control. When things are happening quickly, no one may have control, but a leader can assume control. That is, you do not control the disaster — be it man-made or natural — but you can control the response. A leader puts himself into the action and brings the people and resources to bear. Think of Red Adair, who made a name for himself putting out oil fires that no one else could. A raging blaze may seem uncontrollable but Adair knew could control the way it was extinguished.

Keep loose. Not only does this apply to personal demeanor — a leader can never afford to lose composure — it applies to the leader’s ability to adapt rapidly. A hallmark of a crisis is its ability to change quickly; your first response may not be your final response. In these situations, a leader cannot be wedded to a single strategy. She must continue to take in new information, listen carefully and consult with the frontline experts who know what’s happening.

As you can see, successful crisis leadership is as much about behavior as it is actual business actions. If the person in charge is calm and controlled, that feeling trickles down through the ranks, boosting confidence and productivity. Combine that with solid planning and execution and you have a crisis management machine ready to roll.

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Blogs provide a simple crisis communication solution

Dark sites, fully built web pages held offline until needed, are known as valuable crisis management tools because they grant you the ability to react almost immediately to negative incidents. Taking that a step further is the idea of basing your dark site on a blogging platform, which, as Phillipe Borremans describes in this quote from a Communication Magazine article, has several benefits:

While a “dark site” doesn’t necessarily need to be based on a blogging platform, it does hold a couple of very important advantages:

• A blog is content focused and can be managed by non-technical professionals – no need for the IT crew to update a webpage, the communicator can completely control the crisis site.
• Updates are written using a standard word processing interface with “what you see is what you get” features.
• A blogging platform makes the best use of RSS feeds in publishing mode, allowing for easy and automatic content syndication to other social media platforms like a Twitter channel or a Facebook page.
• A blog can contain text, but easily integrates video, audio, files or a combination of these.

After creating templates for potential crises, it takes only minutes to plug in the appropriate information and publish, creating an information distribution center. Also, many fully-featured blogs are also free to use, a major advantage for small organizations and a good selling point for winning over resistant execs.

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Get engaged and get protected

As with many other aspects of crisis management, businesses are hesitant to invest in social media strategies because the returns are often difficult to quantify. Get caught up in a Web-based crisis, though, and you’ll be thanking your lucky stars for the protection. In a post on the SmartBlog social media blog, Rob Birgfield summed up tips given by several panelists at last year’s BlogWorld Expo, including this one regarding the value of being engaged in social media:

Return on Investment? How about Return on Avoiding Pain? While many companies are looking to measure return on investment by looking at improved sales, greater operational efficiencies, etc., we often ignore social media’s crisis management benefits until it’s too late. Dallas Lawrence reminded attendees to invest in social media for what he calls a “return on avoiding pain.” To stop a crisis in its tracks, you have to have a presence and an ear to the ground. Lawrence cited United Airlines as an example. In 2008, when an archived story announcing the airline was filing for bankruptcy got picked up by Bloomberg – the story took off, made its way around the blogosphere and sent the stock tumbling. In the traditional sense, United did nothing wrong. But if they were appropriately monitoring — and consequently addressing the misinformation, the airline could have averted what turned out to be a true disaster.

Having a presence in the social mediaverse is like insurance for your reputation. Unlike insurance, though, social media is useful during good times as well, be it for marketing, communication, or monitoring stakeholders and the competition, making it well worth the investment.

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Often it takes nothing more than honesty to garner large shares of good will from stakeholders. Despite how vicious initial responses can be, people are surprisingly willing to forgive even major mistakes if they receive an apology and a simple explanation as to how the issue will be prevented in the future. In an interview for B to B Magazine, Jet Blue director of corporate communications Jenny Dervin explained how her organization has utilized this strategy with great success:

“The first was an ice storm that took place in 2007 in New York,” Dervin said. “Other airlines stopped flying, but JetBlue did not. We were only seven years old. Our operational decisions hadn’t yet caught up with our size, and we were caught with our pants down.”

Dervin said the company worked to fix that blot on its reputation with email notes of apology to every one of its customers, and it announced a customer bill of rights detailing compensation in the event of future problems.

“We got out in front and asked people to forgive us,” Dervin said. “It got to the point where reporters asked when we would stop apologizing. But it’s important to realize that customers want to hear an explanation only after you apologize.”

That early PR problem prompted JetBlue to become a devotee of social media to keep track of any issues that might be brewing. The company now maintains an early warning system that is Twitter-based. A full-time staff of 17 employees monitors all mentions of the company on the microblogging site. Top executives receive reports on the most prominent positive and negative comments each day.

The company’s embrace of social media paid off in February 2010, when it faced the prospect of another winter storm.

“This time we decided to pull operations and used social media through our official blog,” Dervin said. The company explained its situation and posted links to content explaining how weather was affecting aviation, which resulted in 250,000 impressions.

“You build good will during daily engagement with customers, and then cash it in when you need to,” Dervin said.

One thing many of these community-engagement stories have in common is the organization’s use of social media. Obviously smaller businesses don’t need a full time staff to monitor this arena, setting automated alerts and devoting a small amount of time daily will yield many opportunities to connect and communicate with stakeholders on a personal, yet public, basis.

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

In my last blog post, I said I would write about funding for technology for nonprofits – and so here it is.

One of the main reasons for a lag in use of technology by nonprofits is always claimed to be a lack of funding. This articles provides some ideas for developing stronger technology funding proposals. I think the two most important things you can do when putting a technology proposal together are:

1. Ask for the appropriate/right thing
2. Connect to you mission

Know What’s Right for You

The perfect example of a technology funding request error is requesting funding for hardware and software but not for training or ongoing maintenance. I know a number of small nonprofits who purchased Raiser’s Edge but did not go to the training. Their money would have been much better spent buying something like GiftWorks plus their full training package for a much lower price. If you don’t need or have any idea on how to use all the bells and whistles, then you may be better off with a more modest product that will meet your needs and you can learn to navigate easily. I’ve also recommended to some organizations that a web-based service like eTapestry may best suit their particular needs, but they thought they had to ask for funding to buy software rather than say five year funding for a license.

I think that funders are getting smarter about technology “fit” for nonprofits and they may not look kindly on technology funding requests that they don’t think are a good fit for your organization. Make sure you are doing your homework, getting knowledgeable technology advice and checking out resources like Idealware and Techsoup . These resources have detailed articles that will help you assess what’s best for you and you can work that knowledge analysis into your request.

Connect to Your Mission

If you look at your successful grants they were probably the ones most closely connected to your mission and what you are good at. Did you address sustainability and did you take the time to choose the right funders? Well, if all of those things were part of the recipe for your success with other grants, make sure they are in your technology grant requests too.

1. Don’t just ask for funding for new computers because your old ones are old. What will new computers enable you to do that you aren’t doing or do well now? Will you be using your computers to deliver better, more timely services or serving more people? Does software that you want to implement for better customer service require more capacity than the computers you now have?
2. Funders will respond to your objective to provide better customer service. New computer/software systems that increase customer access, privacy and support should be presented in relationship to your mission rather than addressed merely from an administrative point of view.
3. Will systems that track information enable you to do better program evaluations and receive/analyze customer feedback? These are results that funders are interested in supporting.
4. Make sure you address ongoing technical maintenance/support, computer/network security and training in your request. All of these can be tied to the quality of your service. Your plan for sustaining the value of the initial investment will make for a stronger proposal.
5. If your request involves website development or development of a social networking presence you can tie this to fundraising capacity and communication. Certainly communicating about your mission is tied to your mission.

Two Other Things to Consider

If you are preparing a program proposal and it will involve additional staffing, make sure that you embed your technology requirements for new staff in the proposal – and don’t forget training!

Increasing your technology capacity IS capacity building. If you know a funder that has capacity building for things like vehicles, buildings and equipment as part of their charter, then they may be a candidate for this proposal.

I hope this article provides some ideas to help you put together the strongest proposal possible. Please share your success stories with us and let us know what works for you.

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For more resources, see our Library topic Nonprofit Capacity Building.

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Marion Conway

Visit my blog at: http://marionconwaynonprofitconsultant.blogspot.com

Frequent and personable communication pays off for US State Department

With many businesses still struggling to understand and utilize social media to the fullest, nobody expects a government agency to be proficient. Surprisingly, the State Department is surpassing expectations by not only holding accounts on Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr, but also maintaining an active and successful Twitter feed. An article by Matthew Lee, published in The Philidelphia Inquirer, provided some examples of recent State Department activity on Twitter:

In recent days, department spokesman P.J. Crowley has tweeted to knock down rumors, amplify U.S. policy positions, appeal for calm, and urge reforms in Haiti, Tunisia, and Lebanon.

Well before he addressed the State Department press corps on the return to Haiti of former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and the possible return of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Crowley took to Twitter to pronounce the U.S. position.

“We are surprised by the timing of Duvalier’s visit to Haiti,” he wrote last Monday. “It adds unpredictability at an uncertain time in Haiti’s election process.”

Late Thursday, Crowley commented on Aristide. “We do not doubt President Aristide’s desire to help the people of Haiti. But today Haiti needs to focus on its future, not its past.”

He has posted sharp responses to WikiLeaks and promoted the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to Chicago by comparing it to Sunday’s NFC championship playoff game between Chicago and Green Bay. “Chicago copes with two blitzes: today the visit of the President of China, Hu Jintao, and then Sunday the Green Bay Packers,” he tweeted on Friday.

According to the article, Crowley has nearly 10,000 followers in addition to a network of re-Tweeters that stretches across more than 100 countries. Nothing to scoff at, to say the least, and the more Crowley continues to establish the Twitter as the ideal place to head for current information and updates, the more influence the department will have when faced with a crisis.

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Well, yes and no. They all want their grantees to develop “sustainability” strategies, by which they mean they want you to continue into the future without their money. So if social enterprise will help an organization diversity its funding sources and rely less on philanthropic support, they’re all for it. They like reading about it in grant proposals, and like even more finding out that you’ve started social enterprises that help you accomplish your mission and provide funding at the same time.

Will they then put money into starting social enterprises? Mostly not, at least directly. Sometimes they will provide small planning grants, which can be helpful but never enough to turn idea into reality. Sometimes they will look more favorably at a grant proposal which has an explicit sustainability strategy that includes social enterprise; such as project community and outreach efforts where the data collected will also become part of the market research for a future venture.

And in rare cases, where they already have a productive, long term relationship with a grantee, it can be demonstrated that a social enterprise is highly feasible (foundations are fairly risk-averse), and that project outcomes would exceed what their grant would otherwise deliver, foundations have been known to put real money into starting a social enterprise. But don’t count on it. It’s pretty rare.

Now, there are foundations that have supported social enterprises through Program Related Investments (PRIs), which tend to be low-interest, long-term loans and loan guarantees rather than grants, involve larger projects, and usually involve community economic development. Here’s some more information about PRIs, including a list of major funders who do PRIs.

Finally, in terms of new SE investment strategies, here’s a good article by Paul Lamb entitled The Rise of the Entrepreneurial Activist, in the Huffington Post, which lists some foundations that have supported social enterprise, usually focused on leadership training rather than venture start up funding. He also addresses some new startup funding strategies (for example crowdfunding), which might help some start ups. Good luck!

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Get your story out first

As anyone who’s been involved in a crisis knows, bad news travels alarmingly fast. This has been compounded in recent years by the evolution of cell phones into mobile computers, creating the need for near-instant reactions to breaking crises. When the situation does arise, Crisis Management 101 dictates that you take control of the situation. How do you do this? Babble On Communications President Susan McLennan gave her advice in a recent article:

Be proactive. Break bad news yourself so you can ensure your side of the story is heard. Waiting for someone else to tell it means you will only be responding and not able to contextualize the issue in the most helpful way. Reach out to the media and make your website a destination by updating it with the information the media and the public want, including the bad news.

Making yourself the go-to for information in a crisis means that you can make sure your customers get all of the facts, not just the negatives, which is what other outlets will surely be focusing on. It also plays the important role of combating rumor and innuendo, the common foes that arise when there is a lack of communication from an organization in crisis. Nothing is guaranteed to stop negative attention in a crisis, but by being proactive you can help shift stakeholder’s perspectives towards the positive.

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]

Autonomous Business Teams or Small Business Units (SBU) in their simplest forms, are groups of people, anywhere between 5 and 20, all working as a team to identify and make improvements to the way they work, within their “circle of influence”.

For this reason, SBU’s almost always share common business goals.

Small Business Units, in my opinion, still remain the most effective vehicle to engage a group of people and to harness the power of teamwork in business improvement programs.

The use of a facilitated approach in understanding the main issues and pain points, allows members to suggest, fix and own solutions, empowering decisions to be made, locally.

A classic question to always ask is:

“If this was your own business, what would you do to improve it?”

10 Characteristics of a Great SBU

a) Totally Inclusive – everyone should belong to one

b) Autonomous – a team makes its own decisions

c) Circle of Influence – Team fixes issues within their influence

d) Problem Solving – problems within the “circle of concern” are escalated.

e) Everybody is encouraged to participate

f) Focus is maintained on priority items

g) A Results oriented approach is vital

h) Simple metrics are used to agree priorities and assign actions

i) Collective and individual responsibilities for Actions are assigned

j) Team success is recognised and rewarded.

How do you engage the hearts and minds of the people in your business to ?

Uk visa application

The uk immigration solicitors

permanent residence uk

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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For more resources, see our Library topic Quality Management.
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How will you communicate in a crisis?

At around 7 a.m. Friday, Bank of America Corp. experienced a partial outage of its online banking service. The Charlotte, N.C., bank used Twitter to get the word out, but it did not announce the outage on its home page. Impacted consumers simply got an error message.

“It is helpful if the bank sees [social media] as a part of their other communication channels,” which should also include branches, call centers, the Web and mobile, said Stessa Cohen, research director for banking industry advisory services at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.

“It is part of a holistic plan to deal with operational risk events,” she said.

Over Twitter, B of A broadcast this message: “Online Banking Outage: Bank of America is working to restore capability as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

This quote, from a Bank Investment Consultant magazine article, describes a crisis communications mistake that may have been spurred on by too much focus on new technologies. Announcing service problems over Twitter was undoubtedly a smart move, but there is no excuse for not posting an announcement on the main Bank of America Web portal as well. After users saw the tweet, the logical next step would be to check the company’s page for more info, and, although Twitter’s popularity is enormous, every business still has a large number of customers that do not make use of the service that must be catered to.

Whenever you’re trying to communicate, it pays to use all of the possible channels. That way, everyone gets the message.

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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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[Jonathan Bernstein is president of Bernstein Crisis Management, Inc. , an international crisis management consultancy, and author of Keeping the Wolves at Bay – Media Training.]