Talking of nice charts made me think of a sure fire way of creating a visual statement in a document….Word Clouds.

They look great and with the help of something like www.wordle.net they are really easy to produce.

Here’s one I produced recently which represents 150 responses from children aged 8-12 to the question “Why did today’s event make you want to read more books?”.

Ever had to create a chart quickly? Or want something that stands out more than the usual Excel Charts?

I have and I found these sites to help me. Finding the right arrow, box shapes graphics and colours can be difficult as well as time consuming so let these apps do the work.

I bookmarked them last week and I’ve already used them three times so I thought I’d share them.

http://lovelycharts.com/ – User friendly site to create organisational or flow charts in seconds.

http://www.chartgo.com/ – Easily create good looking bar,  line or pie charts.

http://www.onlinecharttool.com/ – Gives lots of flexibility but with no ability to copy and paste data might just be useful for small charts.

About 8 years ago my supervisor at a previous employer handed me a list stating my roles and responsibilities as an internal communication professional. In that, I recollect was a line which read ‘the company’s historian’. Then, as a junior member of a growing communications team it only meant ‘collating and updating’ company news. The focus was so much on getting the basics right that it never dawned on me how powerful that specific responsibility was. Today as I look back I can relate quite easily to the expectations. Knowledge farming, retention and reinforcement should be high on any internal communicator’s radar.

sun, sea and sand

In a recent case, I helped an organization put together a timeline and a video on completing 10 years of operations in India. Interestingly, nothing previously existed in terms of a formal history timeline till the time we got down to creating one. Though the experience was phenomenal the process of putting the content together was harder  since most of the information was anecdotal and in peoples’ inboxes.

Creating the company’s history ensured there would always be something employees could refer, have a sense of culture, work ethics, progress and accomplishments. It also opened up numerous avenues for employees and managers to reflect and imbibe the fabric of the organization. Now the timeline and video are a part of the company’s induction, their team meetings, reference for press releases, social media sites and large forums.

So why is this a role of an internal communicator? In our role (and this is my understanding) – we are expected to connect the organization, enable managers and leaders to communicate effectively and provide opportunities and forums to recognize employees. Connecting the organization includes engaging the workforce by rallying around a common theme and direction, creating artifacts and repositories that enable better conversations and capturing moments that define the organization’s DNA.

So how can one go about playing this role?

Here are a few learning from the role I got to play as a ‘historian’.

a)       Have the end outcome in mind: Understand how the final result will look like. We had a timeline that got hosted on the intranet along with a video that we played for engaging local offices

b)       Keep your ears on the ground: I discovered a few sources and ‘servers’ where content was saved in the past. By asking employees I navigated to primary areas for information. One employee sent me a home video that they created that captured how the team kept fit by doing push-ups during overnight project releases!

c)       Tap your ‘history champions’: Social media research identifies two key groups – ‘collectors’ and ‘connectors’ who drive change across organizations and in the social media world. Do we know who they are in the organization?

d)       Google your company: I came across some interesting snippets from the press which we converted into a press timeline for a history module

e)       Make it accessible: Convert the ‘history’ modules into usable models such as flash files and pdfs.

f)         Be open for feedback: After we created the timeline, we opened it up for employees to comment and share their inputs. Quite like how the company evolved, the timeline also had the same effect.

Also, you may want to check out the History Factory. I received an invite via Linkedin from Warren Levy who shared this interesting website. In his words “history and heritage are more powerful communication tools than most organizations realize.”

Starting to put some time against Google Wave to find out what it can and can’t do.

It’s usually against the rules to read the manual but I found this useful starters guide to get me started.

Let me know how you are getting on in the Wave World and any helpful tips you have discovered.

Our new visiting professor at the Bournemouth University Media School, Anthony Lilley of Magic Lantern productions, gave his inaugural lecture on the future of the media last night. It’s a complex and challenging outlook in which the ability to gain and hold attention will be paramount.

Here’s the podcast of the presentation, http://www.cemp.ac.uk/activities/inaugurallecture.php

Twitter for Business

A great way to bring Social Media into the workplace is Yammer.

It’s Twitter with a business edge as only people from within your network can access or read the posts, or do we call them yams???

You can also setup rooms where each member of a particular project or department can communicate privately, allowing real time collaboration without clogging up email.

Its easy to get going too as all you have to do is get everyone in the organisation answering the simple question “What are you working on?”. It’s amazing knowing what colleagues down the corridor are working on and being able to spot potential crossover or opportunities. With a few extra clicks users can create mini social profiles which can function as a low cost, user updated internal directory with the option for photos. Good for putting a face to the name in larger organisations!

Find out more about Yammer here

From my upcoming book The Talent Journey, part of the upcoming 55-minute guide to … series .

Definition Of terms

Attraction – Getting the right people to want to come to work for you and not your competitors.

Brand – The sum total of what and how people think and feel about your organization, its people, and its products and services.  Typically a significant intangible financial asset seldom managed like one.  It’s what they say it is, not what you say it is.

Brand engagement – Broadly, how connected people feel to your brand.  In this context, brand engagement is about how well your employees and other stakeholders are connected to, and prepared to go the extra mile, for your products and services.

Employer Brand – Your reputation as an employer amongst potential and existing employees and other stakeholders.  Again, it’s what they say it is, not what you say it is.

Employee Journey[1] – Whether it’s broken down into two stages or 12, there is a well-embedded concept that breaks down the experience into touch points.  In broad terms, thinking through how your engagement effort applies to people at each of the following stages of the employee journey can provide great insight into who needs to be involved, the potential ROI and benefits to the business, the best media and engagement techniques to apply, and what other actions need to be taken:

1. Brand – A person knows something about your organisation, or learns about it, through a variety of touch points.  These may include your consumer/corporate brand, product and service experience, word of mouth, recruitment advertising, or online experience.
2. Employer Brand – At some stage, the person considers your organisation as a place where they might like to work.  They seek information about your organisation – again from a range of sources, most of which your organisation has no control over whatsoever.
3. Attraction & Recruitment – The person decides to find out more about you, and to seek a job offer from your organisation.  They experience your attraction and recruitment process and decide to join you or not join you.
4. On-boarding and induction – The person is inducted into the organisation and experiences “on boarding”.
5. First 90 days – The person experiences their initial time with your organisation, including initial perceptions, setting of initial goals, objectives and expectations, and forms a picture as to whether what you offered is what they receive.
6. Engagement – The person continues to develop in their role (or not), and at various stages, they consider looking for a different role or challenge – with your organisation or with another organisation. Or, the organisation considers finding a different role for the person with itself or another organisation!
7. Departure experience - The person leaves employment with your organisation – and may (or may not) consider rejoining at another stage, continuing to advocate your organisation as an employer, and its products and services.

Employee Value Proposition – What you say and do to show what you offer as an employer and what people can expect of an employment relationship with you. 

Engagement[2] – Employee engagement is broadly how much people care about, and are willing to do something extra for their career, their company, their colleagues, their communities and their customers.  When it’s working well, therefore, employee engagement is a good thing for everyone on your stakeholder list.  Employee engagement delivers:

• Commercial and cultural benefits to the organisation, and
• Personal and professional benefits to the stakeholders involved.

 Insanity[3] – Doing the same thing but expecting different results.  Often prevalent in employee communications. Alternatively, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got!”

ROI – Return on Investment (or Return on Involvement) – Getting more out than you would if you put your money in the bank or invested in something else (or if you want to calculate it, let us know your current discount rate). 

1.  Engagement builds shareholder value
Smart companies understand that how they attract, engage and retain their people has as much impact on their business performance as their R&D, products and services, and marketing communications.  Companies that do it well outperform those who don’t. 

2.  Engagement builds brand equity
Your brand and intangible assets represent something between 40 and 70 percent of the total value of your organisation on your Finance Director’s balance sheet.  People make or break your reputation.  And people are your greatest asset (according to your annual report).  So it makes sense to manage your reputation, as a business and as an employer, like the important financial asset it is.  External brand building in the employment space is no longer just about recruitment marketing and advertising, either.  It’s just as much about marketing, advertising, PR, HR and internal communications.

3.  Engagement enhances productivity
There are always going to be employees who go the extra mile, and those who don’t. The trick is to have as many of the good ones as possible.  People don’t join a company with the intention of “not being engaged.”  If you invest in making sure people have the awareness, attitude and tools to contribute, people will be more productive.  They will contribute more, and the good ones will stay longer.  Make sure your employer brand, employer value proposition – whatever you want to call it – is working hard as a business asset.   It’s critical to ensuring that you get the right people, that they get productive quickly, and that you don’t have to go through the process of hiring them all over again.

4.  Engagement improves talent attraction & retention
The simple act of making the effort to engage and give people a voice is often enough to make a difference, even to cynics.  What’s more is that your employees can act as a key channel to market for your reputation as a business and as an employer.  It’s not just about being nice – it’s about cost saving and improved productivity.  You can reduce recruitment advertising costs as well as agency fees if people become employer brand ambassadors.

5.  Engagement affects customer attraction & retention
Organisations invest heavily in their infrastructures, in developing products and services, in sales and marketing, in supply chain and getting their products and services to markets at the price that will yield them the most profit. The problem is, you can get all of that right — and still lose customers and market share.  The truth is that for nearly all products and services, even if your performance and pricing are perfect, poor service and interaction with your people – sales forces, procurement people, customer facing, client facing and service staff – is where your reputation is made or broken.  Customers are willing to forgive a lot if your people treat them well.

 Stakeholders – Depending on your objectives, your stakeholders may not be limited to employees of your organisation.  Often, engagement efforts need to take into account other stakeholders who may be affected by changes in the way people inside your organisation think and behave. 

 These can include:

Your organisation

o     Senior executives and leaders

o     Business and people managers

o     Employees (and their families and friends)

o     Contractors (and their families and friends)

o     Former employees

o     Future (potential) employees

Other organisations

o     Outsourced functions (HR, IT, etc.)

o     Suppliers

o     Partners

o     Regulators and government & related bodies

 The broader community

o     The investment community

o     Shareholders / investors

o     Environmental and Corporate Responsibility interests

Your customers/consumers or clients

o     Potential customers or clients

o     Current customers or clients

o     Past customers or clients

Your competitors

o     Direct ‘traditional’ business competitors

o     Non-traditional and indirect competitors

o     Competitors for talent

[2] Gower Handbook of Employee Communications, Gower Publishing, London, 2009.

[3] Albert Einstein, 1879-1955.

There’s no doubt it’s been increasing the role given to internal communication in companies around the world, which is being followewd by an increasing number of courses offered to help those interested. The fact is that people managers could also have a lot to improve by knowing more about this area. Here we picked up and analyzed some points we found important, as well as basic lessons we had through our own experiences:

A purpose
Companies should have a well defined, clear, fully coherent and disseminated purpose. Without this consistency, a communication strategy could be misinterpret and all the efforts to sell goals and ideals could loose their strength. Without this it can be impossible to make the product sell itself.

A culture
Based on the finalities, it`s important to design and promote a culture that can support a day-by-day adaptative way for the specific organization to produce its outcomes. And when it comes to manage culture and values, we must look at its elements, like myths, symbols, rites and heroes.

A team dream
Then internal communication can help people remind what they are there for the company, what are their goals with their activities. In this sense, it`s important to preserve the strategical connection between people activities to companies goals and people-organization alignment to its powerful consequences.

A communication strategy
To segment your market and to know its needs and desires is a first and crucial step. Take a time to really know your peers and what they want. Then take a deep look into your message to find which aspects match both interests and which can be more delicate. After analyzing your message, choose an appropriate channel and media.

Change management
With a well defined communication strategy to specific situations an organization may be a lot more prepared to manage internal changes due to constant transformation environments.

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Several people that have been reading Discussing Dissociation have made posts and comments about how enormously painful and difficult it is to lose a therapist.

There are several different ways to “lose a therapist” but for the purposes of this particular blog entry, I’d like to focus on situations where there was sudden loss.

In my years of experience, I have seen a variety of circumstances that have led to clients suddenly losing their therapist.  When this happened during a long-term therapeutic relationship, the sudden loss is enormously difficult for dissociative trauma survivors.

DID survivors typically trust so few people, and there are usually very few people who are allowed to know the internal system in the way that the therapist gets to meet and know the insiders.  It often takes months of regular, frequent sessions for DID survivors to start feeling the teensiest bits of trust with their therapist in the first place. It may also take years of time before some of the more vulnerable insiders experience any feelings of trust at all.

When you find a good therapist that you connect with, it’s usually pretty important to keep that therapist.

But what if something happens and you suddenly lose your therapist?

What if you lose your therapist due to

• An automobile wreck
• An assault of some kind
• An illness of some version
• An unexpected pregnancy issue
• A family member of the therapist is ill
• An unexpected “personal leave” of any kind
• An unexpected “medical leave” of any kind
• The family of your therapist has required a move to another location

In these situations, it is very difficult, but the adult parts of the survivor can often understand the need for their therapist to have stepped out of the office, even for an extended period of time.  The loss is still there – and most of the internal system will likely still have enormous grief and struggles and emotional pain. The child parts and traumatized parts might blame themselves, but there will probably be someone in the system that can intellectually grasp that the sudden absence was related to an external issue, and not their fault.

But what about if you lose a therapist to one of these reasons:

• Your therapist terminates with you, even if that is not your preference
• Your therapist quits their job for any number of reasons
• Your therapist takes a new job and can’t take you with them
• Your spouse demands that you stop seeing your therapist
• Another person tells you that your therapist is “bad for you”
• Your therapist gets fired and can no longer work with you
• Your therapist decides they are no longer working with DID

What about situations where it is less externally based and more connected to you?

What does it do to the survivor to lose a therapist?

In my experience, when a DID survivor loses their therapist, especially when there is very little time for a termination or goodbye process, there is a huge emotional fall-out from the sudden loss.  The therapeutic relationship is far too important to have a sudden ending, and the emotional overflow will be huge.

The DID survivor tends to:
.

• Act out their pain, anger, and fear in various forms of self-injury
• Be unable to move forward in other areas of healing
• Begin to either devalue or overly-pedestal the therapist (the love-hate response)
• Blame themselves or other insiders for the loss
• Cry, cry, and cry
• Experience internal system chaos, increased internal fighting, decreased internal cooperation
• Experience their internal landscapes and internal structures collapsing and the internal world may go dark, or feel unsafe and unfriendly
• Express an ongoing ambivalence towards the therapist
• Feel suicidal
• Go into a long, deep, dark, devastating depression
• Go into hiding – some of the internal parts may refuse to come back out
• Go numb – become more detached or dissociated
• Have a sudden regression in overall skills, abilities, and social interactions
• Have lots of dreams or nightmares about the therapist
• Hibernate within their own home, refusing to go out or interact with other people
• Lash out with inappropriate or excessive anger at innocent people
• Last out with inappropriate or excessive anger at the therapist
• Leave therapy, refusing to trust another therapist
• Lose hold of the positive gains they made with that therapist
• Pretend that the therapist never existed anyway
• Re-create history by remembering only the good events, making the therapist too perfect
• Re-create history by twisting events into something negative, taking comfort by believing the therapist was “a bad guy anyway”
• Refuse to truly leave the therapist alone (following from afar, maintaining contact, calling their phone, sending emails, etc)
• Spend a lot more time sitting, staring, spacing out, etc.
• Stay focused on the therapist, and their feelings about the therapist as their primary issue for an extended period of time

The termination process is as critical to the long-term health and well-being of the client as any other stage of therapy, if not more so.  In fact, a very positive therapeutic relationship can become completely tainted and twisted if the termination process is not handled properly.

Cold-turkey terminations are dangerous.

I cannot stress that enough – sudden terminations are not good.!!

They are not helpful.

They are harmful and emotionally devastating for the clients, and they set up the therapists for future problems.

If your treasured therapist has to leave for any reason, take the time to have as many termination sessions as possible.  The process of saying goodbye is complicated, but it is crucial to leave your therapist from a positive point of view.  Otherwise, you will experience an ongoing emotional fall-out that will extend much further into the future than you would expect.

———-
By:

Kathy Broady LCSW

www.AbuseConsultants.com

www.SurvivorForum.com

It may be old news, but what a great example of both corporate brand and employer brand converging at the intersection of “internal” and “external” communications, and the new social computing world we inhabit. 

Plus, employee brand engagement and customer engagement.

In short, an American Airlines customer who happened to be a user experience professional wrote about some issues with the AA website and suggested some changes.  An employee saw this and responded, saying it was hard to get right but they were trying.  AA fires the employee for disclosing internal company information.  How stupid can you get?

Read here for more.

The word truth has very many meaning.

Truth could be what you want to believe and tell others. On the other hand, your truth could be what you tell yourself. The truth can be sugar coated or very blunt. Truth can be a very personal thing. It can be something that you keep secret from the world or something that you tell others. The word truth can have infinite meanings.

When children are young, they are sometimes told to always tell the truth because lying is bad. Lies come in different colors, shapes and sizes. I also heard this before “the truth will set you free”. In my opinion, my truth has not set me free. I feel far from free. My truth has made things complicated.

Everyone around me is learning about my truth. My family does not like my truth because it is ugly. I am finding that telling my truth is not always the most accepted thing.

The truth hurts, but can be so nice to hear sometimes when you have been fed bullshit all your life.

My truth sounds so different coming from others. Today my therapist said aloud some things that happened in the past. It sounded so different coming out of her mouth, even though it belongs to my body. I just laughed when she said it because I had no idea what else to do. It is obviously important to me because I have been thinking about it since I left her office.

When I think about it all my parts are pieces of my truth. So I guess my life is not a lie, I just chose to tell my truth differently than others. I created a whole internal system based on my truth. My truth is held by all my insiders.

One of my abusers is still alive and was a part of my so-called family and going to die soon. I have avoided this person since I remembered my truth, so I now had to decide what I am going to do at the death. I thought about this long and hard for so long and I finally came to a decision that I was not going to attend the funeral when it happens.

I recently told my mother that I was not attending the funeral. I had planned to give her a letter I wrote but I wanted to tell her in person so she could see the seriousness in my eyes. I told her and she wanted to know specific details of what how this person traumatized me…

I thought to myself that it is my choice if I tell her the details of my abuse. I do not believe sharing details with family members is helpful. In addition, I do not really think my family could handle the truth. Truthfully, I cannot really handle it myself. I struggle with figuring out if my truth is real because my truth sounds so bizarre in my head.

I have not spoke my truth to my therapists yet. They have seen my truth through flashbacks and artwork. I cannot speak my truth as an adult, child parts tell their truth in therapy but I do not feel like it is mine. I think that is why I laughed when my therapist said a part of it today because I do not claim that truth. That truth is scary and that would make it extremely real.

I have not found my meaning of truth yet. The truth that my insiders claim does not belong to me right now. I hope finding my truth helps me to make sense of everything in my past and present.

Remember the scene?  The situation looks hopeless.  A villain has taken advantage of an innocent bystander in some way.  Then the Lone Ranger arrives just in time to save the day.  Good prevails over evil.  Departing on his white horse Silver, the Ranger would famously say “Hi-yo, Silver, away!” as his horse galloped toward the setting sun to the tune of the William Tell Overture.

It’s interesting that for most people, when asked about the Lone Ranger, his dependable sidekick Tonto almost always comes to mind.  Rarely would an episode feature the Ranger fighting injustice without the aid of his trusting confidant and friend.

It made me think – does that same kinship exist in our leadership?  Is there such a thing as Lone Ranger leadership?

The quick and most obvious answer is certainly not.  But upon deeper thought, I wonder how often our leadership suffers because of a lack of including others in our crusade?  Do we sometimes miss the mark and take on a lone ranger mentality by not truly involving others in the vision and mission of our future? 

The role of a leader can be a lonely one at times.  We are privy to information no one else can know.  A team member may be critical of our approach yet may not have all the facts we do in a particular situation.  Or, the cultural mindset in our workplace may make us one of “them” – management – regardless of our intent and efforts.

So, with those obstacles looming in our workplace, it’s important to identify possible remedies that can help us prevent the lone ranger syndrome from creeping in.

 Here are 3 strategies that help me and hopefully will do the same for you:

1.  Communicate intentionally
The practice of communicating of and about our vision and goals does not happen by accident.  In fact when it does, often the wrong messages or none at all filter to our audience.  Find ways to periodically share the vision and goals of your area – why do we do what we do?  This intentional messaging links your business activities to vision. 

One would think this is a natural skill but how often do we get caught up in the day to day trappings of the business and slowly begin to do things out of habit?  Engaging others is a continual process and it starts with us.  The challenge?  How often do I explain the what and why of our actions?

2.  Communicate passionately
While intentional messaging keeps the vision visible, how we communicate is equally important.  It is true that every person has a unique personality and with that DNA comes how we communicate.  Some are analytical, some philosophical and others with heart.  Regardless of your natural “language”, it is critical to connect with the members of your team in some way. 

When we speak to someone in “their language”, they connect to your mission in a way that makes sense to them.  The danger?  We often speak to others in the language we like best.  So, how often do we miss the opportunity to fully engage someone simply because the messaging didn’t “connect”?

3.  Communicate often
Everyone suffers from short-term memory to some extent.  When it comes to any business mission, it is important to communicate frequently about the purpose and activities of the business.  Talking frequently about progress serves multiple purposes – one of which is energizing those on your team.  It’s that little reminder to your team that activities are leading to a goal.   It creates teambuilding in its purest sense. 

Secondly, the frequency in which we share stories and progress helps a team stay on course.  The potential to become distracted with ancillary tasks that do not link back to our mission is decreased the more we stay focused on communicating the progress toward our goals.

The reality is there are times when your role as a leader must involve only you, you must be lone ranger.  But let me encourage to find ways – when appropriate – to involve others in your vision and goals. 

These principles may not be difficult in concept but unless they are an active part of our leadership, we can become a lone ranger of sorts and sadly, miss the opportunity of engaging others in our endeavors.

At this moment in time, I am doing many things to distract myself. I am taking 16 credits this semester at school, I am going to therapy three to four times a week, and I am working part-time. Recently I stopped to think about all I am doing. I realized that I might be distracting myself too much.

I have just recently returned to school, I did not transition into school, as I should have. Instead, I took as many classes as my parents would pay for. In therapy right now, I am doing abreaction work because I do not want to have flashbacks at school. However, I think that my therapist and I may be digging, but right now, I am functional. At work I really cannot stand being around people that I do not know, so I work one day a week in the office by myself.

As I ask myself, where do I draw the line between distraction and avoidance I remember back before I remembered and I lived the same lifestyle, all or nothing. Right now, I am living with my parents and my siblings, which is difficult because they are tied to my abuse. It is hard for me to show myself as imperfect in front of them, so I choose not to. They see an alter who is perfect in their eyes; she is just like my older sister (which they love).

While doing all this there is very little time for being social. Back in May, we started having a hard time, and we decided to cut all contact off with friends and family. Our friends tried to contact us but we refused to answer. In the past few weeks, we started having limited communication with them.  

This weekend was Halloween, and it is hard for us and our therapist was on vacation for two weeks prior and during Halloween. Therefore, that added another obstacle on to it. We had no therapist, no friends, and no family communication. Add in the equation, little or no sleep, 5 college classes, midterms and family issues. We felt that we did not have any way to seek support if needed.

Throughout our hibernation period from social contact, we deeply missed our friends, because for the most part they understand us better than anyone does. We decided to swallow our pride and apologize to them. It has been different with our friends because we lost five months with them, they have needed us and we were not there for them. We feel bad for not being there for them, but we cannot change the past. The only thing we can do is try to be a good friend right now in the present.

We spent the weekend with our best friend; it was good catching up. Watching intervention episodes, and just being ourselves. We have so much in common with this one friend, she understands DID because she is a survivor too. We have both had hard times recently and I wish I had not cut her off because I could have helped her. However, we realized that we could support her now and that is what we intend on doing.

The best part of my weekend was getting my new pets. My fish are pretty they are three boys. The boy’s names are Sigmund, Ivan and David. After psychologists of course! My friend has yet to name hers, but I am anxiously awaiting their names. Nevertheless, they arrived home safe and are now swimming freely.

As I start the week tomorrow and go back to therapy this week, I am trying to figure out my next move. Thinking about school, work and therapy. Am I in over my head? That I do not know. I think as long as I have people (friends) in my life that will support me no matter what I should be okay. I hope

How do you make a team stronger?  When the word team is mentioned, baseball may come to your mind (or at least it does mine seeing as how it is World Series time) and then you may think that it takes hours and hours of tough training on the playing field to become a champion.  Blood, sweat and tears…right?  But did the Yankees and Phillies practice harder than all of the other teams this past year so that they would be the last two standing right now?   Do their players have more hours of training than players from other teams? 

I would submit that at the Major League level, pretty much all of the players have comparable amounts of training, so absurdly large amounts of it is not the key.  But then what is?

In my opinion, many factors contribute to making high-level teams great, but they have much more to do with team chemistry than tough training.  This is because every individual on a high-level team has already put in the countless, grueling hours to rise to the top.  Everyone in Major League Baseball is already an individual superstar, but not every team is the greatest.  So…back to my question: How do you make a team, particularly a high-level one, stronger? 

At Special Operations Command Europe (SOCEUR), we tackled that challenge this past week when we gathered all of the component commanders (1st Battalion-10th Special Forces Group, Naval Special Warfare Unit 2, 352nd Special Operations Group and the SOCEUR Signal Detachment) and senior staff together at the Edelweiss Resort in Garmisch, Germany.  Maj. Gen. Frank Kisner, the SOCEUR Commander, directed that the conference be conducted in civilian clothing and ensured that there were multiple opportunities to bring everyone together socially. Why civilian clothing you ask?  Well, it seems that when the uniforms are put away and people gather wearing ‘civvies’, traditional service barriers are put away as well.  Put the uniforms on and the Air Force folks tend to hang out with other Air Force folks, Navy with Navy, Army with Army and so on.  When everyone looks like the State Department guys that were in attendance, they are more likely to go interact with them and thus learn something about how to make the larger (read: National) team stronger.  There’s got to be some sort of sociological study that can explain this phenomenon, but I saw it work in real life, which is the ultimate laboratory.

We did gather to talk about where the command is headed and some of the major challenges facing each of the components, but the primary goal was to strengthen the team, and the times when that occurred most readily was after the PowerPoint-heavy (yet informative) ‘conference’ portion finished each day. 

Traditional German dancers entertain the SOCEUR crowd at the Restaurant Frauendorfer. Photo by Lorie Warchol

Our visit to the Restaurant Frauendorfer in the Partenkirchen area of the city really seemed to highlight this.  Amidst the awesome German food, beer, music and folk dancing (although there were some potentially capable folk dancers in our crowd, the restaurant provided the entertainers) emerged great stories about where people had traveled, what crazy things their kids were up to, what personal ambitions they had…all on a personal level that had nothing to do with anything but getting to know each other better.   Learning about each other on a personal level built chemistry.  We learned that despite our service differences, we were all pretty much the same. 

The point is, as we get to know and become more familiar with each other, we are more willing to go the extra mile and ‘dig deep’ for each other when times are tough.  Most everyone accepts that, as ADM Stavridis has pointed out, we are stronger together, but it is when we know each other beyond the professional level that we are truly willing to sacrifice for one another.  That is what makes teams stronger and contributes to true teamwork.  Whether you are a baseball fan or not, you can bet that both the Yankees and Phillies have developed strong personal bonds among themselves, and that, not their level of training (or even funding) is why one of them and not any of the other 28 Major League Baseball teams will be the World Series Champion next week.

MAJ Jim Gregory, SOCEUR PAO

A major function of public relations is internal communication and employee engagement. But without fully understanding who your audience is you will be unable to communicate efficiently with them. Two recent studies have been eye-opening for me and I am sure have been eye-opening for organizations as well.

Women in the Workplace

In an interview between Marcus Buckingham and four successful businesswomen, Business Week helped to uncover myths about the lives of women. Against common beliefs, women are not happier in the workplace, do not prefer to work for a woman boss and do not hold less managerial positions then men (37% of women hold managerial positions versus only 31% of men).

What is more, many working women view situations differently than men in the workplace. It is important as an internal public relations practitioner to understand these differences. For example, Susan Peters, chief learning officer at General Electric states, “I have found that when men are going to leave the company, they go in and say: ‘I’ve got this other offer,’ and they really are expecting that there will be a counteroffer. When women decide to resign, they’ve decided to resign.”

I believe that as someone who must engage employees, it is important to uncover myths and find the true differences between stakeholders. Similar to external audiences, not all employees will be the same. It is important to see where the differences lie and then communicate and engage each group in a way that they will relate to.

Gen Y and Social Media

A second interesting study by The Participatory Marketing Network found that members of Generation Y are actually more reluctant to give up emailing and texting than social networking even though, on average, Generation Y spends more time on social networks than any other online web sites. There have been a number of studies conducted and articles written about how to manage Generation Y. It is important that managers who may be unfamiliar with this generation read up in order to understand their needs, desires and habits. Again, it is impossible to engage someone without first coming to terms with who they are and what they are at your organization to achieve.

Oftentimes, public relations professionals separate audiences into groups based on need states. That is, in most public relations plans, the entire American public is not one audience. Instead, audience members are broken up by age, geography, state in life (relationship status, education level, parent, level in career, etc.), or any other means. It is also critical that internal public relations practitioners do not see all employees as one succinct group. Indeed, these two studies show that myths and stereotypes are not necessarily the case. And, just like the example from Susan Peters, an internal public relations practitioner may be in over their head if they cannot understand where an employee is coming from.

What other myths can you think of regarding people in the workplace? What mistakes will public relations practitioners make if they are unaware of these falsehoods?