CHANGE MANAGEMENT
The three most stressful experiences in life are death, divorce and relocating (moving from one home to another). We are, all of us, creatures of habit, and when outside circumstances interfere with our habitual patterns, stress is the inevitable result.
It’s true for families, for individuals, and for businesses and organizations, as well: changes of any kind – personnel, management, competition, market conditions, income stream – will create potentially disruptive stresses unless mechanisms are in place to anticipate and to deal with those changes in a proactive manner.
Change is inexorable, and is a good thing. The opposite of change is stagnation, and we don’t want to go there, for sure. But change is only a good thing when we can meet it on our own terms, and a good strategy for managing change will enable an enterprise to be agile, adaptive and progressive, all while minimizing the angst that is a normal corollary to evolution.
COMMUNICATIONS
Livingston Consulting specializes in corporate communications, which means we can serve as the interpreter between you and your audience. We can be sure that you talk to your various audiences – customers or clients, vendors, partners, media, public – in their own language.
Just as importantly, we can be sure that whatever means you use to communicate with audiences are consistent with one another, that the means whereby you communicate will reinforce the messages you’re trying to convey. We can also help you and your staff preserve that consistency by developing policies and style manuals that can help you make more effective use of all the communications tools at your disposal – including something as simple (and potentially devastating) as email. Ever send an email you wish you hadn’t? Ever get one that someone else would rather you hadn’t?
Have you given full consideration to the really vast array of communications devices available to you, which ones are most appropriate for various applications, and how best to use them? Here’s a partial list to help you get started:
· Simple correspondence (postal or “snail” mail)
· Website
· Advertising, including print, broadcast, Internet and others
· Public relations
· Press relations
· Meetings, conferences and conventions
· Special events
· Feature articles in consumer or trade publications
· Speeches
· Newsletters
· Internal communications, including such things as personnel or policy manuals
CONSENSUS BUILDING
When someone realized the collective, collaborative power of linking together the aggregate capacity of thousands – ultimately millions – of personal computers, the Internet was born.
E pluribus unum. Collaborations are almost always more productive than the components would be, operating independently, especially when the individual interests of each of the component parts can be protected and positively served.
Livingston Consulting has extensive experience helping enable potentially conflicting enterprises work collaboratively in pursuit of common interests. Conflict prevention is a valuable element of strategic planning, and is applicable to relationships between management and staff, between directors and management, between buyers and vendors, sellers and customers.
Management-by-consensus is a little different than the kind of consensus achieved in the conflict prevention process, and it’s not right for everyone. At the same time, though, it’s also not something to be arbitrarily dismissed, because when it can be made to work, it is a powerful strategic platform. We can help ascertain whether something of the sort is right for you, and if it is, help you get there. If it’s not right, we can help guide you to a more appropriate alternative, too.
CRISIS MANAGEMENT
The best time to manage a crisis is before it happens.
The best way to manage a crisis is to recognize that stuff happens, and it’s best to be prepared for the worst while diligently working to ensure that the worst never comes to pass. What’s the worst thing that could conceivably impact your operation? Loss of a major client or benefactor? Litigation brought by employees, clients, constituents? Natural disaster?
We don’t expect to be in an auto accident, yet we have appropriate insurance. A good, pro-active crisis management plan functions in much the same way: we don’t ever want to use it, but, if needed, we sure are relieved to have it, and that’s why every airline has a plan in place to react to possible air disasters – most have contingencies covering disasters with other airlines, other means of transportation, even weather and other natural phenomena unrelated to their own aircraft, as well as policies and procedures for how to react if it is their own equipment or people who are involved.
One of the greatest crisis management success stories of all time was the Tylenol® scare some years ago, an event which had the potential to ruin one of the most important brands in the world. That the company had a plan in place which it could activate quickly enabled a quick recovery and, in fact, the brand emerged from imminent disaster stronger and more competitive than ever.
Nature abhors a vacuum, of course, and you certainly don’t want to be in a position of having to make no comment in an emergency. A crisis management strategy is a means of filling the vacuum before someone – or something – else does.
CUSTOMER/CLIENT SERVICE
Nearly everyone from Maine can explain why “Bean Boots” can command the premium prices they do, relative to the abundant array of knock-offs, and why even stereotypically penurious Mainers are willing to pay that price. While it’s partially about quality of workmanship, the real meaning is much deeper and is all about customer service, an ethic raised to legendary proportions here in Maine.
Many enterprises spend so much energy focused on how to attract new clients or customers that they often overlook the fact that it is less costly and more productive to direct significant resources to protecting the current client base.
And while the relationship between current and prospective customers is most apparent in traditional for-profit businesses, it is no less important to nonprofits that are expected to provide some sort of service to some sort of client base. Continued funding and other appropriate support is largely conditional on how well that client base is being served.
Most of the time, we define “good client service” by our own standards, by what we have come to expect from those with whom we do business. Those perceptions, though, may or may not match what our own customers expect from us, and if they do not, we are not likely to be able to satisfy our customers.
What Livingston Consulting brings to the table is an ability to ascertain with a good deal of precision what your customers and clients really do want and expect from you, along with an objective assessment of whether or not you are delivering to their – not your – expectations.