The Participation Blog

Finding the Trust You Lost

Only 21% of employees trust their bosses, according to Gallup. That’s a lousy way to run an organization, but it’s consistent with the overall decline in trust in institutions and authority. However, Gallup found, when leaders implement three specific actions, 95% of their employees fully trust them. The answer isn’t ...
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Sorry For Being Sorry

Can’t you apologize too much? Good question. It came from a client recently and it prompted a lengthy conversation starting with what constitutes a good apology. We all agreed that “We are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems. We acknowledge the Court’s rulings ...
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Read the Room

I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve been in the audience in tough public meeting settings and watched the speaker lob verbal duds into the crowd without a clue that he or she is doing it. I don’t know of any institution that provides formalized training in ...
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Making Change

You’ve probably noticed that we’re in a hard-to-explain business. I’ve largely given up trying to describe what I do for a living if the person asking isn’t already connected to it in some way. As Run DMC said, “It’s tricky.” There’s no simple soundbite answer, but one accurate ...
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Is Your Organization Ethical?

There have been times when companies (mostly) would call asking for help with some kind of embarrassing issue that they were afraid the public would find out about. Someone in senior management would typically ask, “What can we do to make sure people see us as being trustworthy and credible?” ...
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Consensus Through a Different Lens

Any work that you’re doing with the public has to start with defining the problem or challenge that you’re trying to solve. This means that there needs to be a common, agreed upon understanding and belief among everyone that a problem exists in the first place, and exactly what that ...
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