It’s a tough work environment for people in a lot of organizations these days with forced changes, shutdowns and shifting priorities. People are on edge, and understandably so. Keeping things moving internally usually falls on the shoulders of communicators and group leaders, so I thought you might be able to ...
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Active listening is a big but often disregarded part of real communication and public engagement, but sometimes it’s easy to forget the true core of why it’s so important. People who believe that they’re actually being heard feel like the listener cares about them and what they have to say. ...
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Your mission and the work that you do is complex and full of detail. It may not be that complex to you because you’re the expert, but for most of us it’s a struggle to figure out. If you expect people to trust you, they need to understand you and ...
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Power and control usually manifest as arrogance and that makes people angry. We use different terms and euphemisms – reducing public anger and outrage, calming the waters, lowering the temperature, building trust – for the same basic goal: getting people to the point of having a reasonable dialogue or debate or interaction ...
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If you answered ‘an old white guy’ you win … congratulations! The following data shows that the preponderance of public participants tend to be white, older, male and there to protect their status quo. Big surprise? Probably not. Is that most effective and useful? Probably not. Determining who really ...
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We in the public involvement biz like to pat ourselves on the back about what a good job we do, but it’s healthy to take an objectively critical step back and look at the broader state of the field, and the state of the field described in the following article ...
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We talk about (re)building trust in government a lot in this newsletter and it will be interesting to watch the long-term reputation ramifications of the partial government shutdown – still underway, as of this writing. Public trust in government continues to erode and increasingly permeates down into state and local ...
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A course that I teach at Indiana University is, in part, taught online. Most of it is face to face but student demand, time constraints, and the times require some of it to be virtual, which is pretty incongruous when the subject matter is, essentially, interpersonal communication – don’t get ...
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I just spent a couple of days with a group of very smart Midwest State agency people coaching their engineers to speak less like engineers when they’re speaking to people who aren’t engineers. A couple of my partners recently helped a Federal agency with a major public meeting that I ...
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