Most of our clients who are pursuing projects for the greater good or are trying to build great things for great reasons believe that simply explaining their actions will convince people to support their efforts. It probably won’t and you might be astonished by the reason. People often prefer ignorance...
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Public anger is a fact of life in America today and most of those who work with the public are fully aware of that. We teach those people how to effectively engage with communities and deal with omnipresent opposition and anger. It’s often assumed that anger is a bad thing ...
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Someone that I was working with recently suggested, in a snarky kind of way, that engaging the public boils down to just being nice to them. Of course, there’s a teensy more to it than that which prompted a conversation about the meaning of nice. We all know nice people; ...
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A lot of the work that’s done with the public is just generally difficult. Jobs with the greatest burnout have always seemed to be those in the service industry – servers, retail employees, catering to everyday people. So it stands to reason that successfully facilitating people in meetings that deal ...
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This is one of those stories that I debated about even using in this newsletter, I’m trying to avoid going too deeply into the polarized political pit. But, fact is, it’s become impossible to avoid in this work that you and I have chosen to do. Working successfully with the ...
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While we’re on the subject of humility, dealing effectively with emotional, upset, angry people requires a skillset that’s counterintuitive to the ways that most of us usually communicate and interact with others. These skills and strategies may be different, but they work. Professionals, understandably, want to express confidence and professionalism ...
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Feels pretty good to hear that, doesn’t it? Validation is something that humans crave regardless of who they are. Not getting some level of validation slowly builds resentment, of which we seem to have an ample supply these days. In helping people understand and deal with emotional, angry, frightened people ...
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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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Dale Carnegie, the incredibly influential How to Win Friends & Influence People book guy said, “When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.” He said this ...
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I’ve thrown around the term “tribal” pretty liberally for a long time. You find it referenced all the time when someone is describing how groups of people tend to think, act and function alike – usually in less than flattering terms. We’ve used it a lot in descriptions of group ...
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