For the past several weeks, for a variety of reasons, I just happened to have had the personal opportunity to experience more than my fair share of customer service. I’ve been dealing with phone automation and front line script readers in utilities, health care, real estate, government and an assortment ...
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Television advertising salespeople are having a spectacular summer! One major marketing analytics firm projects 2022 mid-term political ad spending to exceed $8.8 billion. To put that in perspective, the 2018 midterms generated only $3.9 billion, and $9.5 billion was spent during the much higher profile 2020 presidential election. If you’ve ...
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We spend so much time worrying about the content and process of the projects and initiatives that we’re involved with that we lose sight of what’s right in front of our eyes. Never forget that ultimately we’re in the people business – the relationship business. That means building rapport by ...
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We work with very smart and very caring people doing very complex public sector jobs who do their darndest to make great decisions that benefit all of us – the public. And at the end of the day, often the hardest part of their job is getting us to ...
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When you do the kind of important, greater good work that you do, talking about first impressions or last impressions might sound pretty superficial – not worthy of consideration by serious professional people. But I expect that you realize that public engagement and conflict resolution is at its essence … ...
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We’ve talked in the past about the importance and differences between sympathy and empathy, particularly when dealing with emotional, resistant, or angry people. There’s a third component that plays into dealing with these tough situations and as public policy proponents and facilitators, we need to be emotionally intelligent enough ...
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You’re doing stressful work with stressed out people in an especially stressful time. Did I mention that we’re all stressed? I’m not trying to diminish the real challenge that many people are facing these days, but doing the work that you do is important and not for the faint hearted. ...
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One of the biggest challenges of our time is convincing people that it’s a good idea to keep themselves and each other alive. Sounds ridiculous to say that, doesn’t it? But engaging and influencing people to do what’s in their best interest is often the task of professionals working in ...
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People who are engaged in the practice of public engagement come to it from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives – communication, the sciences, community planning, engineering, sometimes politics – but those that are most successful almost always have one universal trait in common: the ability to truly empathize. If for ...
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As people become more polarized and it gets increasingly difficult to have or facilitate ugly conversations, we as the potential peacemakers have to tune in better to how we manage ourselves and respond to these encounters. This is a simple little technique that I learned some time ago and have ...
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