LC_CHAPTER 12 : Leadership through effective external relations

This chapter provides guideline to help manage external relations in day-to day encounters and in crisis situations so you will get positive image. In the beginning developing external relations strategy, the books has introduced following steps they include: clarify your purpose and strategic objectives, for being a good company need to have managing the press and media, community involvement, establishing relationship with the financial analysts. Identifying major external stakeholders include many of the following: Media, community, customer, investors, analysts, board, partners, distributors, suppliers or vendors, trade associations, unions, interest groups, retirees, competitors, government agencies, and the public at large. Creating major to reach external audience successfully following criteria honest, clear, consistent, and meaningful. Selecting the right spokesperson, there are three major rules apply: they must be at the right level for the problem, they must project a positive ethos, and they should received media training. Establishing the most effective media or forum, to ensure reaching the identified stakeholders is another critical component of external relations. Determining the best timing, depending on the context, the timing of an external message can be critical. Monitoring the results, two of the most common methods used to obtain feedback from external stakeholders are focus groups and surveys.

With the framework in mind, you can take the following steps to create a strategy for external audiences:
1. Clarify your purpose and strategic objectives.
2. Identify your major audiences or stakeholders.
3. Create, refine, and test your major messages.
4. Select, limit, and coach your spokesperson(s).
5. Establish the most effective media or forum.
6. Determine the best timing.7. Monitor the results.

In building and maintaining a positive corporate image, there are six ways companies can build and maintain a positive corporate image: design campaigns to promote the company as a whole, carry out ambitious programs to champion product quality and customer service, maintain systems to screen employee activities for reputation side effects, demonstrate sensitivity to the environment, hire internal communication staff and retain public relations firms, demonstrate corporate citizenship.

Working with the new media there are three major issues need to follow: understanding the media rule and importance, deciding when to talk to the media, and preparing for and delivering a media interview in here also mention three little things they are preparation, is the key to an affective interview. Performance during the interview, you better very well prepared and be ready for it. Step to take after the interview.

Handing crisis communication, the following guidelines will help company response appropriately in crisis situation. Develop a general crisis communication plan and communicate it, once the crisis occurs, respond quickly; make sure you have the right people ready to respond and that they all respond with the same message, put yourself in the shoes of your audience, do not overlook the value of the web, revisit your crisis communication plan frequently, build in a way to monitor the coverage, perform a post crisis evaluation.

Although establishing positive relationships with external audiences prior to a crisis will help in all but the extreme situations, no amount of goodwill can guarantee the positive coverage that is necessary to avoid permanent damage to a company’s reputation.

LC CHAPTER 11 : Leadership Through Strategic Internal Communication

This chapter talked about the effective internal communication leadership which is an important tool for management to direct the organization and motivate employee. This chapter also focused on establishing leadership through strategic communication with the employees.

They start with recognizing the strategic role of employee communication. We should ensure the employee communication connects to the strategic objectives. We should assess the employee communication effectiveness in order to coach or encourage them for accomplishing the organization’s goal. In the effective internal communication stage, there are the core factors as follow:
            1- Supportive management
            2- Targeted messages
            3- Effective media/forum
            4- Well-positioned staff
            5- Ongoing assessment
           

We need the missions and vision to strengthen the internal communication by understanding the importance of mission and vision, defining missions and visions, ensuring the mission and vision are effective, and building an effective mission and vision. For Building an Effective mission and vision, we might start with create initial draft, then clarify the meaning.

 The mission and vision need to be concise. The strategic objectives are developed to make the vision. Cascading meeting is the way to test the employee about the mission and vision. It might start with the upper level of the organization broken into functions or division and then give way to cross-level, functional, or divisional meetings. Next step is the designing and implementing effective change communication which should begin with determining the scope of the change communication program, and then structuring a communication program for major change.

LC_CHAPTER 10 : High-Performing Team Leadership

This chapter discussed about how to build and lead the team effectively. Deciding to form teams is the first step to build the effective team. The team is ready to be formed after we know that the team is the best approach to achieve goal, the organization knows how to manage team issues and processes and know how to resolves the conflicts, the company technology supports team communication, and the performance can be measured.

            There are several processes to be established. It started at creating the team charter which consists of the purpose, member roles and responsibilities, ground rules and the communication protocol. Action plan allow the team to see the big picture of the project meanwhile work plan becomes a more specific elaboration of the action plan. The team’s performance is up to the ability of the team to deliver the results of its work. Team member should learn each other’s experience of being on the team. The talent can solve the problem, however, the talented people clash. We can improve the ability to work together smoothly by taking time to know each other’s current situation (Position and responsibility), Work experience, Expectations, Personality, and Cultural differences. After spending time together, we might experience conflict. We can classify the internal team conflict into four types; Analytical conflict, Task conflict, Interpersonal conflict, and Roles conflict.     

  We use three following approaches to manage the conflict.
- One on One (Individuals involved work it out between themselves)
- Facilitation (Individuals involved work with a facilitator or mediator)
- Team ( Individuals involved discuss it with the entire team)
The virtual teams are teams whose member are geographically dispersed and rely primarily on technology for communication and to accomplish their work as a team. There are several advantages be provided by using virtual team such as lowering travel cost, reducing project schedules, improving efficiency, and so on. The virtual team needs to have more structure than a traditional team so the member should be trained and practice.

LC_CHAPTER 9:Leadership and Productivity

The managers spending between 70 and 90 percent of their workday communicating, a great deal of this time is spent in business meetings.When meetings last too long or attendees fail to take meetings seriously or wander of topic during meetings, meetings tend to lose their value in organizations.Hence, it is essential that managers learn how to plan properly for meetings, manage meeting problems and conflicts effectively and ensure that meetings to into positive action for the organization.

This chapter focuses on how to plan and conduct productive meeting by determining when a meeting is the best forum for achieving the required result; establishing objectives, outcomes, and agenda.

            First, performing essential planning, you need to define a clear purpose and analyze your audience to determine whether a meeting is the best forum for what you want to accomplish. Your main purpose for meeting might be to inform, but could also intend to persuade or even to instruct in the same meeting.
            You need determine topics for the agenda that should follow directly from the objectives and end products and should contain the information about timing and objectives. The attendees you invite should be the ones who can contribute to achieving your objectives.
            You should consider the setting that includes location, equipment, and layout of the room. For on-site meeting, you should establish ground rules that attempt to protect the meeting time as if it were off-site. Setting the time for the meeting can be important.
            To accomplish your goals, you want people when they are at their best.
            You should think about people’s schedules and commitments as much as possible. Finally, you will want to anticipate and provide any information the group may need before or during the meeting to accomplish the meeting purpose.
            If you have not done so beforehand, announce at the start of the meeting the decision-making approach that you plan to use, clarify leader and attendee roles and responsibilities, and establish meeting ground rules.
            In addition, the meeting will be more productive if your attendees know and use common problem-solving tools such as brainstorming, Ranking or rating, Sorting by category (logical grouping), Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, Opposition analysis, Decision trees, From/to analysis, Force-field analysis, The matrix, and Frameworks.
            The primary responsibilities of a meeting leader are to plan the meeting, provide the content, anticipate problems, and ensure process facilitation. Fulfilling the last responsibility may call for the use of a skilled facilitator.

LC_CHAPTER 8 : Cross-cultural literacy and communication

In this chapter, we know how to emotional intelligence relates to leadership style and how cultural literacy relates to how effectively one communicates as a leader.There are definite steps that can be taken to improve one’s emotional intelligence and how well one.As a leader, one’s listening skills can also be improved upon.In communicating, there is need to pay close attention both verbal and non verbal communication elements in order to succeed as a leader.Mentoring is key part of leadership communication and providing feedback is essential to developing staff that report to us as managers.In the context of emotional intelligence, psychological tools like the MBTI can be used to understand oneself better and help identify possible areas for improvement.

LC_CHAPTER 7 : Emotional Intelligence and Interpersonal Skills for Leaders

This chapter talked about the Emotional Intelligence and Cultural Literacy which are important to communicate with others effectively. First, we need to understand the Emotional Intelligence and we should connect it to leadership styles. Self-awareness is the first step toward emotional intelligence. We can use MBTI develop concepts of personality. The MBTI consists of four dichotomies - Introvert (I) vs. Extravert (E), Sensing (S) vs. iNtuitive (N), Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F), and Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P) - in 16 combinations. If we know the others’ type, we can effectively lead and motivate them to the way we want.

 There are many types of nonverbal communication which are important for anyone wanting to improve his or her communication skills. We also need to be a good listener. Thereafter, mentoring other and providing feedback are the last step to develop the Emotional Intelligence. This chapter focused on the Cultural Literacy as well. If we understand and appreciate cultural diversity, we will know how best to communicate with all of the different audiences. First, we should know the importance of cultural literacy and then define the culture. We use the framework to understand differences.

There are many factors to understand such as context (what is going around us), information flow (how message flow between people and levels in organization), time (polychornic time and monochromic), language (central influence on culture and one of the most highly charged symbols of a culture or a nation), and power (the differences of power perception).

LC_CHAPTER 6: Graphics and PowerPoint with a Leadership Edge

In this chapter we focus on when and how to use graphic in effectively. The author gives us some helpful tool guide to let us know how to make good presentation. When to use graphic there are following purpose we should know it. To reinforce the message, to provide a road map to the structure of a presentation, to illustrate relationships or concepts visually, to support an assertion, to emphasize important ideas, to maintain and enhance interest.

 The next thing is for data charts one thing is very important, you need to clarify your message and then you can determine the type and content of the graph. Creating meaningful effective text layouts. In here give us some guideline, do not use too many words on the slide, do not have only one bullet or sub-bullet as a category, keep the text simple but present meaningful content.

The right colors and front can make a difference in how effective your PowerPoint is. The last one would be making the most of PowerPoint as a design and presentation tool. This section is on using PowerPoint as a tool to communicate your content more effectively. There are some guidelines would help us to understand more clearly, selecting and designing layouts and templates, interesting graphs, using animation , and delivering effectively PowerPoint.

Graphic should always be purposeful. They should add to the content of the presentation or the document. Specially, graphics should serve the following purpose :
            *Reinforce the message.

            *Provide a road map to the structure of a presentation.

*Illustrate relationships and concepts visually.
            *Support assertions.
            * Emphasize important ideas.
            * Maintain and enhance interest.

            For data charts to add to your presentation or document, you first need to clarify your message and then you can determine the type and content of the graph that will add to, support, or explain that message best.