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03.27.06
Who's #1?
By Shel Holtz
In the March/April issue of Journal of Employee Communication Management (a print publication; subscribers have access to online articles), my good friend Steve Crescenzo questions the notion of companies prioritizing audiences.
Steve often ponders things that never occur to anyone else. This tendency comes from a combination of creativity, stress, and alcohol. As for his musing about ranking audiences, Steve wrote: I just think it's dangerous to start ranking and prioritizing your different audiences or stakeholders. It's sort of like a parent favoring one child over another. If customers are always first, who's second? Do employees come before shareholders? Where do your distributors fit in? Outside contractors? Wha about the board of directors, or your lobbyists and legislators? If you're putting one group first, that must mean you're putting another group last.
And there's another reason the whole "customers first" philosophy irks me. As an employee communications guy, I tend to think that if you are going to start ranking your audiences (and I'm not saying you should), then the employees should come first. Steve cites Southwest Airlines, which has always held that employees come first. I remember hearing a tale about retired Southwest CEO Herb Kelleher reacting to a company vision pitch from a PR agency by insisting the agency just didn't get the essence of Southwest's vision. In a nutshell, he said, the vision is: "Smiles on faces, butts in seats, money in the bank." In other words, customers will want to fly Southwest if the company is populated by happy employees. Thus, you start with your employees. I don't know if the story is true, but it makes me happy to think that it is.
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But I don't think Steve is looking at the prioritization from the right perspective.
It is important to rank audiences, and it is important to put customers first.
And I say this as a guy who spends a lot of time on employee communications myself.
But employee communications isn't the point. The point is about dealing with crises.
In a crisis, senior management is inclined to panic. Panic begets knee-jerking. Knee-jerk reactions in a crisis can be deadly to a business: "Oh, crap, this is serious! We gotta protect our shareholders or our share price will tank. What do we do?" The answer, most often, is to make a decision with investors in mind that ultimately sinks the company.
That's precisely what Johnson & Johnson didn't do when faced with the Tylenol
tampering incident back in 1982. For those who are unaware (I figure that's about
six people in the US), someone had laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules with
cyanide and then returned the bottles to store shelves. Seven people died as a
result of ingesting the capsules. To this day, Johnson & Johnson's handling
of the crisis is a textbook study of effective crisis management. That success
was the direct result of the prioritization of audiences.
Read
the Full Article
About the Author:
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications. |
