Category: Business Communications

In business, many crises are avoidable. Yet because businesses are lead and operated by human beings, because many crises are unpredictable, and because natural catastrophes are not controllable, crisis happens.

What truly defines a crisis for your company is the preparation that takes place for the possibility, how your business behaves during the event, and what it does afterward. This is crisis management — navigating large-scale, negative Stakeholder and public reaction to a generally unlikely situation.

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You might expect that with today’s information technology, communication in your company ought to be pretty close to perfect.  After all, communication of all kinds, technological and human, are what makes your company happily function each day. Yet communication problems can happen frequently in the business environment, both internally (laterally, up and down) and externally (clients, deals with other businesses).

When you hear statements like “That’s not what I was expecting” or “I didn’t know that” or “Who’s on first?”  or when you make an important decision and later find out some important information was missing, you know, as Paul Newman’s character in Cool Hand Luke pointed out, “What we have here is a communication breakdown.”

These occurrences are not because we are so poor at communicating.  Instead they happen for a variety of correctable reasons that you, as the business leader, can address.

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Whatever your level in your business organization — executive, manager, professional— you likely have faced the issues of work-life boundaries in the workplace either for yourself, your employer or your employees.

Maybe you have children that need you to be at their school play, or perhaps your key project manager is resisting working longer hours for a crunch time project completion.  It might be that your employer wants you to be available all the time, since in this electronic world, you CAN be just a click away no matter where you are.

• What’s the right approach to clarifying these expectations and boundaries  as an employer or an employee?
• When is it right to intrude on professional-personal boundaries or allow yours to be compromised?
• Should you ask an employee to be available during their vacation, or should you be available during yours?

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Boundary setting is a hot topic in business these days — for good reason.

Examples of boundary violations are numerous, and the results can range from unmotivated employees to sexual harassment complaints and worse, law suits. Replacing non-existent, rigid, weak or regularly violated boundaries with clear lines can make a positive difference in your business.

Workplace boundaries are basically lines that are drawn so that every member of your business has defined roles and interaction guidelines.  It’s about the affect of a person’s behavior on others.

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