Good Meetings Make Good Sense

I was doing a brain storming session with a client recently and an issue they were having with the  
inaccuracy of their website, was identified. Several participants complained that
no one was asking for their input from their department, and as a result, the organization had a website that was improperly informing their customers about new services that were being provided.

Good public relations begins at home. Happy staff equals happy customers.
Meaningful and staff meetings can be a very powerful tool in helping your company meet the needs and expectations of your customers. As situations come up, mini-meetings and brain-storming sessions that quickly solve problems can also be used very effectively.

Regular meetings held with a purpose can keep the lines of communication open.

Often employees feel stymied in their ability to communicate their feelings and viewpoints to management. The staff  feel like second-rate people because they are never given an opportunity to be heard. What most organizations lack is a structure to insure that the meetings are held on a regular basis.

To insure that the meetings are effective in your school district, it is important that some preparation be made before each meeting. What are the challenges that need to be addressed? What is being done about the issues that were discussed at the last meeting? What is going right? Why? How can we make things even better? By asking these kinds of questions, you are building a framework to give communication within your company a place to grow and develop.

By holding meaningful and action-oriented meetings, you make it easy for your employees to communicate with each other as well as with management. Many times, it’s not a “generation gap” that prevents teamwork within a school district, but a “communication gap.” By following through with a plan for communicating, you are insuring a clearer, more effective form of constant communication in your organization. As a result, by keeping miscommunication to a minimum, you will have a happier and more productive staff.

For more information on how to help your public school team run the best meetings possible please contact our office at 734-404-5909 or visit our website at: www.TomBorgConsulting.com

Listening to Your Customers is the Key to a Successful School System.

One of the smartest things you can do with your school district in these tough economic times is to make your students and parents happy. This happens by design not by accident. The people you and your staff serve want to feel important and they will reward your school district with their loyalty and support.

This all starts with the attitude of running your organization or department like a marathon, not a fifty yard dash. It is too easy to cut corners on scheduling and hiring when you are trying to save money. That makes the bottom line look good in the short term, but if you are planning on keeping your school district over the long haul, you have to think in terms of your customer’s best interests.

So what are the things that make your parents feel important? What are the actions you and your staff can take that will make them feel like valued human beings? One of the best ways to find out is to ask them. Sitting down with a parent over a cup of  coffee (your treat), can help them give you insights you never dreamed of hearing.

Many times the things you think are important to parents and students are not.  Curiously enough, the list of things that are important may change from week to week or may remain constant. This depends on the circumstances surrounding the people you serve. By having an ongoing dialogue with your parents and students, you can keep abreast of their service perceptions and realities.

In this age of increasing technology and the everyday frenzy that accompanies it, slowing the pace down and getting face to face with parents and students can be priceless. Investing fifteen minutes to simply ask a few questions and sincerely listening to the responses can be like hitting the mother lode of gold.

For more information on how we can help make your school district the best it can be, contact our office at 734-404-5909.

Help Your Employees Create the Right Kind of Cultural Awareness

Creating the right environment for the development of cultural awareness within your organization does not happen by accident. At your next company meeting, make some time for your employees to raise their level of understanding of the different cultures  within it. This can lead to a positive impact on the quality of everyone’s life within your workplace.

Get Your Employees Involved

Paul Gorski, founder of EDChange, makes the point that when you get your employees involved in cultural awareness activities, it allows people to learn more about each other. It helps them eliminate preconceived notions and myths about each other’s culture, and allows people to become more comfortable with each other. Here is an exercise that Gorski recommends that can be used to develop cultural awareness within your organization.

Cultural Awareness Exercise

Ask the participants in the meeting to find someone who they do not know. Ask them to introduce themselves to that person and spend five to ten minutes talking about respect. What does it mean for you to show respect, and what does it mean for you to be shown respect? After the allotted time, ask the participants to return to their seats, and open the discussion. What ideas did people discuss?

When you get the participants back into the large group and discuss the discoveries that were made, responses could include things like:

·         Not everyone wants to be treated the way I want to be treated.

·         Not all cultures are comfortable shaking hands.

·         Different cultures have different expectations in social situations.

Learn From Each Other’s Differences

This type of an exercise can help your managers and employees learn from each other’s differences. When people are able to communicate openly about the differences between their cultures, mutual respect, trust and understanding can develop. In addition to the differences, people begin to see how many similarities there are. By structuring cultural learning time into your meetings on a regular basis, improved cooperation and greater cultural inclusion within your company can be obtained.

Tom Borg is president of Tom Borg Consulting, LLC. He is a business consultant, speaker, trainer and author. He and his associates help public schools become more successful and service oriented. For more information on our services contact our office at 734-404-5909 or visit our website at www.tomborgconsulting.com.

Don’t Use These Words

The words you use color your attitude. If you are constantly using words that are negative, you can be sure you will have a more negative outlook on life. One of the best ways to change your attitude is to be careful with which words you use.

When you are caught in a slowdown in traffic? What do you say? Don’t call it a “traffic jam”.  A more positive way to refer to it would be to describe it as “a chance to slow down and do some thinking”.

Rather than calling a disagreement with another person a, “heated argument’, you can refer to it as a situation where you both saw things from a different perspective”.   

When you make a mistake on a project and, “have to start over”, use self talk that describes it as “an opportunity to make it even better”.

Rather than complaining about the broken dishwasher, discuss the advantage of how it might be time for a new, more efficient one.

When you are running low on groceries, don’t complain about how much food costs. Simply say, “it would be fun to get out of the house and do some grocery shopping”.

The key here is to start positively reframing the situations you are experiencing.  By looking at things from a different perspective, it gives you a more pleasant and optimistic outlook on life. It allows you to look up and see things that you might have missed if you had kept your head down and kept complaining.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people think they have it bad when all they have to do is look around and see how good they really have it. It reminds me of the poem I once heard that goes like this:

“I had the blues because I had no shoes,

Until on the street I met a man with no feet.”

Tom Borg is president of Tom Borg Consulting, LLC. He is a business consultant, speaker, coach and author. He shows school districts and organizations how to attract and retain more clients and customers. For more information on his services please contact our office at 734-404-5909 or email him at: tomborg@tomborgconsulting.com

Do This to Avoid Email Problems

Email is everywhere in public schools across America. What’s worse is that it is getting more burdensome than ever. What is a person to do? Here are five tips from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge for Business Leaders E-publication.

 1. Make Action Requests Clear - If you want things to get done, say so. Clearly. There's nothing more frustrating as a reader than getting copied on an e-mail and finding out three weeks later that someone expected you to pick up the project and run with it. Summarize action items at the end of a message so everyone can read them at one glance. This rule  is mandatory for professionals who want to land a job in communications.


2. Combine Separate Points into One Message - Sometimes the problem is the opposite—sending 500 tiny messages a day will overload someone, even if the intent is to reduce this by creating separate threads. If you are holding a dozen open conversations with one person, the slowness of typing is probably substantial overhead. Jot down all your main points on a piece of (gasp) paper, pick up the phone, and call the person to discuss those points. I guarantee you'll save a ton of time.


3. Edit Forwarded Messages - For goodness sake, if someone sends you a message, don't forward it along without editing it. Make it appropriate for the ultimate recipient and make sure it doesn't get the original sender in trouble.


4. Check E-mail at Defined Times Each Day - We hate telemarketers during dinner, so why do we tolerate e-mail when we're trying to get something useful done? Turn off your e-mail "auto-check" and only check e-mail two or three times a day, by hand. Let people know that if they need to reach you instantly, e-mail isn't the way. When it's e-mail processing time, however, shut the office door, turn off the phone, and blast through the messages..


5. Use a Paper “Response List” to Triage Messages Before You Do Any Follow-up - The solution to e-mail overload is pencil and paper? Who knew? Grab a legal pad and label it "Response list." Run through your incoming e-mails. For each, note on the paper what you have to do or whom you have to call. Resist the temptation to respond immediately. If there's important reference information in the e-mail, drag it to your “Reference folder.” Otherwise, delete it. Zip down your entire list of e-mails to generate your response list. Then, zip down your response list and actually do the follow-up.


Tom Borg is president of Tom Borg Consulting, LLC. For more information on how he and his associates can help your public school please contact our office at 734-404-5909 or visit our website at www.tomborgconsulting.com

The 4 Things the Parents You Serve Really Want to Know About You

Among the many things that people want to know about the people who serve them, research shows that four specific items are at the top of the list. Here is what the studies have identified.  Customers

typically want to know the answers to four questions. They are:
          1. Do you like me?
          2. Do you care about me?
          3. Can I trust you?
          4. Do you know what you are talking about?

The first thing they wanted to know was if they were sincerely liked by the person serving them. The customer knew this from how the representative interacted with them. Did they use their name, did they really listen, and did they have sincere empathy in their voice?
The second thing people wanted to know about the professionals who serve them was, did the representative care about them. The customer could sense this from the questions they were asked, again, the tone of voice, the little things they said or did that indicated they indeed cared, and how helpful the representative tried to be.

The third question they wanted answered was, could they trust the representative. Indications of trust could be seen in how confident the representative was and did they follow through as promised. One example of how trust can be lost by a public school administrator, secretary, teacher or some other representative, is by how promptly a phone call or email is returned  to the parent. When there is a long period of time that elapses between the time the parent contacts the school and there is follow up by the school, or worse yet, no follow up, trust diminishes rapidly. A good rule of thumb is to have all phone calls and emails returned within 24 hours or less.

Finally, the fourth thing people want to know about the professionals who serve them was, was  the person serving them knowledgeable and competent. Indications of these qualities were demonstrated if the individual was familiar with the particular situation the customer was experiencing and had they solved similar types of problems for other customers in the past.

In summary, to build lifetime customer satisfaction with the parents you serve, make sure your school system is able to provide customer service training that teaches the right kind of customer service skills. These skills should empower all of your administrators, secretaries, teachers, bus drivers, food service and all other employees to treat your parents in such a way that consistently answers their four most common questions about your school system.

For more information on how we can speak at your next in-service or provide consulting and training to help you attract and retain more students, please contact our office at 734-404-5909 or email Tom at Tom borg@TomBorgconsulting.com or visit our website at www.TomBorgConsulting.comwww.tomborgconsulting.com

Partnering with Your Business Community

Watch and learn from this Michigan Association of School Administrators (MASA) video/webinar program entitled "Partnering with Your Business Community". In it we discuss how to develop a working relationship with your business community that will allow your school district to develop this very valuable resource. http://vimeo.com/53118773

For more information on how Tom Borg Consulting can help your public school retain more students, call our office at 734-4040-5909 or visit our website at:
www.TomBorgConsulting.com

Public Schools Consulting - Watch Out for the News Media

The next area to be aware of, that can seriously affect your attitude in a negative way, is getting too much exposure to the news media.

A number of years ago I was the program chairperson for the Detroit Rotary Club. Being in Detroit, we had access to many major people of influence. On one occasion we invited the new editor and chief of the Detroit News-Free Press to come and speak to our club. He accepted and came and spoke to our group of business people. At the end of his talk he asked if there were any questions. One attorney in the group asked, “Why is it that your newspaper paints such a negative picture of the city of Detroit?”

The speaker, somewhat surprised by the question, took a step back, gathered his thoughts, stepped forward and gave this answer. “Well you see, what we do in our business is report on things that are unique. It just so happens that just about everything in Detroit that is unique is negative.”

That was his answer. Bad news sells; sad but true. It seems that the news media, be it, television, radio, on-line print or hard copy has a purpose, and that is to get as many people as possible to view, listen or read their news. The higher their subscription rate, the higher the fees that they will be able to charge their advertising clients.

It is not about providing the “news.” It is about providing the kind of news people will read.

Tom Borg Consulting, LLC works with public schools to help them increase student retention and minimize student attrition. They do this through their consulting and training programs that  create better internal and external communication and a  more dynamic service culture. For more

information on our services please contact our office at 734-404-5909 or visit our website at www.TomBorgConsulting.com

School of Choice-The Power of a Positive Service Attitude in Your School District

 Like all journeys of life, it starts from within. It begins with an attitude of realistic optimism. This means not dwelling on the past, but, looking ahead to the future and focusing on positive action in the present moment, that individually be taken by every member of your team. We refer to this as a Positive Service Attitude (PSA).

What is a good definition of a PSA? In the consulting and training programs we conduct, this is the first question we ask when we cover this topic. The answers we have received include:
“Looking for the best in every situation.”
“Having a ‘Can Do’ Attitude”
“Being a problem solver.”
“Looking at what could be, not what can’t be.”

Whichever way you slice it a PSA is going to position your school district to take advantage of the opportunities that come with change and transition. While everyone else is focusing on what they are losing, smart leaders help their team to focus on which opportunities are becoming available.

There are several benefits to having you and your team possess a PSA. Here are just a few.
    It is a more pleasant place to work.
    Students and parents like to be around people who have a “Can Do” attitude.
    Things get done more smoothly and effortlessly.
    Students and parents are attracted to and want to be part of this kind of school environment.

Between the optimist and pessimist
the difference is quite droll.
The optimist, the do nut she sees,
the pessimist, only the hole.

                 - unknown

Pessimists seem to enjoy it when things go wrong. They seem to have a rain cloud that follows them around. They seem to find glee in problems that overwhelm other people. As far as they are concerned, they are happily discontented with being negative about life.

On the other hand, the realistic optimist, despite what seems negative, looks for what is positive and then persistently takes action to get the kind of results that benefit all involved.

When one stops to think about what it takes to get and maintain a PSA, it is like using the analogy of an old fashioned balance beam scale to weigh beans. The more beans you place on one side the more it will tip it in that direction. So it is with a PSA. The more positives you put into your mind, the more it will cause your mental balance beam scale will tip in the direction of being positive. If you put more negatives into your mind, it will tip your mental scale in the direction of being negative.


Tom Borg Consulting, LLC works with public schools to help them increase student retention and minimize student attrition. They do this through their consulting and training programs that  create better internal and external communication and a  more dynamic service culture. For more information on our services please contact our office at 734-404-5909 or visit our website at www.TomBorgConsulting.com
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