What I do.

Building Better Relationships Through Effective Communication

I help organizations to identify issues that affect their operations and reputations. I then assist in addressing those issues through effective communication. This includes research, planning, implementation and evaluation of professional communication programs.

The process starts and ends with listening, not speaking.

I work with senior executives to assess the condition of their organizations' relationships with critical internal and external audiences, by listening to those audiences with appropriate research techniques.

I use this information to plan what's needed to meet each group's expectations for the organization's performance as an employer, supplier, citizen and neighbor. I build unique communication programs to let each of these audiences know how the organization is performing in the public interest and to meet their expectations. Then I listen again to see how effectively the communication worked and how we can further shape the policies, actions and communication of the organization.

This is called effective communication. Effective communication builds better relationships.

Brief History

Menu of Services

Role-Based Assessments™ and Coherent Human Infrastructure™

Additional Resources

Why Interviews Suck Innovation DAILY

Are Your Customers on Your Team? Innovation DAILY

Put Your Money Where Your TEAM Is! National Association of Seed & Venture Funds

Collateral Damage from a Bad Hire Innovation DAILY

Innovation Interviewing: New Game, New Rules Innovation DAILY

Here Today, Team Tomorrow Innovation DAILY

Role-Based Assessment: A New Way to Know ERE.net webinar

When Bad Things Happen to Good Innovators Innovation DAILY

Make Sure People Will Fit - Before You Hire Them! National Association of Seed & Venture Funds 

A New Way to Know How People Will Perform in Teams

Role-Based Assessment™ (RBA) is a cost-effective, user-friendly, online source of reliable decision-support used for screening, selecting and developing employees and teams.  Few employees work in isolation, so team performance is the ultimate “Quality of Hire” measure. RBA’s narrative reports describe and predict how and where a person is most likely to succeed on a team. They also highlight areas of concern and provide key advice for teambuilding. 

For a no-cost trial for up to five RBA reports and other background information, click here.

In partnership with The Gabriel Institute, thePRguy is dedicated to helping organizations improve quality and productivity, while securing a higher return on their investment in people. Building on a 35-year foundation of research by Dr. Janice Presser and Dr. Jack Gerber, TGI has created a technology that qualitatively identifies how a person will perform on a team. The resulting TGI Role-Based Assessment™ (RBA) predicts three group-performance variables that directly impact business productivity and profitability.

Why wonder?

How many times have you read resumes, reviewed assessment reports, and interviewed a slate of job candidates, and still felt uncertain about deciding which would be the best fit on your team? By focusing on ‘teaming characteristics’ instead of individual characteristics, TGI Role-Based Assessment™ offers a new way to know whether a prospective employee (or a potential successor) will be a productive contributor or a roadblock to success.

Why Role-Based Assessment?

Imagine for a moment that you must make a very important hiring decision. You may envision yourself as a senior executive in a company facing stiff competition, a middle manager in a fast-growing business or a small business owner who absolutely cannot afford to make a hiring mistake.

Through the use of resumes, references and interviews, you have identified the ‘finalist’ candidates. You also have assessment reports that describe each one’s IQ, personality, problem-solving skills and stress response. But you still feel unsure. Why? It’s because you have been through this process before and, despite the discipline and the documentation, the person you hired was a complete failure. “Why?” you ask yourself, “What was missing?"

Employers gather lots of data about the individual characteristics of job candidates, but they rarely find the answer to these crucial questions: Which of these people will fit best on my team? What are their “teaming” characteristics?

In organizations of any size, making an error when hiring or promoting a person can have very expensive and painful consequences.

Business leaders attempt to reduce or avoid these problems by spending billions of dollars every year on tests of personality, skills, knowledge and intelligence. Such tests do measure accurately, but they were not designed to predict team performance.

The behavioral scientists who created Role-Based Assessment had a specific goal: they wanted to deliver business value by predicting the quality of a person’s performance on a team./p>

Using Role-Based Assessment

Other assessment reports contain up to 70 pages of data and diagrams about individual traits. They may utilize codes, colors or animal names to describe a person. Virtually all require the manager to correlate, calibrate and infer how a person might actually perform.

In contrast, RBA reports contain short, direct statements about the way a person will interact with others in the workplace. Fundamental “teaming behaviors” are made clear by the Role name. It is easy to understand that an Explorer would excel in discovering new information or assets, that a Communicator can build positive community interaction, and that a Vision Former’s strengths include strategic planning, business development and modeling efficient operations.

RBA Reports identify three unique measures of behavior: Coherence, Role, and Teaming Characteristics. Coherence represents a person’s desire and ability to work productively with others; Role is the way a person seeks to meet specific needs within an organization; and Teaming Characteristics identify a range of factors that relate to “job-fit,” “team-fit” and other quality-of-hire concerns —including potential dysfunctional behaviors. Selecting Coherent people will fill your staff with strong, positive team players.

Matching a Coherent person’s job responsibilities to his or her Role will increase individual success and job satisfaction. Building teams of Coherent people whose Roles match the team’s goals and activities is the recipe for Coherent Human Infrastructure™ — a state of productive synergy that adds bottom-line value to any organization.

Coherent Human Infrastructure and the CHI Indicators™

Making the Workplace a Better Place to Work

As a natural extension of The Gabriel Institute’s focus on teaming behaviors, TGI has developed metrics and methods for evaluating and strengthening an organization’s human infrastructure. The measures of Coherent Human Infrastructure quality are called the CHI Indicators™ (pronounced ‘key’ or ‘chee’ as in ‘life-force’). Managers utilize the CHI Indicators to predict workplace performance in qualitative terms, by identifying the collective Coherence and job-fit of a team, and in quantitative terms that enable the diagnosis and repair of team performance problems.

By aggregating RBA data to determine Role Distribution™ and Coherence Ratio™, managers can:

• Assemble teams that are structured for success;
• Identify weaknesses/strengths in group behavior; and
• Obtain actionable objectives for improving team performance

Together, CHI Indicators and Role-Based Assessment form the foundation of innovative, high-value management consulting and organizational development capabilities. Any organization with a Coherent Human Infrastructure will perform better, grow faster, adapt more quickly and win more often.

Role-Based Assessment: Additional Background articles.

Choose from these attachments for a no-cost trial for up to five RBA reports and additional information:

You'll get top-10 search-engine rankings or I'll refund your fee.

If you take the steps detailed in the report I will create for you, your Web site will be listed in the top 10 results in the search engine of your choice. You choose the keywords. This guarantee is valid for one full year after your purchase. The cost is only $189 per report.

Of course no one can guarantee top-10 rankings except the search engines' programmers. But the proprietary software analysis system I use has a success rate greater than 98%. So this guarantee is a safe bet for you and me.

Finally a tool that would dissect the top websites and tell me exactly what I need to change. This was a God send! I made the edits and to my surprise within a week or two I started ranking in the top 30 for items I never ranked for. And I recently ranked top ten for some other keywords related to my site."

One site wanted to capture a high Google ranking for "Philadelphia graphic design firm." We compared the Web site's main page to the main pages of the ten Web sites that, today, hold the top-ten organic-search result positions in a Google search for that phrase. Comparing more than 30 factors, we delivered more than 60 pages of specific, actionable advice. When just a few of the recommended changes had been made — in about 30 minutes — the site went from having absolutely no chance of being in the top Google results to a 62% chance.

This custom report tells you, in specific terms, exactly what you need to do to improve your search results.

Here are just a few comments from users of this of this proprietary analysis.

"My very first attempt brought me to position #1 out of nearly 400,000 sites.  Incredible, thank you" 

"My website was lost in a sea of competitors.  I could not find it by searching for keywords related to what I sell.  PPC ads were costing me a small fortune, but it was the only way I could get any customers at all, and the amount of product I sold didn't nearly cover the d costs.  My site was costing me money everyday.  I totally re-designed and refocused the way my site was built.  I now have quite a few top ten placements on Google for very competitive search terms."

"My website today is #1 for Google, Yahoo and AOL."

To order your custom report, visit the store.

Here are a few examples of my specialized copywriting work.

• Wrote, for a bank CEO, a one-hour equity analyst presentation for the annual analyst meeting. (This assignment, by the way, was given and completed in 5 days, including a weekend...)
   
• Ghosted a "career reminiscence" piece for the chief executive of a chemical products company for the 50th anniversary issue of Chemical Week magazine.
   
• Based on interviews with executives of a Bristol-Myers Squibb subsidiary wrote a profile piece for a leading trade magazine.
   
• Substantially re-wrote speeches, for publication, originally delivered by senior executives of Du Pont Merck and Glaxo.
   
• Wrote, for FMC, and am now licensing to other companies a full-color, illustrated 30-page manager's workbook, Managing Change: How to Plan and Implement an Effective Employee Communication Program.
   
• I have written countless feature articles, speeches, PowerPoint presentations, news releases, employee communication pieces such as Q&A documents, annual reports, brochures, direct mail pieces and Web sites

Here are a few examples of my consulting and planning work.

• Developed a communication plan to support a $90 million implementation of electronic medical records for a major healthsystem, based on in-depth executive interviews and an extensive literature review.
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• Collaborated with senior management of a large hospital to develop a special-purpose employee and community communication program to mitigate any negative impact of the hospital's program to recruit nurses from the Phillipines.
   

  Directed the joint communication planning process for the proposed consolidation of two major urban hospitals in a Northeastern city; process included several Community Relationship Check-Ups, facilitating team meetings, writing a two- year communication plan and presenting research and plan to joint board of directors steering committee.
   

• Developed audience- and issue-specific communication programs for a variety of companies, including opinion-leader communication programs for hospitals.
   
• Developed, managed and directly serviced the internal and external communication plans for a major subsidiary of a Fortune 500 company prior to, during and following the company's top-to-bottom re-engineering project.
   
• For Chemical Products Group of a Frotune 100 company, undertook a variety of project-planning initiatives in support of the director of Public Affairs including how to structure and support the employee and community relations functions at the plant level.
   
• For scores of clients, during a 30+ year career, have developed full-scale, research-based communication programs for specific purposes in support of marketing communication and corporate communication activities including product introductions, management of major crises, corporate identity and others.

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Public Relations programs begin and end with research.

As this basic communication planning model demonstrates, public relations programs depend upon research for planning, monitoring and evaluating communication programs. (For an extended discussion of the current state-of-the-practice, please visit this entry in my blog.)

These are examples of research services I provide to my clients.

Secondary Studies

Secondary research involves examining the literature or other information sources such as news media reports or an organization's Twitter streams to answer specific questions.

Example: I have conducted news media analyses, for several clients, to answer specific management questions about relationships with certain media and reporters. For example, to convince one CEO who believed the leading industry-publication to be biased against the company, content analysis of media reports demonstrated that while the publication was rigidly unbiased in its reporting, "negative" material about the company was contained almost exclusively in the quoted commentary of equity analysts. This led to a program to improve analyst -- not media -- relationships.

Example: For a major bank planning a corporate re-engineering project, I answered key questions, through reviews of primary studies, such as: "What role does trust of management play in employee support of the company? How is support demonstrated by employees? What are the factors that contribute to job satisfaction? How is it measured? What are the behavioral components of "trust" and what specific management actions can be taken to improve trust and credibility?"

A communication program-planning workshop

This is an all-day, facilitated program to develop full-scale communication programs in issue-driven and urgent circumstances. (See the workshop description for details about this program.)

Example: A large healthcare company convened leaders of its industry from around the United States to plan the industry's collective response, through its professional association, to pending legislative and regulatory threats. The workshop resulted in engaging a professional search firm to identify a Washington-based PR/lobbying firm and a multi-million investment in a public affairs program to avert the threats.

Benchmark studies of best practices

Traditional benchmark studies of best practices combine primary-research techniques, such as in-depth interviews, site visits and surveys, and secondary-research techniques such as aliterature reviews.

Example: As part of its ongoing public accountability program, the hospital Association of Pennsylvania commissioned a study, Building Relationships with Community Opinion Leaders: Why, Who and How. The report drew on an annotated bibliography produced by a noted public relations academic and researcher, a self-administered survey of "benchmark partners" who were identified by prominent authors and other experts as representative of current "best practices," and in-depth interviews with CEOs and other senior officers of 13 member hospitals. The study was distributed to all of the member hospitals.

Example: A healthcare system commissioned a study, Best Practices: Organizing a Public Affairs Function as part of an effort to reorganize its in-house functions to place greater emphasis upon building relationships with legislators and regulators at the state and federal levels. The study report was based on in-depth interviews with the senior government relations officers of eight major health systems.

In-Depth Initerview-Based Reports

For a major urban university's school of business, I conducted an interview study among major employers in the school's region to determine employers' needs, expectations and reactions regarding a proposed change of the school's MBA program from "generic" to industry-specific.

Best practices white papers and issue briefings

Best practices research is often entirely based on secondary-research techniques, chiefly reviews of existing research and scholarship on a particular subject, and produced as a white paper.

Example: A major financial institution engaged us to consult with the executive steering committee that was responsible for conducting a re-engineering of a major subsidiary company. One product of this assignment was white paper about Best Practices in Employee Communication, which focused on preparing the steering committee for the challenges they would face in terms of employee morale and productivty when the re-engineering was completed.

Example: A large healthcare system commissioned a white paper, Hospital Price Transparency, to demonstrate current trends and impending legislations and regulation that is driving the need for healtghcare systems to provide comparative pricing information about their services.

Example: I conducted, analyzed, reported and presented best practices benchmark studies for a major bank (the use of technology in corporate communications functions) and a major industrial chemical manufaturer (the structure and organization of chemical company public affairs operations.)

Employee Opinion Polls

I have designed, conducted, reported and presented the results of full-scale employee surveys for three major corporations.

Public opinion polls

Public opinion polls employ scientific sampling methods to accurately portray the opinions of an entire population based on a selected sample of the population within a specified margin of error.

Example: A large healthcare system engaged me to conduct a poll that would measure the success of certain marketing programs and to learn more about factors leading to the selection of hospitals. The study was based on 2,847, 14-minute in-depth telephone interviews with adult residents, 35 years of age or older, living in five specific georaphic areas. The sample screened-out journalists, hospital employees or volunteers, physicians and hospital directors and trustees.

Example: I Conducted an "overnight" survey of 800 18+adults and 150 community leaders in a targeted state to guide the communication planning process for an acquisition bid made by a company after another takeover offer was already in play.

The Relationship Check-Up©

A Relationship Check-Up© is a proprietary method I developed for assessing the state of an organization's relationships with key internal and external constituent groups, whose expectations must be met to win their support for the goals and objectives of the organization.

Examples: I have conducted six Community Relationship Check-Ups for four teaching hospitals. The process involved in-depth interviews with community leaders, senior staff, physicians and board members; a series of employee focus groups; and audits of the institution's publications, advertising, collateral materials and publicity activities. I've also conducted "mini" Check-Ups with specialized audiences such as physicians and equity analysts for several clients.

Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the industrial revolution?

Watch this astounding video. Then, if your marketing and corporate reputation-management communication programs do not include a robust social media component, feel free to contact me to discuss how to fill that critical gap. Our services include setting up automated Twitter programs, using proprietary software.