Phoenix Jackson is an award-winning social entrepreneur, tech investor,
author, and speaker. She’s also the founder and Chief Communications Officer of Phoenix Effect, a 16-year-old global Public Relations and Marketing firm.
Passionate about empowering her clients to be influential through entrepreneurship, Phoenix has worked with many small business owners, nonprofits, professional athletes, entertainers, authors, speakers, and politicians in helping them manifest their business goals.
Our social media environment has made it more common to see companies face disparaging conversations on social media. In our interview, we discussed how companies could effectively handle negative press from social media and strategies to avoid facing these issues in the first place.
Key takeaways from our conversation today include:
Why social media has exacerbated an existing cultural trend of spreading negative stories before confirming accuracy.
Tips for assessing risk when navigating politically charged company decisions.
Best practices for responding to negative reviews and angry customers.
Gina Schreck is the founder of SocialKNX, a digital marketing & social media management agency and the owner of two coworking spaces, The Village Workspace and BarnWorx in Centennial Colorado. She’s been ranked by LinkedIn as one of the top B2B marketers to follow in 2019 and 2020.
On today’s episode of Corporate CPR, Gina shared the most impactful strategies for strengthening your company’s social media presence and avoiding digital media faux pas. During our discussion, we touched on topics such as:
Choosing the best voice and style for your social media content
Which companies should be active on social media and why
Factors to consider when deciding the optimum content marketing budget
The best time to start using social media for business branding
This episode is fast-paced and full of impactful nuggets of information for companies ready to refine or expand their social media strategy.
Dan Prince is a life-long technologist and expert in the modern software development lifecycle.
He’s the founder and CEO of Illumisoft, a custom software development company that provides healthcare solutions with a human-centered approach. He’s also a team-player that opts for simplicity over perfection, and people over processes.
In our interview today, Dan and I discussed the importance of building strong relationships with clients in order to truly understand their needs. And with customer satisfaction as a key indicator of how effective your business processes are, Dan and his team always conduct an analysis at the end of projects in order to learn and grow from their experiences.
Dr. Eric Daimler is an authority in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.
With over 20 years of experience in the field, he has co-founded six technology companies and is currently the founder and CEO of Connexus AI; A company spun out of MIT that addresses the most significant unsolved problem in computer science.
As a frequent speaker, lecturer, and commentator, Daimler empowers communities and citizens to leverage AI and robotics for a more sustainable, secure, and prosperous future.
Having experienced AI in the broadest possible perspective from academia to business and policy, Dr. Eric has a unique outlook from which to consider the potential problems concerning the future of AI and help frame the debate about possible solutions.
In our interview today, Dr. Eric and I discussed why it’s vital that we all embrace the use of technology in our lives and businesses. We discuss the pros and cons of different database solutions alongside how organizations can fix common problems related to data.
Other topics Dr. Eric and I cover include:
Why data is the foundation of the future
The future of fintech in relation to data.
Policy and protection: how we can keep our data secure.
Learning to be precise when dealing with databases.
Ron Karr is a sales success expert who has helped leaders on six continents eliminate risk, gain buy-in and achieve better results faster with the Velocity Mindset. In addition, his presentations and advisory services have generated over a billion dollars in incremental revenues for his clients.
Ron is the author of five books, including his latest, The Velocity Mindset, and the bestselling book Lead, Sell or Get Out of the Way. In addition, Ron facilitates the Chief Revenue Officer Mastermind Group made up of CEOs and VP’s building high-performance sales cultures.
This podcast interview discussed the hurdles sales leaders face in achieving their goals, especially amidst economic shifts and changing environments. According to Ron, the best sales results come from uncovering customer motivations to find opportunities to become valuable — this often negates competitive forces that can often distract our gaze.
We also dive into the importance of sales benchmarking tools, growth mindset, and strategies for B2B companies to build new customer relationships.
Dr. Troy Hall is an award-winning culture strategist, speaker, best-selling author, and talent retention expert. He has been featured on the Today Show, ABC, Beyond the Business Radio Show, and CEO world. His book Cohesion Culture discusses how leaders can create safe workplaces where employees feel valued and share mutual commitment. In addition, he has provided executive counseling to leaders, founders, and CEOs throughout his career who benefited from his experience and assistance in achieving their desired outcomes.
In this podcast interview, Dr. Troy discusses ways organizations can create a healthy working environment through culture, vision, alignment, camaraderie, and healthy workplace cultures. Almost every company has a culture problem. One of the ways to avoid significant cultural challenges is hiring people who share the company’s values. Although culture evolves through time, you can set the groundwork and establish the parameters and expectations upfront.
For Dr. Troy, one of the things that organizations should look at when hiring is behavior and conduct. Understanding the behavior of employees can help minimize cultural problems. If you allow individuals to be harmful in the work environment, then the root of the culture problem is you and not the environment itself. Therefore, it’s crucial to actively observe behaviors, training, support, and communication at your company.
I have a love/hate relationship with women’s events. On the one hand, I feel more included in women’s events. Other people take the initiative and start conversations with me. At other events I attend, I feel like I’m constantly the one trying to initiate conversations and be included. On the other hand, most of the time at women’s events I want to stand up and yell “STOP BEING A VICTIM!” I feel like the recurring message is, “whoa is me, I can’t succeed because I’m a woman in business.” Some of the gender inequity can be blamed on women not getting out of their own way and changing their course.
You may be asked at some point to take over a failing project. When joining a failing project, you will have to assess the people, processes, and tools. Today, I want to focus on processes.
When I join a failing project, the first thing I want to understand is whether the scope is clear? I look at the documented scope, but I also take time to understand what people believe the scope is. I frequently find there is a mismatch between what is expected and what is documented. At that point, we take the time to align on scope, clearly defining what is in scope as well as out of scope for the project.
Companies are faced with a need to constantly be evolving and improving in order to effectively respond to the market. This pressure to evolve usually results in a long list of projects the company wants to complete in order to stay competitive, improve profitability, or respond to regulations. When I joined the board of the PMI Mile Hi Chapter, there was a list of 20 great projects we needed to undertake in order to improve the value we were delivering to our customers and ensure we were staying relevant. The team tried to take on all 20 projects. At the end of the year, how many were delivered? None. Companies must reduce the number of in process projects. Do less to do more. Too many projects result in:
Divided focus. Leaders are spread thin and cannot provide the support projects need to overcome issues that arise. Multiple teams vie for the leader’s attention. This is evidenced by calendars full of meetings and the project not being able to get key decision-makers together timely; deliverable reviews and sign offs being delayed; and leaders multi-tasking while attending project meetings. I have seen this countless times in organizations. Jim Collins mentions in Good to Great, “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.” This is scalable to the organization level. If a department or company has more than three priorities, nothing is truly a priority because the proper focus cannot be given to it. An example of divided focus: we were holding an executive steering committee meeting and the CEO was immersed in his iPad and occasionally glanced up to ask questions that had already been answered just minutes before. Not only was the meeting not adding the value for him, it also sent a message to the project team that the project wasn’t that important and seemingly, not worth his time.
Overworked team. I have yet to work with a company that doesn’t have a capacity issue. Teams are always asked to do more with less without being given the environment to do so. Project teams are often spread thin and face challenges having the time to focus on a project. Project team members are often overbooked in meetings and do not have time to get project deliverables completed until after the standard workday ends. Or, they are forced to work on deliverables while half-listening to project calls resulting in a risk in quality. From a quantitative perspective, an over-allocated team increases risk and increases project duration and eventually cost. From a qualitative perspective, it results in reduced customer satisfaction, because the project isn’t delivering the results expected when expected, and reduced morale of an overworked team.
Extended project timelines. If the project team is anything less than 100% allocated to the project, then the project will be slower than it could be. If resources are 100% dedicated, they can work on project tasks without interruption and be available precisely when the project needs them. Having the entire project team 100% dedicated is not always realistic but the concept is applicable. The objective is to keep projects minimized so project team members can be available exactly when the project needs them, in order to reduce wait time, unnecessary hand-offs, and partially done work that is not delivering value, which all culminates into waste.
Increased risk. The more in-flight projects, the more risk. First, it puts quality at risk. As mentioned above, if there are many projects in flight, there is a divided focus. This division can result in poor decision-making because the proper amount of time is not being put into making a quality decision. Quality can also be compromised due to resources moving between projects and therefore rushing to get things done and possibly taking shortcuts, or forgetting where they left off and missing important details. Second, there is a risk that the solution the project is delivering will be obsolete or will be delivering at a lower project ROI. The business landscape is always changing and if solutions are being delivered a year after the business need was identified, the market opportunity may be missed, or the market may have shifted enough that the solution is no longer able to capitalize on the opportunity to achieve the company’s IRR.
Managing the project portfolio is important in order to support project success. If an organization has a right-sized portfolio, it will likely reduce the number of projects that ever get off-track. And if a project does get off-track, the leaders and resources will have the availability necessary to support the project to get it back on track. This isn’t possible if an organization is taking on too many projects simultaneously.
Right-sizing portfolios can be challenging and deserves its own blog post. But some key things to look at are ensuring that the organization is delivering no more than three enterprise-wide projects at once. After allocating those resources, if a department or team still has capacity, they can look to deliver their own department or team specific projects – again, no more than three. Starting here will often bring up questions around ancillary project team members (ones with highly specialized skills) and under allocated resources. It may mean you have to redesign the way projects are staffed. We will discuss these in the future.
What ways have you seen companies effectively manage portfolio size? What benefits did you see?
Jana Axline is Chief Project Officer at Project Genetics and the author of Becoming You. Through her leadership musings, she inspires audiences to grow as leaders and ultimately achieve who they were created to be. For more information visit Project Genetics.
When I once joined a project as a recovery consultant, the organization had already spent $10 million on a Salesforce implementation. Despite the amount of money invested, nothing was yet in production. It was one of the top three initiatives in the company. One of the first things I do during a project rescue is to understand the project org chart. As the team was walking me through it, they mentioned that we were to meet weekly with the sponsors. Sponsors? As in more than one? On this project, there were three, each from a different department.
Sponsors play a critical role in project success, and can also be a direct cause of project failure.
When evaluating why a project is off-track, it is important to learn what role the sponsor plays to determine if there is an opportunity for them to be more effective.
Is there only one sponsor? The sponsor is the captain of the ship. Imagine what would happen if there was more than one captain, and each wanted to steer to a different location! In a project, it’s not uncommon for there to be competing priorities between stakeholders. Each stakeholder group focuses on what’s best for them and the outcomes they need. The sponsor must be focused on the overall project outcomes and attaining the project ROI that outlined in the business case. A sponsor is often responsible for sorting through competing priorities and understanding what will get the project the best overall outcome. If there is more than one sponsor, than there is no single point of accountability to project outcomes. And if sponsors have competing priorities that have to be de-conflicted, we will have to go to a leader outside the project to resolve the conflicts. The key is to have a single point of accountability, and that manifests itself as one sponsor.
Have the role and expectations been clearly defined? Often someone is assigned the role of a sponsor with no explanation of what that means. Maybe it’s assumed that the newly designated sponsor knows their roles and responsibilities. Perhaps they are assigned simply because a project must have a sponsor, and no one understands the position. A sponsor is the champion of the project. This person should be the project’s biggest cheerleader. The sponsor should be advocating the project through the organization and ensuring it’s getting the right visibility within the organization. The sponsor is responsible for providing the project with the resources it needs, typically in funding. Finally, the sponsor is the professional roadblock remover. They are an escalation path for the project when the project fails in achieving its results.
Is the right person the sponsor? As you learn the sponsor’s role, you may determine the person assigned isn’t the right fit. The sponsor owns the business case and, therefore, the project outcomes. The sponsor should invest in reaching those outcomes. If the results are to improve customer service and the sponsor is in finance, that is most likely a misaligned sponsor.
Is the sponsor actively engaged? It should be clear that a sponsor cannot be a person who sits on the sidelines and only shows up for steering committee meetings. A sponsor should always know how the project is going, and work with the project manager to adjust project activities to ensure the project hits its goals. The sponsor should be scanning the environment, and validating the project is still going to fulfill the business case and resolve the business driver. A disengaged sponsor becomes an anchor to the project.
If your project is off-track and needs rescue, examine the sponsor’s role and purpose. What challenges have your projects faced when it comes to a less than ideal project sponsor? What techniques have you used to circumvent those issues?
Jana Axline is Chief Project Officer at Project Genetics and the author of Becoming You. Through her leadership musings, she inspires audiences to grow as leaders and ultimately achieve who they were created to be. For more information visit Project Genetics.
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