Category Archives: Government Relations Excellence
The Best (and Worst) Behaviors
I’m citing very specific behaviors that encouraged and energized me in 2010, as well as a couple on the dark side that should be avoided as career-limiting moves.
On the bright side. . . . . .
Show You Know
For several years, I have heard political involvement professionals lament the lack of understanding among their executives about the need for quality vs. quantity in grassroots participation. Rather than ringing your hands about it, get out there and call the game. Meet with your senior executives and demonstrate the value of quality engagement. Politically involved professionals know that quality grassroots involvement is what will set them apart from the mass grassroots hysteria.
Rather, why not make a face to face, compelling case…
Solutions to the Social Loafing Lifestyle
In a previous post, I talked about social loafing. Now I’m going to talk about how we change the social loafing dynamic.
Identify Contributions
Identify team member contributions. What have coalition members done to advance the cause? Be specific, and enumerate contributions that you want duplicated. Are the contributions distributed to the coalition members or posted on an easily accessible Web site?
What about your faithful PAC recruiters? What about your PAC board members who help answer tough PAC questions or find colleagues to help recruit others? Where are
their achievements noted?
Ditto for your grassroots team leaders. How many new members have they recruited during the last quarter? Who consistently responds to your calls to action?
Anyone who has worked in sales knows that…
Want to Innovate? First, You Have to Know Your Strengths
As a leader in next-level political involvement skill development, the Innovate to Motivate® Conference is known for investing in expert faculty to connect you to nationally-known thought leaders.
Another one of our expert faculty members is Candace Fitzpatrick, President of Core Clarity, Inc. You can read more about her here: http://www.coreclarity.net/pages/AboutUs.html.
As many of you know, I believe that to improve your government relations performance, you have to work from your strengths, rather than focusing on shoring up weaknesses. This applies to one’s professional life, as well.
However, many of us don’t know what our organizational or personal strengths are. Candace will be leading two dynamic breakout sessions where you will conduct your own personal strength analysis to find out what…
Social Loafing
We’ve all been on a team where 20 percent of the team members do 80 percent of the work – a few board members recruit for the PAC, a couple of organizations in your coalition make the effort to mobilize their members on an important issue, or one member of your GR staff reviews and edits the department’s Web site.
I grew up on a farm, and there are great lessons from the farm. A German agricultural engineer named Max Ringelmann studied farm labor efficiency and found that productivity decreases in large work groups (for me, that meant a work group of two, as my brother did most of the hard labor—and yes, I was the social loafer). Fifty years later,…
2008 I2M Survey Results
This survey is different from typical benchmarking surveys, as it goes several steps beyond the numbers to find out why certain political involvement outcomes are or are not prevalent.
Since the survey questions were largely open-ended, there is a lot of “word-crunching” to do, and we are thus releasing the results in phases, along with, where warranted, my commentary and “reality check” advice at the conclusion of each finding.
So, let’s get to the top of it!
Political Involvement Culture (“PIC”) Is Generally Strong
An organizational culture that is conducive to political involvement (PAC, grassroots, & lobbying) makes our lives easier, right? I look at it like this: values drive attitudes, attitudes drive behavior, and behavior drives culture. Each is dependent on the other.
We…