I wanted to let all our loyal blog followers know about some important changes coming to the HF web site. The main HF Consulting & Coaching web site will undergo some long-overdue layout and design changes and some features will be relocated.  

Our new site will be more focused on who we are, what we do for our clients, and how we can add real value to your organization with our coaching and consulting services.  Information such as our specific expertise, service offerings, consulting philosophy, and engagement practices will all be easier to find after the rework.

Our blog will also move as a part of the overhaul.

If you are not already following us via Twitter, you can catch our Sr. Consultant and Strategist, Dave Winner @davewinner and our President, Steve Pearl @stevepearl.  No matter where we blog or why, you'll always see the latest updates pop on Twitter first.

By the way...

Our "Crisis Communications" and "Making Meetings Matter" series continue!  Making Meetings Matter returns in three weeks, after we conclude our Crisis Communications series.  (It seems like there are a lot of crises going on out there these days, so it just feels right to focus on that topic for a while.)

Check out @stevepearl for the latest updates and blog posts on these two series.  These are two FREE coaching series that will help you unleash the creativity of your teams and be ready to respond with better communications in the face of an emergency or crisis.

"Wow!"  That's all my friend Jack could say.  Then there was another moment of stunned silence before he added an even louder, "WOW!" for emphasis.

I just finished telling my long-time friend the heavily abridged, ultra-sanitized, super-condensed version of my eight month journey through the mother of all organizational crises.  It wasn't a tidy little, "here today, gone tomorrow" crisis.  It was a, "This isn't going away any time soon and we could lose the company" crisis.  

Jack's reaction pretty much said it all.

"WOW!"

Jack and I hadn't seen or talked to each other in nearly two years, so we had a LOT of catching up to do.  The last time we talked he was congratulating me on my new job.  A few months later I was heading off to another state, believing I was about to build a brand new college from the ground up.  As far as Jack knew when he picked up the phone, I was about to share the good news with him about the college opening in the fall of 2012.

We reconnected when I called Jack for some advice on a potential consulting project.  One thing led to another and our conversation soon took a turn toward my eight-month-long trip down the crisis management rabbit hole.

Editor's Note:  It's time for one more side-trip, friends.  I apologize.  I normally don't like side-tripping during an extended series, and our "Making Meetings Matter" series seems to resonate with some people.  I have received several positive notes from readers who stumbled upon it, liked it, and are waiting for the next installment.

The next installment in the MMM series, by the way, is, "Planning Matters." Better meeting planning and putting a little work into better meeting execution will take you one step closer to unleashing the creative power of your team.  We are proud of the impact this series is having, so we are eager to get back to it.

Recently, though, I have watched helplessly from the sidelines as organizations I know and support have faced life-and-death crises.  I'm talking about the kind of crises that can take an organization to its knees, leaving it fighting for survival.  Such crises expose the urgency to craft high-quality "Crisis Communications," including practices, themes, and messages that connect at emotional and intellectual levels with a community or customer base in turmoil.  

Crisis Communications are far trickier and more delicate than day-to-day organizational communications, often outstripping the capabilities of otherwise gifted communicators.  A seasoned communicator can come off looking like a bumbling rookie in if they lack awareness of the difference between crafting largely one-way communications designed to "sell" a product and communications that are designed to open a deeper "conversation" with a doubting customer.

So, for the moment, more so even than helping you with "Make Meetings Matter" it is important that we talk about how to do effective "Crisis Communications."  As you will soon see, the issue is not "if" you will one day face an organizational crisis, but "when." 

Prepare yourself with better communication tools now and you will increase your organization's chances of survival when a true crisis strikes.

Let's dig in...

(NEXT:  "This is the Crisis That Never Ends...") 

We want to take a brief side-trip from our, "Making Meetings Matter" series to talk about an under-appreciated concept in organizational leadership.  Sometimes it feels like leadership experts talk about the practice of "leadership" in narrowly-defined, myopic terms.  "Leaders" tend to say "this," or "leaders" behave a certain way in certain situations.  

To hear some leadership gurus describe it, you would think that the same leadership skills and styles apply equally well to all disciplines, all industries, and all challenges.

That's just not the case.  Applying good leadership practices to the unique circumstances of one company versus another is rarely neat, tidy, or predictable.  Leadership can be messy at times as you use a method that worked one time before only to find out that the new team doesn't respond the same way as the old.

Sometimes a leadership style that worked well in one environment backfires in another. 

With Steve Jobs' death so fresh on our minds, a perfect example of a leadership mismatch springs to mind.  John Sculley, skilled at leading consumer products giant PepsiCo, notoriously bombed at Apple when he tried to impose the skills he had honed at PepsiCo on the laid-back, Cupertino-based technology company.  Jobs and Sculley clashed horribly, resulting in Jobs' departure from the company he founded in a garage with his friend Steve Wozniak back in the late 70's.