COMMENTARY
In difficult times, nurture your staff
By Dawn Morais Webster
The economy is so turbulent that it's causing many to go green at the gills and withdraw from the upper deck to their cabins.
To survive and prosper in these hard times, the practices that midsize marketing communication agencies must embrace look a lot like the strategies all businesses should use. That was the conclusion the North American members of ICOM, the global independent communications network, came to when they met in Boston recently for their annual regional meeting.
In two days of frank discussions about both leading-edge practices and challenges facing their businesses, the owner/managers of agencies in Alabama, Atlanta, Birmingham, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Des Moines, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Miami, Minneapolis, Ontario, Philadelphia, Portland, Puerto Rico and Honolulu emerged with a rich to-do list of strategies for both professional and business growth.
The list was a familiar, if sometimes forgotten, one of practices that atrophy when good times make us complacent or bad times make us fearful.
We ignore at peril the truism that people want to work with and buy from people who make them feel good about themselves. People want to work with and buy from people who make them smile and feel smart. So hire carefully. Hire for richness of heart, not just for richness of resume. People with the kind of spirit that clients gravitate to like bees around honey are less easy to identify. They can often be found like the sweetest honey in the newest blooms. Sometimes they are called interns. Don't overlook or underestimate what they can do if you interview carefully, set expectations high and are prepared to invest time and energy in coaching.
Which brings us back to the fundamental strategy for what may be hard times: the care and nourishment of people, beginning with your own team, your customers and the larger public. Too often we make the mistake of thinking of all of these groups as homogenous entities to whom we direct the deadening sameness of homogenous communications. If we can learn to listen and talk to each of these groups without forgetting that they are made up of unique individuals caught in a complex web of needs, challenges and aspirations, we will demonstrate the kind of empathy that may lead them to love us right back. And that, we all know, is a lesson for all time.
Dawn Morais Webster is tpresident/CEO of Loomis-ISC, the Honolulu member of ICOM, the international network of independent marketing communication agencies. She wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.
