The Path To Achieving Positive Issues Management

Your business is bound to have public relations issues with your stakeholders and customers eventually; it's just a fact of life. It helps if you look at an issue as a rift between your business's policy or actions and your stakeholder and customer expectations. Now consider Issue management as the process you can use to heal that rift!

Fortunately, there are a number of ways to accomplish this. Your business can partake in an issues management process in public relations that can help it to meet expectations and alleviate the disagreement. This may involve adjusting a product or modifying your mode of operations. 

These Public relations rifts can often be mollified by making accommodations for them through policy decisions that will drive individual actions and operations in significant ways. In this case, implementing the changes will involve your board of directors setting a new policy and your management team seeing that it's implemented. 

Yet another way a rift may be healed is by changing expectations through acts like presenting public education on new product testing, or establishing dialogue with your business community on new procedures, in which expectations can be changed by improving communications.

All of these strategies can work together in combination to achieve the desired issues management results.

Engaging in issue management can create value and spawn benefits across a very wide spectrum of issues, both external and internal:

Externally - 

A dialogue of mutuality can mitigate conflict or even avoid it altogether. The improved stakeholder relationships it fosters can lead to successful resolutions that take the positions and goals of all interested parties and the stakeholders into account.

Bring products and services relevant to expressed concerns or unmet demand to market with alacrity before further damage takes place.

Reduce the marketplace communication noise that forms an impediment to the competitive, efficient performance of your business.

Eradicate any and all barriers to operational constraints and market entry that are causing dissonance.

Implement and maintain socially intelligent management that really listens to concerns and acts on them in a timely and constructive manner.

Perform a hard reality check on your business's internal perceptions and plans versus the external realities they are in conflict with, forming a filter that will produce improved strategic initiatives.

Internally - 

Implement business-wide management tweaks along with efficient resource allocation to achieve a new synergy.

Provide contextually relevant communication to improve the capacity for the selected individuals to speak for the business.

Understanding organisational strategy along with individual roles relative to goals will improve morale, teamwork, and productivity.

The path to positive issues management begins with improving public relations.