4.7.1: Bringing it All Together

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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Shaping Your Professional Brand

21 ratings

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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Shaping Your Professional Brand

21 ratings

Course 2 of 4 in the Specialization Professional IQ: Preventing and Solving Problems at Work

You've thought about who you are and how you want your career to be. You have some soft skills to deal with situations that could cause problems. What about the team around you? How do you build functional and constructive professional relationships? How can you add value? What do employers look for when they are promoting? Skill-building in this course will include asking questions, listening, developing likeability (you’d better be stellar if you’re difficult), identifying cognitive bias, apologizing, receiving apologies, and the basics of whistleblowing. After this course, you will be able to: - assess your own listening and reactions and retune them in advance or on the spot for a more constructive outcome - add value at work by keeping situations easy instead of difficult - manage your own approach - be prepared when things go wrong The prerequisite for this course is Course One of the Specialization "Professional IQ: Preventing and Solving Problems at Work".

From the lesson

Week 4: When Things Go Wrong

Despite your best efforts, sometimes problems can’t be avoided. Learn an effective strategy for apologizing, and how to engage in disputes professionally.

4.7.1: Bringing it All Together7:25

Meet the Instructors

C. K. Gunsalus
Director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics (NCPRE), Professor Emerita of Business, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory

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Think back to the beginning of the course when we were presented with the two minute

challenge involving a failure in your most successful product launch to date.

Whose success is pretty important to your company's financial viability.

How do you grapple with the potential safety violation it presents and

your company's financial liability?

Those are really serious problems and

they call in to question many of the aspects of your professional branding.

How you deal with problems?

How you deal with other people?

Let's see what some of our experts have to say about this problem.

>> So here's the thing I would say, you have to start with first the facts.

I've seen situations where someone has done a chicken little.

Something has happened and the way it's been framed, it sounds extremely serious,

it sounds like exonerate.

The one we've gone down and done the research we've discovered that it's either

a limited problem, it's a very fixable problem.

But it's one that if it's taken out of context, it can sound horrible.

So they key is start with the facts and take the emotion out of it.

When there are lives at risk, it's a pretty cut and dry situation.

If there's a chance that someone could lose lives,

if you are a brand manager it is your absolute responsibility to escalate that.

And to make sure the right people involve and the right decisions are made.

In these situations, facts matter, but

also business object as matter because at the end of the day again.

If your company's brand and reputations on the line you have to consider what will

happen if it is exposed that there was a real problem, and it wasn't addressed.

Look at some recent news.

We've seen with some very well known brands,

ranging from cars to coffee makers to all kind of items.

So comes back to ownership and

if you are the brand manager, you are the one that is managing that product.

You have a moral responsibility to escalate that to the highest levels.

It does not absolve you of responsibility if this product puts someone's life at

risk or their high stakes and the company does not decide to do the right thing.

You have to make sure, that again, based on your values and based on real facts and

real information, that you escalate it to the right decision levels.

And if you are not satisfied with the way it comes up,

then you have a moral obligation to take the steps that you feel are necessary.

>> A lot of what we do is assessing risk and

sometimes its the risk of public ridicule.

Sometimes it's the risk of death.

And you have to evaluate

those things based on a spectrum of what's the bad outcome.

Likely is the bad outcome to happen and

in this case if the bad outcome is a twisted ankle.

And the likelihood of it is not very great then you might not do much with it.

If the potential outcome is somebody might die,

and there's a really small chance that somebody might die but somebody might die.

Then, you probably need to pull the plug on the project, and recall the product.

>> The dilemma facing our brand manager,

to work it through, takes all the skills we've talked about in this course.

It takes listening and asking questions.

Do you have all the facts?

Are they on the table?

Are there ways to elicit more information that will help you?

Are there ways if you paraphrase back to summarize,

to clarify that will help make it clear what's really going on?

Are there issues involved here with cognitive biases?

Are you likely to overlook some of the factors

because of the financial success and its importance to your company?

Are there issues here with disputes and internal conflicts in your company?

Or in your organization there are people who strongly want to do one thing and

others who want to do another.

And can you help keep the temperature down through your skills, and how you listen,

and how you talk with people, and how you work through the problem?

And finally, if you decide that you need to look out for the potential danger.

And recall your product, or issue a fix, or

do something to warn people so they don't get hurt or killed.

How you go about it and how you apologize?

How you frame it, how you talk about it will be critical

to the reputation of you and your company and how you come out the other side.

>> I talked about playing longball, and companies have to play longball,

just like people have to play longball with their career.

A career is not a sprint, it's a marathon, and it's a long term race.

Business is the same way.

And what history has shown is that companies that operate in an ethical

fashion and make decisions based on the right thing to do are the companies long

term that are successful.

You can think of companies that made poor decisions and they paid for it for

a long time.

Because when it's dealing with consumers,

especially with consumers' lives there's no question about the right thing to do.

And it maybe more expensive but history has shown over and

over that those investments that are made to do the right thing

have long term profitability and long term effects.

So it may look like in the short term this is going to help,

but the chance that this could be exposed.

Or the chance that this could actually lead to, well if the moon is right, and

the wind is blowing this way, it could happen.

Well, guess what, sometimes the moon is right, and the wind is blowing that way,

so if there's that chance, that risk, and you are the decision maker.

You have to make the best decision and again values, the decision making process

will help a great deal and don't be afraid to bring others in.

But at the end of the day, own that decision and do it based on what

you think is the right thing to do >> The skills that we've talked about

in this course generalize in so many ways.

And remember we've looked at a whole set of circumstances in two minute challenges.

Not all of the two minute challenges will connect to you personally.

Think about what the core dilemma each of them presents.

See if you can generalize it or connect it to some other aspect of your life.

What can you learn from it?

Most importantly, what skills can you add on to what you already have,

to become a better professional?

To build your professional brand?

To be the kind of professional you want to be.

To be the kind of person everybody sees as a value added,

go to asset in an organization.

This is about you, it's about what you stand for, it's about who you are.

It's about what difference you make in the world with the life force and

energy you put into your work.

So think carefully about all these things and find places that you can practice

To continue to get better and i hope that i will see you in course three.

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