President Obama's first interview after he was sworn into office was with the Al Arabiya channel with people have been calling "Muslim TV" (which personally I think is in bad taste, we don't call CBS 'Christian TV' or anything like that). This was a bold move for President Obama. This is not a political blog and I don't want to get into the politics of should he or shouldn't he and what impact it will have. From a communication aspect however it was a great move. Too many times the problems we have in our workplace, our home lives and between nations is that we just don't communicate effectively with each other. What President Obama did was reach out to the Arab community by granting them the first interview of his presidency. Doing this is going to give him some good will and will hopefully bring in more dialouge with countries that have not been too keen on listening to us.
Do you do that in your business? If you have had problems with a worker, a co-worker, a client or anyone else, do you reach out to them to try and solve the problem or do you let it simmer? This is why effectively communicating with people from the start is so important. We waste so much of our time trying to fix things that could have been prevented had we communicated our expectations from the beginning. Take a look in the mirror this week and see if you are communicating effectively in your job. If you are not, then think about what you need to do to improve it. Believe me, it can only help you.
Travis