Businesswoman's Blog: The week that was 20180702

MY PROUDEST | MOST GRATEFUL MOMENT

PRISA Reputation Management course attendees

This week there were two moments. The first was presenting the full day reputation management course at PRISA on Friday.

My main aim of the session is for delegates to understand that reputation management is more than just crisis management or social media engagement; there are ten different areas of the business that have an impact on the reputation of an organisation.

One of my personal objectives of the session is to make it as practical and engaging as possible. Delegates leave with an action plan of areas in their business that they can tackle immediately to start taking their business' reputation to the next level. The knowledge sharing and stories told from everyone's different experiences are fascinating; we all have a lot to learn from each other. What a great engaging group!

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Over the past ten years, our teams in Gauteng and Cape Town have been working remotely; giving everyone the flexibility and space to manage their own time. As long as clients are happy and deliverables are up to date, I don't mind where the team chooses to work from. I definitely don't want to micromanage the team's time or foster a culture of clock watchers.

I have however realised, that having a space where the team can work from together every now and again is quite beneficial. I saw this when we started working with The Bureaux in Cape Town from their delightful shared office space.

The Gauteng team also indicated that they would really like a space to work from every now and again. 30 Blesbok Avenue in Koedoespoort, which is an industrial building that my grandfather built, proved to be the perfect solution. It's a building we are rather proud of; I'm not too sure why we didn't think of using it a long time ago.

I think it will work well if one of the team members want a break from their home office and be in a different surrounding. My mom has done an absolutely tremendous job with restoring the building and giving it a new lease of life. It is a wonderfully creative haven in the middle of an industrial area. With her creative touch, most of the tenants are now also quite creative (leather shoe makers, handbag makers, framers, pottery, coffee); quiet a change from some of the characters that have been there in the past. Isn't it interesting how like attract like?

BIGGEST LESSON THIS WEEK

Again, two:

eSwatini, I honestly did not know that Swaziland had changed it's name. I happened to come across it when I was trying to figure out whether there are 54 or 55 countries in Africa [one of the delegates at the recent conference in Botswana had indicated that there were now 55 countries, and I was trying to see which one had been added, because I thought it might be South Sudan, but it was part of the 54. Said fellow delegate / newly found friend, has promised to let me know which number 55 is...]. So, how interesting is it that one of the African countries has been renamed, I thought it would be much bigger news (although, I see from a quick Google search, that there is quite a lot of international news links, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, covering the story.)

Today, I learned who Nico Smith is. I was surprised when my GPS indicated that I was to turn into Nico Smith street; a name and street I had never heard of before. Quite a few streets in Pretoria have been renamed. Michael Brink is now Nico Smith. Edited from Wikipedia: Nico Smith was a South African minister and prominent opponent of apartheid. Smith was a professor of theology at the University of Stellenbosch. He abandoned his upper-class lifestyle to live with the impoverished and segregated blacks of Mamelodi, a township in the east of Pretoria. From Mamelodi, he worked to support the black community and oppose apartheid.