Find Your Inner Mister Rogers

In chapter nine of Measure What Matters, Katie Paine discusses measuring your relationships with your local community. She states that "it is more important that ever to understand and measure and improve your relationships with your local community," or what I like to think of as finding your inner Mister Rogers. Mister Rogers was the ultimate neighbor. He cared about people, did his best to resolve negative situations and talked about the important issues in a timely manner. 

In a world where many organizations and businesses focus mainly on their key publics, the Mister Rogers of the world would not stand for this. You must look beyond your customers, stakeholders and the media and learn to think about what else you may need to do to get approval. To be a good neighbor in your community, you must become involved. Businesses need to take an interest in the community they are involved in by creating a plan of corporate social responsibility, treating employees and consumers well and fully embodying all the positive attributes of the company. Mister Rogers would not say something to his audiences face that he didn't mean, nor would he let fear keep him from doing what is right. He would admit that his business practices were wrong before he would let his image take a hit on the internet by bloggers and the media. He would take responsibility for his actions. 

As Mister Rogers says, "We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say, 'It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.' Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes." Be a hero, share responsibility for whatever your business or organization has done to create a negative impact and be a good neighbor.