‘Embrace change’… Coke Lloyd nudges Jamaica

Jacqueline Coke-Lloyd, managing director of Make Your Mark Consultants, is urging Jamaican organisations not to see change as a crisis.

According to Coke-Lloyd, especially with heightened technological advances, change is something that local entities will have to embrace.

The inevitable impact of change and other topics will be among the range of issues to be discussed at the seventh staging of the Make Your Mark Consultants annual middle managers conference to be held at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston on April 26 and 27.

"One of the things we will be looking at is business risk and crisis. It's a topic that we have actually added to this year's event. What we realise is that people believe that change happens because it comes out of a meeting or it's a response to a problem, but change is something that organisations must proactively embrace if they want to be relevant," said Coke-Lloyd.

PERSONAL GROWTH

"It's important that we focus on growth as well; looking at how you grow as a person to add value to [your] company. You might have 20 years of experience, but it's experience doing the same thing. You must grow so that you can add value to the organisation, and grow personally. You will never become a good leader unless you are growing," added Coke-Lloyd.

She stressed the importance for managers to build and implement strategies which will improve communication as, according to her, this continues to be a challenge for many companies.

"What's important is that managers understand that they are leaders, which means leaders are change agents. They are visionaries. They are not only people who manage what is there, [but] they are going to bring about change and be innovators in their organisations. There will be a lot of focus on leadership issues," said Coke-Lloyd.

"Communication is the biggest hurdle in any organisation. You can never talk about it too much. There are so many organisation which, from time to time, do surveys, and in every survey done, communication comes up as an issue. We can't look at the best practices enough," said Coke-Lloyd.

Some of the speakers expected to address the two-day conference include Labour Minister Shahine Robinson; William Mahfood, president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica; and Elon Parkinson, public relations manager at Digicel.