Internal communications - it's not rocket science

It's an intelligence thing

The kerfuffle that seems to have been stirred up by my post about writers has been an interesting experience.  And it seems that I'm not the only person worrying about the issue of what should be the role and accompanying skill set of an internal communicator.

Take a look at the latest offering from Commsscrum to see another take on the subject.

However, having upset a US colleague in my response to his reaction to my writing post I thought I should see if there were areas on which we agreed so I took a trip to his blog.

 Luckily we share the same prejudice that good IC people should be intelligence gatherers.  I think he says that no one has the budget to spend time gathering intelligence - we're all too busy producing stuff but otherwise we agree.

My view is that Intelligence -led communication needs not involve complicated surveys all the time - just getting out and about.  Although I do think your need bigger surveys - as long as you do proper analysis. 

Maybe one day all comms people will believe this.

Liam

Shel Holtz weighs in on the writing issue - where I stand

A recent posting on this blog seems to have caused a bit of a stir. Provocatively I said that writing was not an essential skill for an internal communicator and that great writers do not automatically make great internal communicators.

Respected US commentator Shel Holtz has now posted on the subject.  His approach was to ask a number of other experienced commentators what they thought about the issue and he has published their considered thoughts.

I agree entirely that any professional should be able to order their thoughts in a cogent manner.  I agree that a skilled practitioner should be able to express those thoughts in a concise and compelling way.  I agree that writing is one way in which these competencies are demonstrated.

Perhaps I originally overstated my view for effect but I have been surprised at the number of people who have responded saying not just that writing is a base skill, but that it is the dominant competency.  Whilst I would accept that a communicator needs to be able to spot bad writing, many of the contributors to the debate elevate writing to be the over-riding ability for anyone working in communications.

My concern is that a wider palette of skills is ignored if we fall into the trap of thinking that writing is communication and communication is writing. In particular my view is that some writing is needed but that for most senior roles writing doesn't need to be exercised at the highest level.  You don't need to be a fine wordsmith in order to be a valued counsel to the executive suite.

This was also the message from research among practitioners done in 2007.

Organisations need writers, but they also need executive coaches, intelligence operatives, planners, creative thinkers, project managers, relationship-builders and quality checkers.  To pick out a single skill set and elevate its importance over all others is a mistake and short-sighted.

Equally hazardous is the tendency to ignore the changes in the way people and organisations communicate.  It is clear to me that people do not sit down and read prose documents as much as they used to.  Indeed news organisations are having to reorganise the way in which they deliver information to fit around changing audience behaviours. We need to be careful that we do not ignore similar trends among employees and invest energies on writing newsletter, executive memos or brochures.

I sense that much of the problem comes from too great a focus on the methods of communication rather than the outcome.  Years ago I was pitched to by a IC consultancy that happened to have a video production side.  Unsurprisingly video was the solution to any problem that you cared to mention.  It would be madness if you said that whatever the issue, the answer was always going to be a piece of writing.

If we are to help organisations use communication to its full effect then we need a more broad minded and integrated approach and we need senior practitioners with a more diverse set of skills.  If we define ourselves as the people who get the words in the right order rather than the people who get the best results we are missing an opportunity. 

Liam

Words we should not use

Every year, The Local Government Association in the UK tries to encourage councils to cut down on jargon by publishing a list of banned words.  Before anyone with an underdeveloped sense of irony gets over excited and starts pulling on their boxing gloves I should point out that the list is partly tongue in cheek.

It's a brilliant idea.  Guaranteed to get PR coverage and probably a lot of fun compiling.

However, when I started looking down the list I was quite alarmed.

It seems that a fair number of the words on the list are used daily by me and a quick chat with a few of my mates indicated how far some of this language has crept into daily life.  Once upon a time we could all spot obtuse verbosity (like that) at 100 paces - now most of us are not so sure.

I'm not talking about words like hereditament (going forward, I'm looking for an opportunity to work that one into a dialogue) but words or phrases like 'enable', 'flex' (presumably as a verb) and 'management capacity' are labelled as suspect.

I think some of the list is nonsense, but broadly it's a useful reminder of how far our language travels when we're locked in the company of our peers.  When it's exposed to people outside our caste or tribe it's striking how different it can become from common parlance.

And I write this suitably shamefaced at having yesterday to explain 'bunking off' to a bunch of non-brits when I made a presentation.  As a chum said to me over a drink "you'd think you'd learn not to make the same mistakes but all you really learn is how to spot your mistake quicker after you've made it..."

Liam

An engaging read

I'm really enjoying a great read at the moment.

It's Julie Gebauer and Don Lowman's 'Closing the engagement gap - how great companies unlock employee potential for superior results'.  

Drawing on years of consulting experience and research, the book explores the impact that employee engagement can have on business performance.  It looks at the drivers for engagement and the strategies that different organisations employ to win over employees.

The list of drivers includes (my paraphrasing):

• A chance to develop my career
• Making a difference to customers' lives
• Interesting work
• A chance to input on work issues
• Good relationships with my supervisor
• Social responsibility
• A culture that encourages innovation
• A chance to develop my skills
• Employee authority to do a great job
• Sincere interest in employee well-being

And although many of these things are firmly in the domain of HR, it is clearly the role of communications to ensure that employees understand the intent of their organisations. There's not much use having a fantastic training programme if no one knows about it!

However, it is communications that owns some crucial components.  For example it is our role to ensure that senior leaders get to demonstrate their interest in employees or celebrate the impact that the organisation makes on the lives of customers or service users.

And the thing I am finding particularly interesting is how organisations involve or ignore their staff when it comes to sustainability or CSR programmes.  Clearly community or environmental action are things that motivate and bind (or indeed repulse) employees.  It therefore makes considerable sense that CSR programmes are intimately tied into an engagement strategy.

But how many CSR teams sit in HR or Comms?  Very few I suspect.

Liam

Oh dear - I've put my foot in it.

I've made a bit of a mistake.

I posted a blog saying I didn't think that writing was the most important skill that a communicator could have.

Leaving aside the obvious stupidity of saying something about writing skills and not double checking my grammar and spelling, I should have anticipated the reaction that I would provoke.

Firstly Reuben commented on his blog and made a couple of valid points about the importance of having a facility with words.  Then a few other people commented accusing me of disrespecting professional writers or implying that I was advocating illiteracy as a core competency for communicators.

Next up comes David Murray. 

His posting quite fairly takes me to task for sloppy writing and makes the reasonable point that if I'm going to risk offending writers I had better make sure I turned in perfect prose and proof read.

However, there follows a general outpouring of anger at my simple point that communication is more than writing.  One commenter suggests that holding my particular view smacks of profiteering, someone else implies that " smiling, ...schmoozing and insincere laughter" are the alternative skill set to good writing.  Another contributor suggests that bullying or lying are the natural routes to persuasion if you can't write.

I'm starting to feel a little beleagured for writing "I’m not suggesting that a communicator should be allowed to get away with bad writing. All I’m saying is that it doesn’t make sense to prioritise writing over any other skill – if a single skill is all that matters why shouldn’t it be film-making, web design or spamming twitter?"

In 2007 I conducted some research which you can read in summary here.  We asked senior communicators about the skills they needed in order to do their jobs.  We ran a statistical analysis on the data and it told us that there was a wide range of skills that mattered - writing wasn't the sine qua non skill that people mentioned.

Admittedly we didn't ask the question "do you think writing is irrelevant?" Nor did we ask "do you agree that anyone who can't string a sentence together is clearly a weasel-faced money-grabbing schmoozer who can't be trusted?"  Perhaps we might have got different results.

But I can only reflect what 700 communicators around the world told us.  They said that in order to be a great internal communicator you needed to draw on a range of competencies. 

So I stand by my original post and I'm happy to debate it.

But maybe I should check my copy before I post.

Liam

(Thanks Becky for proofing!)

Bringing customers to life

I've had an interesting conversation with a colleague about the role of IC in bringing customers to life for employees.

My view is that it is a good thing (nothing challenging there).  Most of us go to work because we want to make a difference of some kind and I remember working years ago with an insurer who had managed to refine processes to the point that customers had stopped being real people.  To employees they were nothing more than a case number with the result that had stopped caring about the problems they were solving.  Reintroducing an image of a customer had an immediate effect on performance.

There was a similar effect in a pharmaceutical company suffering quality problems in its manufacturing plans.  Exhortations to 'take care' and 'Clear down fully' were no more compelling than the 101 other posters lining the factory wall.

But once we'd started talking about real patients - some of whom were related to factory employees - the whole energy around quality changed.

However it seems to get difficult in a B2B context.  In consumer, marketing often have great customer segmentation models which provide a great starting point (financial services seem to be especially good at this) and requests for help get met with real enthusiasm.

Yet, as soon as you move into the B2B arena and there's an individual sales team involved things get difficult.  The sales guys don't want anyone talking to their cherished client, they certainly don't want anyone encouraging the client to say what they don't like about the business.  In fact it's almost impossible to get anywhere close to a reasonable insight.

It's a real challenge.  Everyone likes to have a picture in their mind of who they're working for.  But when you can't get close to the current reality, you find that people have an outdated or warped model which doesn't help anyone.

I was at a manager conference some years back at a local authority when some consultants presented segmentation data about the people who were residents in the borough.  They started by asking the audience to speculate on the composition of the local population - and they came up with a picture of predominately poor people, high unemployment and widespread deprivation.  In fact, the consultants showed that the area was actually very affluent and although there were some pockets of people who were 'municipally dependant' they were few in number and highly concentrated.

I suspect, it is a core role for internal commuicators to bring to life the reality of the populations which we serve - and that can probably can't be done without an understanding of the data that marketing have to hand AND familiarity with the customer base at first hand.

A client of mine has just come back from working as a holiday rep as part of his induction into a new company.  He said that the reps work hard (and play hard) and laughed as he told me about a customer who's said to him "aren't you getting a bit old for this...?".  

I don't think you ever get too old when it comes to understanding the real people whose stories you have to tell to to your colleagues.

Liam

An entry-level IC job going if anyone is interested...

I'm looking for an entry-level person with strong writing and organisational skills to join our group in London for quite an interesting role.  I would say this wouldn't I, but it's a genuinely exciting chance to work alongside some leading people in the business.

Tweet me @liamfitz if you want to know more. (no agencies at the moment thanks)

Liam

Who cares about writing skills?

A more recent post on this issue is available here.

Years ago I went for a job interview at a well-known PR agency and was rather taken aback to be asked to do a writing test.  I never got the job and never got any feedback so I’ll leave it to my loyal readers to judge if my writing would have let me down or whether I can blame it on my dreadful interview technique.

But it is something that has puzzled me over the years.  Does a competent communicator have to be a good writer or are there other attributes that are more important?

To be honest I don’t think being a good writer matters – I’ve met plenty of great comms people who couldn’t write to save their lives and I know a few fantastic writers who I’d never trust to give communications advice.

And that was one of the findings that cam out when Sue Dewhurst and I conducted our skills research a few years ago.  Simply put, many senior communicators see writing as a technical or craft skill that can be bought in as it is needed.  Other abilities are much more important when it comes to planning messaging or gathering feedback for senior leaders.

Clearly writing involves certain skills that are invaluable for a communicator.  Empathy with your audience, simplifying complex ideas and finding ways to make a dull subject engaging are certainly useful.  And advice like this supplied by Wedge at Kilobox is valuable.

But I’m not sure I’d appoint a director of comms on the basis of their ability to win a Pulitzer prize.

I’m not suggesting that a communicator should be allowed to get away with bad writing.  All I’m saying is that it doesn’t make sense to prioritise writing over any other skill – if a single skill is all that matters why shouldn’t it be film-making, web design or spamming twitter?

Take a look at some of the skills models that exist and make your own mind up!

 Liam

Engaging on-line communities - Press Association

I was sent this link to an event at the Press Association talking about engaging on-line communities.  Thought I'd share it.

Liam