I've been helping a client with some benchmarking interviews in the last couple of weeks and I was struck the other day by something I heard.
One of our interviewees, the corporate head of comms in a global manufacturing company was telling us her story. She was explaining that, for the first couple of years in her job she didn't really bother to focus on developing lots of channels.
This threw me a little.
In every role I've ever had I've tried to buy some credibility by delivering something tangible and fast. Although I've had the strategic game plan in mind, I've always preached that no one wants a comms manager who doesn't deliver stuff.
But our interviewee rejected this as nonsense.
Her take was that if you start the conversation with a newsletter or by fiddling with the details of delivery, you'll struggle to get attention about the issues that really matter.
So, she said that she'd spent time working on getting the senior leadership to understand how comms could help them, what their role was and how they could get better at it. When she felt that she'd made headway there she started looking at her channels and other tactics.
She's made me question a few things.
Most of all, I do wonder whether we should all stick to our guns a bit more - which isn't always easy when there's pressure to deliver things...
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