How to prove your worth in communication

By Kim Harrison,

Consultant, Author and Principal of www.cuttingedgepr.com

Every professional communicator is surrounded by people who don’t understand communication. Executives from operations, accounting, finance, administration, HR, legal, sales and marketing really don’t understand the PR function. Clients usually don’t understand, either.

Should this concern you? Yes, indeed. When other people don’t understand your professionalism, then they under-estimate your value. You will find they think PR is easy – because you make it look easy. You do the hard work out of sight behind the scenes and then produce a smooth, professional result that looks a lot simpler than it actually is.

I’ve encountered the same problem. As a consultant, I found the national chairman of one of the big four accounting firms in the world thought PR was easy because my consultancy arranged a very successful media relations program for him and his firm over a couple of years. The same with the general manager of a big football club. They saw how smoothly we did their PR and thought they could do their own PR - and fell flat on their faces because they didn’t understand the amount of professionalism needed.

Corporate managers show the same lack of understanding – most of them are much less effective than they should be as a result. Leadership is communication. Unfortunately, corporate managers, especially those from a technical area such as engineering or finance, to the end of their careers have little idea of the importance of communication to in good leadership.

Even the top management consultants in the world don’t understand. If you read the regular newsletters from McKinsey & Company, the world’s most influential management firm, most of the time they refer to communication just in passing while they write in lofty terms about various trendy strategic management concepts.

However, organizations that communicate well get the proven results. For instance, major studies over the past decade by international HR management consultancy, Watson Wyatt (now Towers Watson), have consistently found that companies with effective employee communication programs gained higher total return to shareholders and levels of employee engagement than companies that were not as good at communicating. Proving this point, the 2009/2010 Towers Watson survey, in which data was collected from 328 companies representing 5 million employees around the world, found that companies with the most effective employee communication programs had 47% higher total returns to shareholders for the period 2004–09 compared with companies with less effective communication practices.

So what can you do about this? It would be gratifying to tell you that there are some easy things you can do, but unfortunately there are no magic bullets. The main lesson is for you to build into your communication plans a core program of internal stakeholder communication and relationship development.

Identify and meet with your key stakeholders

The way to do this is firstly to identify your key internal stakeholders. They should be key contacts at a personal level as well as at a departmental, starting with your boss. Map out a program of contact with them. Your task is to show them, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, how valuable the communication role is.

Some of your key internal stakeholders are obvious, while others hold influential positions without formal authority. You can ask advice about the influencers from HR people and others you trust. Then call those influencers and interview them. Ask to meet with them so you can get an informal briefing on what their key operational priorities are and what things are causing them to lose sleep at night. Find out how they communicate with their staff and whether it is on a planned basis.

It is important to find out the business and marketing plans of all operational units. Simply ask for a copy of their latest plan because you need to understand what is important to them and the direction they are intending to take. Many operational heads think PR is a wasteful head office overhead cost, especially when so few PR people make the effort to visit their operation. So you need to show them you are determined to understand their part of the business.

Discuss some of your communication programs that may be relevant to those people, but don’t fall into the trap of just discussing your communication activities. The priorities of these people aren’t your priorities, and you will turn them off if you look at everything they discuss from your point of view. Instead, go away and think about how you can use communication to help solve their operational problems. Then come back to them with some suggestions.

Meet with the influencers on a regular basis, but don’t make it a formal arrangement as you may wear out your welcome with these busy people unless they indicate they want to catch up with you frequently.

Form a good relationship with your boss

Find out how your boss prefers to communicate formally with you. He or she might prefer you to provide them with reports in writing. Other bosses prefer face-to-face meetings. Arrange these on a regular basis. Weekly meetings are a good way to go. Always submit a written agenda to your boss at the meeting or ahead of time so they can see you are an organized person. Much of the time, bosses are so busy dealing with daily hassles and decisions that they will enjoy the way you set the agenda for them. Then they can add their own items of discussion.

Document all decisions in writing, indicating clearly what the decision was, the action to be taken and the person responsible for supervising or taking the action. Informal emails are a good way to do this. When I was Corporate Affairs Manager of a billion dollar company I found stress caused the Managing Director to forget many of the decisions I reached with him in our meetings together, and so I found the best way to confirm a decision was a quick email to him the next day stating informally my understanding of the decision.

Find ways to promote your boss in the internal media and externally in industry newsletters and speech opportunities, if not publicity in the news media. Give him or her personal briefings on your specialist subject areas. If you are contacted by senior management to perform special projects, always inform your boss immediately so they feel you are keeping them in the loop. In summary, you should make your boss feel good about you.

Compile monthly progress reports

Ensure you keep a progress record of projects so you can summarise them monthly to your boss. Also send the monthly reports to upper management if that is appropriate, as well as to managers from other areas within the organization for their information.

Why? This effort provides tangible evidence of the impressive depth and breadth of your communication activities. You will be surprised at the big number and variety of tasks you undertake every month. It can be a hassle to compile these reports, but you will find them a valuable selling tool over time.

Always group these tasks or projects into categories that specifically relate to the organization’s strategic goals – whether you are requested to or not (most of the time you aren’t). In this way you demonstrate that (1) you are always acutely mindful of the stated priorities of top management, and (2) you are a strategic thinker.

Become the trusted expert in specialist areas

You can find specialist niches for which management may come to consider you as the expert. For instance, an international IABC survey found about half of PR practitioners report that they are the de facto internal consultants on ethical matters. This happens because ethical matters often don’t fit easily into the responsibility of other departments, including HR, and also ethical matters tend to involve communicators because of their communication implications.

Another area that PR people can be considered expert is issue management. Issue management involves scanning and monitoring the operating environment and using communication to resolve them. This is uniquely a public relations function.

As a result, PR people can prepare ethics and issues strategies and brief senior management and other executives about them. You can hold briefings and workshops to other departments about core PR matters like issue management. Then afterwards write reports on these topics to other areas within the organization, and articles in the internal newsletter. This is a great opportunity to impress these influential people about your grasp of specific issues and also more generally about communication matters. Don’t hesitate to circulate summaries and reports to peers from other departments. This will strengthen your reputation as a PR practitioner and improve understanding of public relations role.

In summary: taking the strategic high ground will enable you to prove your worth.

About the Author

Kim Harrison is a recognized authority in the public relations field. His website, www.cuttingedgepr.com, provides a wealth of informative articles and resources on public relations techniques and management.

 

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