Black Belt Dojo

The Melting Pot

Apparently I'm unique. And not just because one of my feet is two shoe sizes bigger than the other. (Yes, really. Yes, I do have to buy two pairs. And yes, it is expensive.)

I'm unique because if ever someone asks people at an internal comms event to raise their hand if they actually started their career in internal comms, I'm inevitably the only person that puts their hand up.  My CV looks quite beautifully planned, even if it's more by luck than judgement.

Mostly, people come from other places. HR, Marketing, PR, Engineering, Dentistry, you name it.  Personally I don't think it matters where people start out. Internal comms is largely common sense. You can learn the technical skills and knowledge and build up the experience. What really counts is the right attitude.

I once practically begged a PR person to take a job in my team. She was obviously fantastic at building relationships, motivated, bright and positive ... but she wouldn't take the role because she was worried she didn't have enough experience in IC. I'd spent all day seeing experienced internal comms people and I wasn't about to recruit any of them. I was gutted that I lost her.

Actually, I think it's a very GOOD thing that people come from other places, because we can learn a lot from them.

• PR people are fantastic at messaging. They're trained to hone in on three messages and boil them down into something short and memorable. I think they're much sharper than IC people on that front. 
• Marketers are great at segmentation. They think harder about knowing audiences and connecting emotionally with them, and they're often data junkies. Most IC people I know think of research and measurement as some kind of nasty-tasting medicine. They know they should do it, but they don't like it. Marketers know the power of data and use it well to make informed decisions.
• HR people - I suppose it depends which part of HR. I did a brief stint in learning & development. Just long enough to do my stage one IPD (as it was then), train as a career coach, become a pretty good competence-based assessor and get familiar with learning styles and planning and running training programmes. All of which have come in very handy.
• People with business-based backgrounds think like business people and talk business language. They have instant credibility with business leaders and they remind us what we're doing here. It's interesting when we have business people on black belt that are just moving into IC roles. They're the ones that can instantly answer the quiz questions about financials.

I'm generalising of course, but I do think we gain a lot from people joining the profession from such different backgrounds. There are not many cookie cutter IC managers.  Everyone brings their own experience and their own perspective. 

Where were you before you found IC?  How do you think it's shaped your approach? What have you learned from people that have come via different routes?

Sue

By association

On Wednesday I'm off to Lisbon to chair a two day conference on behalf of CIPR Inside - the Chartered Institute of Public relations' Internal Communications group previously called the Internal Communications Alliance.

All credit to new Chairman Paul Massie and Lee Smith for giving the group a new lease of life and putting in place a great programme of activity for the year ahead focused on internal reputation management and change. It takes energy and persistance to be on the committee for a professional association. Liam and I were members of the ICA committee for years before work committments got the better of us and we became so embarrassed at the amount of consecutive weeks we could never make the conference calls that we decided to call it a day.

Fortunately, now we're joining CIPR Inside's new panel of 'expert advisors', which means we get to be nosy and opinionated about everything that's planned and go along to events to hear what's new in the world of IC, but without the responsibility of being committee members. Excellent!

Professional associations - why the lack of enthusiasm?

In the research we've just done about how IC people are developing themselves, joining a professional association came very low on people's priority lists. Anyone shed any light about why?

We try to keep our links with all three professional associations for IC people. We're judging some of the awards for the CiB this year and Darren Crozier keeps us in touch with goings on as president of the CiB in Scotland.  And I think Jacqui Hitt has put on a really good programme of events for the IABC's UK Chapter as VP of Development for the past twelve months, which we catch up about over lunch, dinner or long phone chats now and again. 

Jacqui and Darren have both written pieces for our soon-to-be-published report about development for internal comms people giving their views about the benefits to be had from being part of professional associations, including:

• A formal programme of events & workshops
• Networking & sharing ideas & best practice
• Validation & confidence that you're doing the right thing from award programme feedback
• A sense that you're not alone when you realise other people are struggling with the same issues
• Personal development through being a committee member and organising, chairing or speaking at events

I'm hoping Lee Smith will also be able to write about the benefits he's seen from being part of the CIPR's continuous professional development scheme.

I've certainly got a lot to thank CIPR Inside for. It's where I first started to build a network, realised I was interested in the whole IC development agenda, got involved in writing the Intercomm matrix and was forced up on stage to speak at conferences.  I even have them to thank for first introducing me to Liam. (At least, I THINK I should be thanking them!)

Anyone want to share what you've got from being a member of a professional association, or explain why you can't see the attraction?

Sue

Honesty: not the best policy?

In last week's edition of PR Week an audience of PR professionals and students voted against a motion that 'PR has a duty to tell the truth.'

Leading the debate against the motion was the infamous Max Clifford. Memorable quotes: "I've been telling lies on behalf of people, businessmen, politicians and countries for 40 years." "All PROs at all levels lie through their teeth." "PR is about getting the right results for the client.  I get results, but they are sometimes based on lies."

Ouch. I can imagine Max Clifford saying those things. But I found it incredibly depressing that so many PR people in a room agreed with him. No wonder Edelman's Trust Barometer Survey shows the most credible spokesperson for information about a company is 'someone like me' at 53%. The CEO comes in at 32%. A PR person, 15%. As Simon Cohen, founder of ethical PR agency Global Tolerance said in PR Week, "It's bad PR to say you're in PR now."

Internal comms - tarred with the same brush?

Fair enough, we like to think the PR and internal comms worlds are different, but I don't think we can kid ourselves that we're seen as whiter than white. Once upon a time we were immediately seen as the independent ones that would listen with an open mind to both senior leaders and the front line, and help build the relationship between the two. Someone once said to me "Internal comms people are a bit like priests. I trust you enough to tell you anything."

How times have changed. Yes, thanks to carefully-developed relationships and personal integrity, you can still be seen as a trusted independent. But it no longer comes with the territory. As far as a lot of people are concerned, we're just internal spin doctors. I'm routinely asked to 'put a positive spin' on things. (But only once. After that people learn to avoid my best glare and a mini lecture.) In a manager training workshop last week, when I'd run out of time to convince someone why answer A was better than answer B, I resorted to "trust me - I'm a comms person". He looked politely but pointedly back and said "That is one very good reason NOT to trust you."

What are we here for?

I guess it comes down to your definition of what your job is all about. I've always liked the CIPR's description of public relations as being about building mutual understanding and relationships between groups. Building understanding of the strategy so that people can translate it into individual actions. Building human relationships and getting dialogue going so that groups actually work together instead of against each other (easier said than done).

But Lee Hopkins reports in his blog an argument by Ragan's David Murray that we've forgotten how to be mediators and facilitators and become instead 'the official (and unrespected) mouthpiece of management, complete with a toolbox of management jargon and rhetoric'.

Is he right? Is that what we're really up to? Is it what people perceive we're up to even if we're not? And if the answer to any of those questions is 'yes', what should we be doing about it if we don't want to be seen as the Max Cliffords of our organisations?

Sue

 

 

Skills of the future

Like Liam, I also did a podcast with James Brown recently (clearly he's not that fussy) and one of the questions was around what skills internal communicators of the future would need. My initial reaction was that the skills of a good communicator wouldn't necessarily change, although the techniques and technologies certainly would.

Now I'm not so sure, particularly in the light of Liam's audio-editing experiences. For the average internal communicator ten years ago, the emphasis was predominantly on print media skills. Back then the use of email and intranets was not widespread, the CIB was known as the British Association of Industrial Editors, and producing a newsletter involved paste-board mock-ups, chromalins and bromides (no, not in your tea) rather than PDFs and e-links.

Today there's a whole range of communications tools available to us, and we're all expected to be IT-literate. Hey, I even inserted my own hotlink back there.

So what do we think? In another ten years will a completely different set of skills be required for the internal communicator, or will some things always be valued (dare I mention writing skills here?).

Emma

Techno smug

I'm feeling quite pleased with myself as I recorded a podcast yesterday with James Brown (not the recently deceased hardest working man in showbusiness, but the bloke at Melcrum).  And it's so easy...

Actually, even when I made it hard for myself it was easy...

James wanted to do a podcast to promote our forthcoming major publication about the 12 competencies (fear not regular chums we'll let you have a mini report).  He rang me over skype and recorded my pearls of wisdom (so far so good).

However when he sent me the rough recording I thought I could have phrased a few things better and perhaps been a little less rude about a few people. 

Well, I thought I can't really ask him to record the whole thing again, but how difficult can it be to do it myself....?  An hour later I'm trying to send a completed MP3 file to James!

What did I do?

First stop was a Google search "How to podcast" from which I learnt that I had to download an audio editing program called Audacity which comes with a couple of basic tutorials and a program to convert the finished products in to MP3 file.  After a quick mic check I was off!

The tutorial proved to be a good investment (of about 10 minutes) because I needed to learn how to cut and paste and insert silence sections.  But I recorded about 15 minutes in about half an hour (there was a bit of back and forwarding).

Funnily enough the tricky thing was sending the file over to James.  After I'd finished it,  it turned out to be a little over 14mb which, with my basic broadband connection takes a while to send anywhere.  There was the added problem that the Melcrum firewall rejects anything over 10mb (which also happens to be the limit on Hotmail and Yahoo).  Luckily we found someone with Gmail and got it over (the transmisson bit took a couple of hours to sort out).

You can judge for yourself when James puts it up on the Melcrum server next week if it's worth listening to and I'm seriously thinking about signing up for a radio production course as it's a stuggle to maintain a level of interest in my voice over a list of 12 items.

My son Dan says he'll show me how to import music and wants to teach me how to use Cubase (a more fancy program) and Peter Riddelsdell (my mate at DFID) has been raving about a program called Soundslides which allows you to make animated photomontages with a voice-over (here's a very moving example from the BBC).  Perhaps I might get dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age - stand by Shel Holtz!

Liam

How niece

Thanks for your comments in response to my first blog - it's nice to feel welcome, and to know there are people out there.

Is Liam serious about the photo? You'll have to let me hone my blogging skills a little more before I figure out how to insert pictures. In the meantime I'm looking forward to sharing more thoughts on communications personal development over the next four weeks.

My niece Ruby is five months old today, and her own communications skills are coming on very well. She can now make herself understood quite well using a combination of nods, grunts and hard stares.

Reminds me of a boss I once had.

Happy weekend,
Emma

PS to Fiona: I just heard on the radio that a pair of tickets for Take That are available on eBay for £9,000. Come on, you can afford that on your E&Y salary.

Hello from me

Firstly thanks to Timm for the words of welcome...

Having dipped a tentative blogging toe in just before Christmas, I’m taking the plunge as guest blogger for March. So here goes.

The invite came partly because, having recently left in-house life after 17 years, I’ve gone solo. So after five years at Orange, two years at PA Consulting Group and over ten years at LogicaCMG, how is life outside of in-house?

Well I’m sure much has been written on the topic by others more experienced than me, but I'm finding it hugely stretching in lots of ways. It can be tiring to be positive and solution-oriented all the time (I’m trying to emulate the most impressive consultants I’ve worked with). I have to resist the bad habits of in-house life, like treating unreasonable deadlines with a large pinch of salt and assuming they’ll chase when they want it. Apparently “it’s OK to challenge a deadline, but it’s not OK to miss one.”

My first assignment is for a global client three times bigger than anywhere I’ve worked. So getting up to speed with the acronyms, the structure, the culture and ‘the way things get done around here’ has been a huge task. It helps that I’m based on-site some of the time, but I have to resist the temptation to join in with office banter – it seems part of being a consultant means keeping at a slight distance to gain a better perspective, but that’s hard for someone like me for whom a sense of belonging has been a huge part of job satisfaction.

Which brings me on to ‘working at home’. I’m glad to read about the diversionary tactics of others in this respect, and I think my own skills are developing well. I’m fighting the urge to become an inveterate curtain-twitcher, but I now know what the postman looks like and I’ve bought some dusters I didn’t need from a door-to-door guy on a rehabilitation project. Perhaps my assertiveness skills will improve when I’ve been consulting a little longer.

Come on, back to work.

Well, two months in and I feel as though every day I’ve learnt 100% more than I knew yesterday – that’s something I couldn’t say latterly about working in-house. Being visible and continually focused on client deliverables – every week, every day – can also be highly motivating. Let’s see if that’s still the case at the end of my guest-blogging month.

That’s all for now. Signing off, I realise it’s St David’s Day today so a special hello if you’re Welsh. My mum is, so she’ll be wearing her leek with pride.

Emma

PS: What does the 'dojo' bit stand for?

Farewell, Dear Friends

As February only has 28 days, I've boldly decided to take what's rightfully mine: An additional day of blogging! But, alas, only to say good bye. I proudly hand over the post button (baton?) to the next guest blogger, Emma Ridgeon - best of success!

It has been tremendous fun to be a guestblogger on the BlackBeltDojo, which I will of course continue to visit. I now return to my own blog, The Honeyjar - if you liked my posts, feel free drop by some time!

Thank you, Sue & Liam - the Dojo is a great addition to the community, and I hope you will expand your readership beyond the Black Belt trainings.