..and he'll eat for a day - teach him how to fish and he'll eat forever.
That's the old adage behind many development programmes but I think it's got some resonance in our field.
Well, that's what got thinking about the other day when chatting to a new client who'd very proudly told me about some of the break-throughs he'd had in establishing a new IC function in his organisation.
He's had some real success doing simple things like organising proper layouts for announcements and adding some high quality photography to announcements. "When some people see what good looks like it starts to change what they think about communications" was his point.
A good point in fact. And he's a very impressive fellow as well with lots of operational (non-communication) expertise to give him credibility. No doubt he'll leverage this success to introduce a communicating culture in his organisation.
But his comments did remind me of other people who may never escape the 'Delivery trap'.
You know what I mean don't you?
In our desperation to prove our worth we get trapped into 'doing stuff' just to show that we can. The only trouble is you become seen purely as the person who 'does stuff' - an never get asked your opinion on the things you're yearning to talk about.
Obviously 'doing stuff' as a conversation-opener is important. Some colleagues just won't understand what you're talking about until you've shown them something (as an agency consultant I was always amazed at pitches when clients were more impressed by the leave-behind stress ball/t-shirt/mug than they were by the concepts we'd tried to explain...).
And for many people a deep relationship starts with a small favour...
But at what point do say "that's your lot..." and how do you start the process of moving people from seeing you as a servant to seeing you as an advisor?
I suppose step one is to find ways of getting them to do it for themselves. One friend of mine got so sick of explaining to people how to prepare news for the intranet that he produced some simple template that helped people make sensible channel choices long before they turned up at his desk begging for energy sapping help.
And perhaps step two is to find ways of leap-frogging their requests. Being so well connected and informed that you can spot it coming AND know better than them what they really need to achieve has to be a good move.
But finally, I was very struck by someone the other week who said that she'd really struggled to learn to say 'no'...
Liam





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