I was emailing a chum the other day and discussing the current business situation and I asked if he was worried.
Of course not he said, there is so much happening at head office he wouldn’t want to miss it for the world.
Which takes me back to the last crash when I was working for a ‘troubled’ company. Based at Head Office life was anything but boring. Long hours and stressful weekends went alongside being part of the action. I still have dreams of the atmosphere as day to day we struggled to complete negotiations with the people we owed £3bn to whilst maintaining business performance in the post dotcom downturn.
And best of all was the absence of politics.
OK there were one or two people I could have cheerfully strangled, but we were all working to the same goal. Departmental agenda and local scheming just didn’t happen.
Sometimes ‘Head Office’ can be a pretty poor posting for an internal communicator.
The real fun is happening out in the business. Often HQ work is all about financial calendar work or ‘special projects’ whilst divisional IC’s get their hands on pressing issues like performance or service delivery.
I know more than a few Global Heads of IC who discovered that they are not really in charge of very much and plenty of divisional IC managers who are doing much more interesting work and having loads more fun.
But right now…a crisis is one of the times when a Head Office IC role comes into its own….
Liam
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