Simply-Blogging

Off to Cranfield again

I'm about to climb into the car for a trip to Cranfield University where I teach the Black Belt programme - I always dread this trip.  It should be about 30 minutes but often turns into three times that. Which isn't ideal when you're freeling stressed anyway about a couple of day's teaching.

This time it's going to be a bit stranger than usual.

I'm stepping away from running the course which I developed with Sue Dewhurst and have seen rolled out in Australia after three very happy years.  In November I'm doing it for the last time and today my replacement is coming alsong to try out delivering one of the sessions that I have always done.

I genuinely hope she's good - actually as it's Sally Hinder I know she'll be good.  But it's a funny to think that someone else is doing 'my stuff'.  I'm wondering how it will be and how I'll feel when she does it - or indeed if she changes anything....

Liam

Geeks and gurus

I've been working on updating one of my courses and have been fishing around for recent writing on change communications.

In particular I've been looking for some new ideas and approaches but I'm struck how the writing on the subject falls into broadly two camps.

Firstly, there are the academic writings on the subject which seems to have the weakness in that they all seem to be very highly focused on one area or another.  I guess academic economics make it hard to do big scale studies unless its funded by a drugs company!  So often the academic literature is based on very small studies - frequently of small organisations.

Which is a shame as they have the strength of credibility.  I'm looking at a report from one of the big publishers in the field and it's full of rather dubious material (which is a shame given how much I had to pay for it).  All these stories of heroic transformation are superb - but many don't have the ring of truth to them.

Secondly, there are the gurus.  There are quite a few of these in our field (some even pretending to be to have academic credentials) and their approach is less "how to" and more "you must..."  Surely they can't all be right can they?

Someone asked me the other day to pull together a course which covered "the good models" of change - to be honest, I'm not sure if you can always tell the difference from the "outrageous nonsense models"!!!

Liam

Remind me what are we meant to be doing

It's been a funny old week.

Because this is the week when I officially started with Simply Good Advice I kept finding myself having to articulate again and again what we do (perhaps going to a conference is asking for trouble).

But I've been with two clients this week and talking to an old colleague about plans and I keep coming back in my mind to the question of what should employee communications people be doing.

I guess what starts it all off in my mind is the experience of meeting so many frustrated communicators who claim to be strategically minded but who are trapped producing newsletters.  I'm not talking about the sort of people who still get a buzz from opening a box that's just arrived from the printers (because that's most of us). No, I think I mean the people who month in and year out are driven mad by the stupidity of their organisations but, like a character in a Dr Suess book can't get listened to.

Yet it does work the other way around.

An old friend was telling me that he'd joined a comms team with the remit to build relationships at the highest level but was finding that everyone else in the team thought they were senior business partners as well.  He's thinking of leaving because as the new boy he's being pushed towards making sure the basics work - and there's going to be no time to do the strategic stuff.

But my feeling is that there is real opportunity for him to shine here and he shouldn't be so quick to start firing off his CV.

Like any service department (HR, legal, IT) Internal Comms can adopt one of three roles (Download three_roles.pdf ).  It can be a process manager, a business enabler or a senior partner.  I think a lot of nonsense is talked about the senior partner or consultant role - in recent years a range of people have gone out of their way to imply that anything apart from being a trusted advisor to the chief executive is an unworthy aspiration for anyone in internal communications.

The truth is that if you run a rubbish operation and/or don't know how to help other business areas achieve their goals you will never be asked your opinion on issues apart from communications. The next time you're at an internal communications conference it's worth asking one of those amazing strategists about their basic operations.  Frankly if they don't have a solid machine for producing news, gathering intellingence or handling day to day comms they are either spinning a line or have been very lucky to get away with it!

So what do I say to my old friend and ex-colleague?  Think long and hard about the operations role that he resents being pushed into.  There are certainly frustrations but there are also medals to be won here.  In many ways getting a basic machine working well is the first thing that gets apprecaited in the business - it's not the clever strategies and long beard stroking meetings that people notice. 

I'm not for a moment suggesting that clever strategy and excellent senior coaching don't matter - they're massively important.  But the day when everyone in your team wants to be a business partner and strategist is the day when you start getting into serious trouble!

Liam