In my last post, I highlighted Lee Smith saying that "many of our current approaches to internal communication remain essentially about coercion, command and control."
I said then that I'd expand on the logic that links that statement to the approach I'm promoting, but first it's worth making a short detour through the history of internal communication.
In the beginning was the word...
and the word was written in the in-house newsletter. If one had to name an originating strand in the story of "internal communications" it would be in the organisational newsletter. Many of them were started without a clear purpose, just vague notions of "community building" or "enhancing shared identity" and production placed in the hands of whoever happened to be available.
Over time, people started thinking about that position more carefully. First we saw some journalists brought it to do the writing, which gave us a sense of "mass media," a subtle shift towards "few to many" communication and away from the "community odds and ends" that many newsletters began with.
Over time these internal communicators started to talk to each other and band together and work to define their role more carefully. There has been reams written about the "professionalisation projects" of various groups so I won't go into the mechanics here, except to observe that people who write in a journalistic style, but not for newspapers are often members of the Public Relations function. It's worth noting that in the UK, the "Chartered Institute" that encompasses most internal communicators is the CIPR.
PR and Marketing
Internal communications did have vague goals, as mentioned above, but the influence of PR practitioners was to begin to sharpen the notion that communications could alter the character of the community, reinforce the establishment of a particular identity. This isn't to say no one was doing this before, but it is from the field of Public Relations and the related discipline of Marketing that the philosophical impetus came. Whereas before the goals of internal communicators were loosely tied to the organisation, they were now becoming actively more engaged in "selling the values of the organisation" to the employees. The critical issue here is that this model of "few to many" and "selling" sits very comfortably in a world where the values of a the organisation are set by central/top management and the "ordinary worker" is persuaded (or as Lee put it, coerced) into compliance with that vision.
Strategy and Change Managment
The final strand in this short tour brings us to the present day. Despite the rush of conceptual ideas from PR and Marketing, the "internal communication department" remained a prisoner of it's roots, with a limited budget and often seen to be a "feel-good" item on the budget, ripe for cuts when recession hit. Now we all know that internal communication is vital to the health of the company, but it has taken time to construct a case for it and the tools for that case form the third strand of the history. It's from the field of change management that the "business case" for internal communication really took off. It has been observed that full communication and "selling the case" are vital for successful change. This established a business critical role for internal communicators in times of change. The Strategic Management types took this concept and ran further with it. They reasoned that a new strategy (or in some companies, the explication of an existing one) was also a matter that required full communication and case selling for success. Thus we reached a position where there was a continuing business case for internal communications, communicating the vision of the organisation to its members and persuading them to adopt it.
So what's the problem?
Internal communications is important, we all know and it's found a business case. What could cloud this sunny picture?
I will post in more detail on this when I talk about Mark Earls book, Herd, but in a nutshell, traditional marketing is not going to keep working. Internal communication has built a business case for itself, but it cannot deliver everything promised. The old notion of a vision and set of values, handed down from on high for the internal communicator to insert into the minds of masses sets those communicators up for a fall.
Alternatives?
What can an internal communications consultancy provide, if old style communication plans and "vision selling" aren't effective. What is the role for internal communications interventions?
Technorati Tags: command and control, alternative ways of thinking, internal communications, history
I said then that I'd expand on the logic that links that statement to the approach I'm promoting, but first it's worth making a short detour through the history of internal communication.
In the beginning was the word...
and the word was written in the in-house newsletter. If one had to name an originating strand in the story of "internal communications" it would be in the organisational newsletter. Many of them were started without a clear purpose, just vague notions of "community building" or "enhancing shared identity" and production placed in the hands of whoever happened to be available.
Over time, people started thinking about that position more carefully. First we saw some journalists brought it to do the writing, which gave us a sense of "mass media," a subtle shift towards "few to many" communication and away from the "community odds and ends" that many newsletters began with.
Over time these internal communicators started to talk to each other and band together and work to define their role more carefully. There has been reams written about the "professionalisation projects" of various groups so I won't go into the mechanics here, except to observe that people who write in a journalistic style, but not for newspapers are often members of the Public Relations function. It's worth noting that in the UK, the "Chartered Institute" that encompasses most internal communicators is the CIPR.
PR and Marketing
Internal communications did have vague goals, as mentioned above, but the influence of PR practitioners was to begin to sharpen the notion that communications could alter the character of the community, reinforce the establishment of a particular identity. This isn't to say no one was doing this before, but it is from the field of Public Relations and the related discipline of Marketing that the philosophical impetus came. Whereas before the goals of internal communicators were loosely tied to the organisation, they were now becoming actively more engaged in "selling the values of the organisation" to the employees. The critical issue here is that this model of "few to many" and "selling" sits very comfortably in a world where the values of a the organisation are set by central/top management and the "ordinary worker" is persuaded (or as Lee put it, coerced) into compliance with that vision.
Strategy and Change Managment
The final strand in this short tour brings us to the present day. Despite the rush of conceptual ideas from PR and Marketing, the "internal communication department" remained a prisoner of it's roots, with a limited budget and often seen to be a "feel-good" item on the budget, ripe for cuts when recession hit. Now we all know that internal communication is vital to the health of the company, but it has taken time to construct a case for it and the tools for that case form the third strand of the history. It's from the field of change management that the "business case" for internal communication really took off. It has been observed that full communication and "selling the case" are vital for successful change. This established a business critical role for internal communicators in times of change. The Strategic Management types took this concept and ran further with it. They reasoned that a new strategy (or in some companies, the explication of an existing one) was also a matter that required full communication and case selling for success. Thus we reached a position where there was a continuing business case for internal communications, communicating the vision of the organisation to its members and persuading them to adopt it.
So what's the problem?
Internal communications is important, we all know and it's found a business case. What could cloud this sunny picture?
I will post in more detail on this when I talk about Mark Earls book, Herd, but in a nutshell, traditional marketing is not going to keep working. Internal communication has built a business case for itself, but it cannot deliver everything promised. The old notion of a vision and set of values, handed down from on high for the internal communicator to insert into the minds of masses sets those communicators up for a fall.
Alternatives?
What can an internal communications consultancy provide, if old style communication plans and "vision selling" aren't effective. What is the role for internal communications interventions?
I would say that developing corporate strategy requires the flow of communication up as well as down in the organisation and that one aspect is the development and nurturing of those upward flows. Of course, that is something that plenty of people already do. I have been remiss in not acknowledging that conscientious practitioners have sought to feed information back up the chain, especially with regard to changes and strategy.
What is perhaps newer is the understanding that implementing any strategy depends on the quality of cooperation inside the organisation and crucially the quality of lateral communication. One area I particularly concentrate on visible problems between different groups in the organisation, especially those who form different subcultures. However, there is serious work on the human side of lateral communication to be done in every organisation. We have many technological solutions in place, but we still need people to talk and sometimes they need help for that.
Technorati Tags: command and control, alternative ways of thinking, internal communications, history
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