As part of my travels this week I was privileged to get a small insight into a recent (not yet published study) of corporate communications managers that examined their actions in unexpected crisis situations. I won't identify any people or situations too closely because it would be unfair to preempt the study too much, but it did include managers at the top of the corporate communications tree in a number of prominent businesses, many in the FTSE100.
The fascinating part for me was a pattern of "regression under fire" where people who are very definitely managers, whose position is far above "copywriter" or "PR representative" slipped away from strategic thinking into what might be termed "chasing the message cycle." Of course, the message cycle shouldn't be ignored in a crisis, but presumably these people have whole departments to help them with that. Surely, their role is to think in a strategic manner and help the board look for opportunities to address the underlying issues, rather than engage unduly with day by day press and communications tasks.
I don't say this as a criticism, I think we've all turned in bad performances in a crisis at some point. If you haven't, then you probably haven't been in that many crises or you're failing to admit that someone else saved your bacon at one point. Rather, I see is as saying something about the state of the corporate and internal communications field. There's a deep seated insecurity about the value of the discipline and it seems to me that combines with the relative newness of these professions to leave some uncertainty of identity. In a crisis, we have a tendency to fall back on "what we're good at" which is, reasonably enough for people from that background the basics of crafting and disseminating a message.
However, these people are at the top of a management tree, they have been managers for a long time. Is it really appropriate that they react as craftsmen and craftswomen? And what does it say about "management" in the field?
It's perhaps unfair to overgeneralise from an unpublished study, but I think there are some important issues here. One is the question of how well communicators are relating to strategic, rather than tactical concerns. There are narratives of "communications strategy" alive and well within the profession, but it seems that we don't really have full confidence in them as yet. Another issue is the question of management. Communications is very definitely "knowledge work" and as such doesn't fit easily into the industrial traditions that shape a lot of "managment." All the same, it sometimes feels that there isn't a clear sense of what it means to be a manager in a communications function and certainly I think there are opportunities to improve the training and development of people who ascend into these communications management positions.
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