Category: Stakeholder Communications
To boost your credibility, try to unleash your inner consultant. Think of yourself as a highly valued and recognized strategist: how would you engage with your clients? What would you expect of them, and what would they expect of you? As you try out this experiment, think about the foundational enablers required to position yourself…
A recent post by Melcrum posed an interesting question that generated a lot of Twitter buzz – does internal communication and engagement differ in the public sector from the private sector? I’d say unequivocally, yes. Here are two reasons why: 1. Resourcing Increasingly, private companies recognize that internal communication and employee engagement are foundational requirements for…
Being strategic is a state of mind – it’s about the discipline of taking a step back from the noise to consider how communications activities contribute to an organization’s desired end state. It’s also about finding creative solutions to help an organization maximize positive opportunity for profile or good will, while minimizing potential risk exposure….
Communicators are regularly called on to bring together groups of people for the purpose of gathering insights, brainstorming and teaching. If this activity isn’t second nature to you, check out these tips for making any workshop more productive: Give a clear introduction. Clarify the overall purpose of the session, and check in regularly with the…
It fascinates me that with all the talk and hype about the transformative impact of social media, there is very little discussion of the fact that social media has profoundly and permanently changed the expectation of how employees get information from their organizations, and how they connect, collaborate, create and perform. This is the invisible…
“It’s easy, when you’re planning a communications strategy or project, to get caught up in the reams of material to read and the plans to be written. But there’s no substitute for leaving your desk and going to talk to people.” Results Map Blog: A penny for your thoughts
Issue management is one of the most high-profile elements of strategic communications. It’s about forging a deliberate response to a challenge facing your organization, ranging from a relatively minor day-to-day incident to a full-blown crisis. But it’s not, strictly speaking, just a communications function. Rather, it’s an activity in which communications leadership marshals many different…
There are many core competencies important to building a career in communications. Here are my top five: Project management: To excel as a communicator, you have to be comfortable with complex projects with many moving parts, shifting and changing in order of priority in real time. Project management is the discipline of managing the variables of time,…
It’s probably the case that most of your work as a communicator consists of one-on-one discussions with internal clients, management or external stakeholders. But from time to time, your job calls for you to stand up before a larger group of people and make communications magic happen. One of those times that I find most…
The communications industry is no different than any other when it comes to the necessity and relevance of leadership. It’s what internal clients are looking for, and it’s also the unique space where communicators can provide real value to the organizations they serve. While the value of leadership can often be invisible (after all, it…
