If your CEO walked up to you tomorrow and asked, “Why are you here?”, how would you answer?

Think about your potential response for a moment. There are a lot of choices. If you’ve ever gotten into the concept of personal branding, you might have already prepared a quick ‘elevator pitch’ for just such an occasion. You could talk about your ability to deliver results, change and influence the organization, and rattle off a half dozen key communication tools that you know how to leverage on your leader’s behalf. Or take any number of other approaches to demonstrating your value. If you’re like my colleague Tom (see comments to my previous post), you have seen the value of turning yourself into a “walking mission statement.” And that’s a good thing.

Now, let’s ask an even tougher question: “Why is your department here?”

You can go a lot of directions with that question, but the main point is, how do you define the business that you are in? If your communications department were an independent consulting firm, you would have to know:

• What customers you serve
• What services you offer
• Your position in the marketplace (are you a premium boutique or a discount store?)
• Your brand promise to your customers

Those points imply some deep thinking about your capabilities, strengths, weaknesses and what you can realistically deliver to your marketplace. Everyone knows that if you are not on target with your product mix as a company, you will eventually go out of business. I think it would help all of us as communicators if we remembered that the same thing applies to our function within organizations.

Tags: Strategic Communications