1. If you want a communicator, don’t hire a writer. Organizations have a wide range of needs for communication professionals. Unfortunately, many who have less experience with communicators assume that a writer/editor will meet all of their needs. Or a journalist. Or a video editor. If you need a strong generalist, a strategic advisor, a leader, or a team manager, look for candidates with a background to match. It’s true that being a strong writer is a cornerstone skill for any communicator – but it’s not the end of the story.
2. Hire to your mandate. What do you want your communications function to accomplish? Some companies need strong business to business relationships. Others need to drive communications within a specific business function that requires familiarity with industry or professional trends and issues. Rather than concentrating on your immediate need (such as to create an online community or web site), look for candidates who can describe how to apply communications competencies to reaching your objectives.
3. Insist on communications AND business acumen. You’ll find good communicators in every industry, and in many cases, these professionals cross industry boundaries well. The ability to communicate clearly, systematically assess needs and deliver a strategically-useful communications plan should be a part of any senior communicator’s portfolio of skills. So should a clear understanding of return on investment, the time value of money, and basic project management concepts. When you interview for a communications professional, ask yourself: Does the person I am interviewing understand the fundamentals of business. Seek out candidates who understand how your business makes money. Senior communicators should be able to look beyond knowing the regulations behind communicating in the banking industry or telling employees about benefit plans to seeing the opportunities to improve your bottom line with their skills.
4. Raise your expectations. I am amazed at how many high-level communications positions still advertise for a BA/BS degree in English or journalism (preferred) with five to seven years of experience. Professional degrees such as master’s level studies in communications or business (MBA) and credentials such as IABC’s Accredited Business Communicator (ABC) provide objective evidence that your candidate brings more to the table than exceptional proofreading skills. These candidates may cost more in terms of salary, but also bring more value in both the near and long term.
5. If you can only afford a ‘one person show,’ hire a star. Tight budgets – especially today – are a reality. So are small departments where everyone wears multiple hats. If you are looking to make a real impact on your company through strategic communications, look for generalists with a little more experience who are still ready to roll up their sleeves. In this job market, there are some exceptional professionals ready to show you what your extra salary dollars can buy.
6. There’s more to communications than PR and social media. What kind of communications professional do you need? Like many other professions, there are several disciplines in organizational communications that can add value to your team. Do the research to determine what kind of communicator is the best fit for your needs.
7. Listen to your recruiting professionals. Your Human Resources staff and ‘headhunters’ will reinforce those basic hiring practices that get you better employees in every specialization. Test for knowledge. Use behavior-based interviews. Your strategic communicator is out there ready to make a big difference in your organization. It’s up to you to hold candidates to a higher standard to find the right match for your company.

Strategic-level governance is about business alignment and staying honest to your value proposition. Few communication organizations have taken this step, but I think there is benefit for everyone. This is not easy work – IT organizations recognized the need for governance some time ago, and are still struggling to make good IT governance work.

If you find yourself trying to guess what your business leaders want, are worried about what your leaders are going to ‘do to’ your budget, or otherwise feel disconnected from the powers that be, you would probably benefit from some kind of governance system. A governance structure can keep you on track with strategy, improve your relationship with key stakeholders, and constantly reinforce your relevance to your organization.

At it simplest, governance can take the form of a small steering committee that meets with you quarterly and gives you feedback on your team’s contributions to the organization. Having this feedback (especially from a few highly-placed leaders) can be invaluable just to improve your team’s day to day work. At a strategic level, your steering committee can also approve your charter, mission or vision, help you establish a clear mandate, and be there with compelling evidence of your worth at budget time.

If your curious about governance systems and how they might work for you, reach out to your technology leaders. Odds are good that they have been down this road, and might have some valuable insights on what works in your organization to share.

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.

Mandate. Why are you here, and how does your company or organization leverage communication competencies to achieve its objectives? Mandates are reasons for being that go deeper than listing the handful of channels you manage or which job titles belong in your corner of the organizational chart. A mandate can be expressed in the form of a mission statement, as a charter, or even just a concise table that describes what activities are in and out of scope for your department. I’ve seen the latter employed successfully within IT organizations to set boundaries (thus avoiding turf wars) and by communications teams at several companies. A mandate will keep your team focused on what’s important and remind your leaders of where your agreed priorities support the overall business strategy.

Strategy. How will you achieve your mandate? Strategy is one of those business terms that has a thousand meanings (several hundred thousand if you also involve management consultants). If you have the time and political capital to do it, nothing beats a Stephen Covey-esque deep dive into creating a compelling vision and mission statement. This activity, completed over the course of months, captures your mandate and the fundamentals of how you will go about your daily business though hard work and close collaboration with your business partners. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have the combination of time, money and political capital to make that happen. However, even creating a simple objective statement supported by guiding principles can help your organization become much more effective in a short period of time. More on that in a future post.

Governance. Who is your conscience? As part of my work with IT organizations, I have had a lot of experience with governance teams that ensure technology investments actually translate into business value. A governance body should include representatives from your senior business leadership team, primary stakeholder communities, and organizational influencers. Invite them to sign off on your mandate. Engage deeply with them when you set your budget. And most importantly, listen to them and make a commitment to collaborate with them as business conditions change.

These are not new ideas for other parts of our companies. Information technology groups, for example, have gained a lot of ground in recent years from this approach. CIOs who adopt these practices get less questions at budget time, can defend their business cases more effectively, and without fail have that ‘seat at the table’ that many senior communicators have told me they wish that they had. My personal thought on that? Before you can get a seat at the table, you need a floor to put that seat on. A mandate, strategy and governance structure can give you that floor, and I’ll talk about my thoughts on implementing all of them within organizational communications teams in future posts.

Now that the social media revolution is well under way, I don’t feel especially inspired to evangelize adopting Web 2.0 in this blog. If you are here, odds are you’ve already drunk that particular Kool-aid, as my friend Bob would say. Besides, there are much better evangelists out there. You might even be one of them.

But the flurry of activity around social media and my participation in it has prompted me to start a new conversation online. Or “Comm”-versation. (Insert groan here).

I’ve seen a lot of words published about the need for social media. What I have not seen much of is candid explorations of how the communication function needs to evolve. Where is the conversation about what new practices, strategies, and competencies communicators need to have today beyond knowing how to use social media tools to be effective?  In short, how do corporate communicators remain strategic and relevant in the social media era? 

In my opinion, communication is a leadership accelerator – the most powerful contributor to the success of an organization after that first brilliant business idea and the ability to execute on your objectives. Strategic communication is about facilitating conversation and using it to engage customers, build a brand, attract talent and motivate your teams. Strategic communicators build business value and advance the organization’s agenda. We are (or should be) leaders, innovators, facilitators and partners contributing to that end goal, rather than just good writers or experts on the latest post-Twitter phenomenon. Too often, however we don’t talk about how to make that happen. We keep revisiting the old conversations – getting ‘a seat at the table’, or becoming an ‘expert’ at social media. (more on my opinion of the short lifespan of that role in future posts).

We need to start talking about shaping our futures and the future of our profession as a strategic part of organizations. It’s time for a new conversation.

This weblog will explore developing the future communications organization (or fixing the ones we have today) and how we need to re-think the communication function’s contribution to the enterprise once Web 2.0 is a mainstream part of our lives rather than a hotly-debated new phenomenon. I’ll also cover some strategies related to CIO communications and marketing the IT function – a somewhat unique subject area that I have been lucky enough to explore in my career.

Thanks in advance for reading – I hope you find what I write here interesting, engaging and thought provoking. More coming soon.