If you’ve ever been involved in an organization which has hit trouble – or just worked adjacent to one – you’ve probably heard someone say “if only we could get the Comms right”. This line, as a way of bemoaning difficulties without engaging in criticism which could sound disloyal, is usually well-meant, but it’s equally useless advice, akin to a passenger on the Titanic bemoaning rats in the galley.
When you see “bad Comms” what you often see is actually strategic failure, manifested through an organization’s outward-facing channels. “Good Comms”, by contrast, often results in credit going to the top of the organization. Communicators are therefore stuck in the unenviable middle, essential to a functioning operation but pinned in place by an organization’s refusal to address hard questions when they are finally asked.
A good Communications operation, like the crew of a ship, acts as a tactical and operational delivery mechanism for good strategic decisions taken at an organization’s top level. In an ideally functioning organization, the Communications team is a technologically sophisticated conveyor belt, taking a core message, purpose or direction and distributing it using whatever technical means are necessary. Running this operation smoothly, however, relies on clear lines of decision-making, institutional knowledge and an ability to plan for contingencies before anyone gets close to opening Photoshop or writing social media posts.
Sometimes, of course, Comms teams do drop the ball. A shoddily-designed graphic, an unfixed placeholder intro in an email, or an accidental double-entendre in a social media post make for one excruciating morning for the Comms team, and a good laugh for your opponents. But a fundamentally sound organization can style that out or even lean into the joke. When these cause real damage is when they are seen to embody a dark inner truth about the organization – something people always suspected, but couldn’t put their finger on before now.
In my career so far, I’ve worked with some organizations which function like a well-oiled machine, and some where the grinding of rusted gears is deafening. Here’s what I’ve learned:
Strategic Decision-Making: How to Do Good Comms Before Doing Comms
If you are a strategic decision-maker in your organization, good news! If you make good decisions, goods Comms will follow. When devising a policy, campaign or product, think through the following questions:
- Is your decision clearly stated, ideally in a written format which can be referred back to? If not, why not?
- Can your Communications team understand well enough the underlying principles of the decision that, if required, they can expand upon it if pressed? If not, why not?
- Are your key supporters and important stakeholders on board enough for you to be sure the new decision can be announced confidently with no chance of having to embarrassingly roll it back? If not, why not?
- Has this decision been taken with enough notice for your Comms team to interpret it and properly plan to execute on it? If not, why not?
- Have you thoroughly considered all reasonable opposing points of view, and do you have a consistent defence to them if challenged? If not, why not?
- Is there sufficient substance to the decision that it can be communicated in varying levels of depth? For instance, how can it be summarised in a social media post? How can it be written up as a newspaper editorial? How can it be expressed in a longer policy paper? If not, why not?
- Is there a single source of authority to whom your Comms team can turn for a rapid decision in case of ambiguity? If not, why not?
- Do you trust your Communications team to correctly interpret the decision and create appropriate communications output from it? If not, why not?
In this role, think of yourself as a ship’s captain. You are not responsible for swabbing the engine room, but it is your job to spot icebergs and shout warnings to the helmsman. That warning must be clear, voluble and easily interpreted based on your past statements, behaviour and organizational priorities.
All Hands on Deck: Advice for Communicators
If you’re driving your organization’s communications, you may be lucky enough to serve under a captain who follows the above advice. But let’s say you don’t – how can you make the best of a bad situation without becoming the scapegoat for failures elsewhere in your organization?
- Try to identify potential problems early. Many communications issues come from pressure to produce content in a rush, and while sometimes this is an unavoidable reality (as in crisis comms) often nobody has told you something you could have known about well in advance. Speak to a trusted manager and see if you can have a regular check-in or even a shared calendar. Ask to sit in on important strategic meetings so you can fully understand the group dynamics and thought processes behind decisions.
- Write things down. Particularly in small organizations, changes to the communications team can lead to huge gaps in institutional knowledge. A lot of work gets done twice because the first time around, nobody documented it. Someone new coming into the team will have a much easier time if there are precedent, templates and clear formal procedures they can follow.
- Ask the right questions, and speak up. If there is a problem with a strategic decision, you are often the team best placed to challenge it before it becomes a serious issue. While you don’t need to answer the above advice for strategic decision makers, it can be very helpful to double check their working.
- Be prepared for contingencies. You can’t use a branching logic tree to prepare for every possible outcome, but you should be able to prepare yourself to minimise the time between decision and communication. If an important decision is binary, write both emails (but for God’s sake, don’t set them both up in Mailchimp). Have statement graphics and leaflets designed with dummy text. Ensure your media contact list is up to date.
- Identify the next level of decision-making above you. No matter how clear you think you’ve been, there will be follow up questions, and you might not know the answer. Ideally, you will have enough delegated authority that you’re able to confidently give a response, but failing that, you should at least know who can do so, and how to reach them.
As a communicator, you are not the captain, but your job is to ensure all the other officers and enlisted sailors can follow the Captain’s decisions. You are responsible for ensuring there’s enough fresh water and the engine’s tuned up, but not for whether the bridge crew sails you straight into the iceberg. You may well have a responsibility to spot the iceberg, but if that advice goes ignored, you have every right to climb aboard a lifeboat.
In addition to the above challenges, communications problems are often an issue of capacity. By instituting some of these suggestions, you can raise the productivity of a Comms team significantly, but if that’s not doing the trick – or you have a specific upcoming project which your current workload can’t accommodate – that’s where Wildebeest can come in.
We’re equipped to handle any scale of communications work, from creating collateral for major events to building up longer-term communications infrastructure to help you focus on the things that matter most. If that sounds like something you’d like to take advantage of, get in touch using the form below!
