Perception is reality

I commented on Rachel Allen's blog recently on how the perception of a 'communications consultant' is different from being simply a business or change consultant. I've been called all three on projects in recent years, and while my role has been largely the same - and the actions I've taken have been around improving communication within and beyond those organisations - my standing, and indeed my remuneration has been higher when I've kept communication out of the title.

I did a project a few months ago where I was asked to improve communication: the assumption was I'd clean up the intranet and probably launch a new ezine. Actually, the conversations within the business proved far more interesting and soon evolved into recasting the style of leadership from one of command and control (probably necessary in a start-up) to something more collaborative and inclusive. It demanded a huge change in communication - not in the use of formal tools, but in the way management operated. The demand was for more openness, more inclusion in decision making or simply explanation when harder leadership was called for.

It was an interesting experience, and all the more interesting when the leaders forgot I was there with a 'communication' hat on, and started talking to me quite simply about how they could improve decision making in the business and move the mindset from a public service ethos to something much more commercial. They may well change some of the formal tools, but by parking 'communication' as a transactional experience, we delved more deeply into the real drivers of engagement and business evolution.

Communication is at the core of this, but by positioning ourselves as the 'communication professionals' we still tend to be marginalised: given the task of finding the best way to package the message once the decision's been made. It's easy to get wrapped up in the tools of communication - especially in how business should embrace social media. There's a danger in this in that the tool becomes the raison d'etre. Chopping the c word out of the conversation can actually drive to the heart of the issue far more quickly and effectively - and enable us to demonstrate our expertise.

How many is too many?

I've been at my desk for well over an hour so far today, and slowly my clients are drifting in and starting to send emails to me. I started early-ish as 1) I've got a lot to get through; 2) it's hot and 3) I'm sunburned from yesterday so it's not comfy lounging around!

One of my first pieces of work was completing and sending off a proposal for a training day for 25 business people.

Now I was quite put off first of all because 25 is a very large group for one session, and I normally work with groups of six - 12. But this is a fairly basic course, so I think I can scale up and still deliver something worthwhile.

But what is the best size for a training group? As ever, it depends on what the group's doing, but my rule of thumb is that the best days have more than four participants and no more than 12.

You might think that 1:1 is best - and in executive coaching or employee mentoring that's probably the case. But for comms training, four for me is the absolute minimum. Fewer than that, and there's little chance for the sharing of ideas and the spark of ideas around a group. More than that and you can have two or more groups competing on the training tasks - and that also brings an edge that tends to lift the day.

But 25....that's a lot for the personal attention one would like to achieve. But, in my head, I've the thought that a few people won't turn up and that we'll end up with four or five groups of....four or five. It's eminently do-able. The trick is to make it not feel like a sheep dip but something that addresses personal needs.

Anyway, the proposal has now gone in, so it's back to a bank strategy document and a couple of business magazine features for the rest of the day.