You make your choice and take the consequences

I'm a tad gutted that I've had to turn down Sean Trainor's offer to speak in one of the CIPR Inside's Engage Inside Expo sessions in London on May 5. It would have been a chance to share the research I worked on at the tail end of last year - and look forward to how it may move on this year.

But, the way I choose to operate my business has meant I've had to give up the opportunity to share a platform with the MacLeod 2 team and other practitioners with some skin in the engagement game. While the Expo will be in full swing, I'll be a dozen miles west in Uxbridge on day two of my university's annual research student event. It's just about the only compulsory event for researchers all year, but if I'm not there (and I missed it last year while stuck under a volcanic ash cloud), my chances of advancing to my next year of PhD research will be slimmer than a pre-pregnancy Victoria Beckham.

Back in 2007, I took the conscious decision to ease back on work and complete an MA in International Relations. It meant about a day and a half a week onsite at University from late September - April - with a frantic drive to over-index on work from late April to early September. The MA went really well and by 2010 had segued into PhD research (NOT part of the plan in 2007). That was easy to fit in when times were tough and I wasn't picking up work. However, the past year has been a less easy balance.

Long-term (post PhD) I plan to do more in academic research and, if there's any left by then, academic teaching. To that end, I've been balancing up comms work with part-time lecturing and support for some of the full-time staff (essay marking, running seminars etc). At times there's a really interesting synergy between the academic work and the organisational comms stuff but at other times there are some tectonic crashes as my two worlds collide. The Expo is one of those occasions.

Still, last week I had the pleasure of sharing a roundtable event with MacLeod 2's Nita Clark (of course it should  be Clark/MacLeod ) during the kick-off phase of Adecco's 'Unlocking Britain's Potential' .  The theme of this first roundtable was engagement - and while there was probably still too much time spent attempting to define what engagement is, there was consensus that no successful organisation can afford either to ignore it or to place it in a 'task' box. I'm going to be working with Adecco and the research team Loudhouse on the research outcomes/plan of action report later in the year. Perhaps it's another tip in the balance from organisational comms consultancy into research into the outcomes of such consultancy? It's not a leap I want to take totally yet, but the applied end of research is an area I find fascinating.

Institutes, inertia and a time to break out of the circle

Last Friday, I was chased for my annual subs for the Institute of Internal Communication - and organisation I've been a member of in the UK for 20 years. It didn't take me too long to decide that I didn't want to renew.

Under its British Association of Industrial Editors guise, I began to make the switch from consumer magazine journalist to internal communicator, successfully acquiring a Certificate in Industrial Editing. As the organisation morphed into the British Association of Communicators in Business, I became one of the last people to be awarded a Diploma in Business Communication. Under its Communicators in Business Guise, I was a national committee member and was made a Fellow of the organisation. But, as the recession bit and my career direction turned more to academia, CiB (or the IoIC as it now is) and I began to diverge in thought and action.

Today, internal communication plays only a small part in my business output. I write about it, but have found that B2B and B2C work is both easier to pick up and, at the moment, more satisfying. For me, that's because too many businesses have shown their true colours during the economic downturn: turning to organisational communication not to help engagement and build for the future, but to slip back into the default of command and control - telling people what to do if they want to still have a job.

It has been dispiriting. At a time when we should be making a paradigm shift to more open, transparent, enabling and effective communication, underpinned by a far wider armoury that should be built on the opportunity of social media, top teams have been slow to change, and communicators have been weak in championing the necessary cultural shift. There are, of course, pockets of brilliance - but the practice or organisational/employee/internal communication has actually moved far more slowly and covered a lot less ground than it thinks it has in the past two decades.

The fundamental for me is the focus on and rewarding of output over outcome - reflected ingloriously in the organisations supposed to represent the organisational communicators' role and advocate its ascendancy.

The revolution hasn't happened: the 'new' has a distinct whiff of emperor's new clothes; and organisational communicators remain in low earth orbit when we could be reaching for the stars.

I'm going to keep on doing what I'm doing - though probably ever more in b2b and b2c. Internal communication isn't dead - but it seems to need some radical new medicine.

Jan 2009 v Jan 2010 - there is a difference

So we're now into the second month of 2010. We're officially out of recession and my CiB colleagues (or the Xchange team anyway), say that the only way the organisational communications market can move is up. I hope that's the case, though I've yet to see the fragile optimism translate into money in the bank.

But looking back on January - with the perspective of a whole day - I can already see that the month was quite a different proposition from its partner in 2009. I have been a lot busier than at this time last year, and while this isn't reflected in a poor billing month, there's definitely more reason to feel positive.

If I look at my January calendar I can see that barring a couple of snowed-out days, I was engaged in the dark arts of communication on every work day. I'd love to say it was all day every day: it wasn't. I'd love to say it was all fee-earning stuff: it wasn't.

In January 2009, I waited for the anticipated surge that has happened every year since I started Leapfrog in 2000. It never came. This year I didn't expect it. I had a few small pieces of work carrying over from December, and have completed or brought these close to completion over the last few weeks. Bits of billing have gone in, some more will happen over the next week, and more small tactical pieces of work have come my way. Not the much-needed 'big project', but all good stuff, and all a real step forward from this time last year.

What's been different from 2009 is the number of conversations I've had about upcoming work of all varieties, and the number of pieces of work - of all hues - that I've been asked to quote for. Not everything has been rosy, but the overall feel is that the market's finally beginning to move.

On the downside for me, I had some facilitation work that I hoped would lead to a larger piece of change comms work. My piece of the jigsaw went well - but the team made a crucial decision that day to run the project from Switzerland rather than the UK. It's the right decision and means they can resource the comms internally. It was tough to miss out on the work, but I hope the client saw enough in me to consider using me in the future. Certainly they were very positive about the planning/facilitation I did for them.

The upside is a number of conversations about work opportunities - some for ad-hoc support, others for the more encompassing 'big project'. These conversations just weren't happening 12 months ago. I've spent a significant amount of time putting pitch material together and the vibe feels a lot better than last year. While much of the quality work remains in-house, there's a bit more budget around, and certainly more appetite for communication as a means to prepare organisations for the upswing.

I now feel I'm on the runway, wheels rolling. It's a much better feeling than last year when I, and too many of my peers, were stuck in a snowdrift.

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.

A not so subtle way to access revenue-making talent

So VMA are raising their profile and looking for a means to access potential revenue-earning talent by sponsoring the new and some would say spurious Corp Comms Top 100 Club .

Coming out of CorpComms Magazine, the blurb states: The Corp Comms Top 100 club creates a network of the most influential and inspiring individuals within the communications marketplace; Members will range from individuals responsible for revitalising an internal employees’ messaging scheme to those who have been principle in determining a major CSR policy or to others who have successfully rebranded a FTSE 100 company.

A number of things strike me as worrying about this new club of corporate communicators. The first is that it's exclusive to those working in-house. Yes, there are many great communicators in-house, but there are just as many - if not more working in agencies and as independents. it's often these people who are the creative powerhouses, while their internal colleagues get on with managing their teams and trading in corporate politics. Surely a real 'Top 100' would blend the best of in-house and consultant talent?

Second, I worry about any organisation that still regards IC as 'revitalising an internal employees' messaging scheme'. So, the magazine still regards IC as being postman come publisher? Sounds like they're still very externally focused and behind the times on organisational comms.

Finally, a concern that could also be an opportunity: this new 'club' covers a hugely wide area - from IC to Public Affairs to PR to CSR - often areas that report into different heads in the organisations I work with. Their skills, concerns and outlook are often quite different and the so-called powerhouse that the magazine is looking to create may turn out to be no more than a collection of disparate strands.

Of course, as we move to issues-based communication, organisations should be knitting together all the strands of their communication - so actually there could be a great opportunity here to create and mobilise best practice.

It's just a shame that this new network is under the auspices of a magazine looking to make money by selling subscriptions to big corporates, and sponsored by a recruitment consultancy with a need to get the top talent on their books. Of course, it's the way the world works, but I wonder at the independence in selecting the cream of our industry's cream.

The waters of change....

.....People are faced with an unhappy choice. They can try to preserve their traditional culture by putting up barriers against the outside world and trying to resist change. Or they can go with the flow, forget the past and melt into a bland generic culture where everything is the same and nothing has much depth. One way leads to isolation and hostility, the other to a nagging sense of loss. But there is another possibility. It is to carry what you have taken from the past on an open-ended journey, showing it off, throwing it open, making it a point of contact rather than a point of honour.....

The words above could have come from any of the culture change/organisational communication tomes written in the past few years, wise words about embracing change but being proud of our past. It's certainly the strategy I've seen played out across the raft of mergers, acquisitions, closures and re-engineerings I've been a part of over the last 18 years.

But, these great words of management wisdom are actually culled from the pages of the Riverdance souvenir programme.

Last night, for our 20th anniversary treat, Jac and I took the kids to one of Ireland's most significant exports of the past 20 years; a show so infused with a mix of energy and nostalgia for the 'oul sod' that anyone with even the smallest percentile of diaspora heritage would get a lump in their throat. For a few, that might be bile at the unashamed sentimentality of it all, but for me, it's a real sense of pride in a perfectly packaged show trading on the heritage of my family's home country.

I didn't expect to get a slice of management change speak with my ice cream - but isn't that what Riverdance is all about? In two hours, it distills the perfect cultural change programme through dance and traditional music - leaving the old, embracing the new, honouring the past and energised for a great future.

We had a great night out...........................and I must be far too deeply into this change communication stuff if I can really draw a parallel between a modern cultural phenomenon and organisational change!

Let's not get hung up on strategy

Every now and again I get accused, in the most vehement terms, of being a 'strategist' or worse still, a 'strategic consultant'.

It's odd that, since I don't actually believe in communication strategies.

Somehow, a communications strategy aggrandises organisational communication. As far as I'm concerned, successful organisations will have a clear, tangible, measurable and deliverable business strategy, and communication will be one of the tools - I'd say one of the top three tools - to deliver that strategy.

To have a separate communication strategy is to immediately put space between the business strategy and communication - when the latter should be at the heart of the former. All our communication objectives should be to deliver the business strategy and if our work is not enabling that delivery, then we probably shouldn't be doing it.

What gets me too is how often strategy gets bandied around when people are actually talking about the tactics they'll use - the channels, media and messages - to deliver a business objective.

So let's tread warily around strategies - especially one that are not 100% in line with business objectives, the whole area can get communications a bad name.

Would you like fries with that?

Today I've been flat out on three client projects all paying a reasonable rate. I've now been in front of the PC for nine hours, and look set to rack up another three or four before another three or four days of much keyboard whacking heading up to deadlines.

While the emails have been pinging and ponging around, I've also been asked to get involved in a communication project for a large professional services company. A new client, all good.

This afternoon, an agency also got in touch asking if I was free to do some phone interviewing and then write up the interviews for a publication. Well, if you want something done, ask a busy man. So I said that I could probably help with at least a couple of the interviews on Friday/Monday. I then enquired about what they were paying.

They said they were planning on an hourly rate of £20. i suggested they revise their thinking or look elsewhere.

In 1991 I was charging and getting £35 per hour. These days I generally work on double that and upwards, but will come down if the job or the client merits it. But £20 per hour.......

What value does that put on the work we do. It's not simply stringing together random sentences. Surely understanding a client company, their needs and what they expect from the particular communication exercise is worth more than £20? Surely asking the right questions to elicit the right responses and following that initial questioning with incisive follow-up is worth more than £20? Surely packaging the results of your research in a compelling interview that delivers on the business expectation is worth more than £20?

The only thing I'm sure of is that the client is paying the agency a lot more than £20 per hour.

But it would seem that this agency just sees the people paid to be creative with words as a low-price transactional commodity - one step up from the burger flippers.

Frankly, I wasn't impressed.