Be a partner, not a packager: know when it's right to say 'no'

My working world has been organisational communication for more than 20 years now. Throughout that time, IC professionals in particular have been fighting to establish their role: first in delivering comms, then in gaining employee buy-in and communicating through change and most recently, establishing the position of IC in engagement. The constant has been that IC has never been confident in its role  - and the upshot is that communicators and the rest of the business see the IC role as two different things.

Wherever I go, I tend to find well-qualified, talented and ambitious IC people working as packagers: responding to the needs of the business by picking up decisions made elsewhere and processing them for publication - be that on a portal, through a tweet, in a team meeting or even in a glossy magazine. Most are doing a great job, but I'd question whether they're doing the right job in building a culture that will truly drive their organisation forward.

Far less frequently, I find IC people in on the decision making process before the key business decisions are finalised. This is where IC should be and should earn its spurs.

With the democratisation of communication, through the near-ubiquitous SharePoint world of team sites, yammer and the rest, overlaid with the bloom of external social media, comms pros can no longer sit their with a finger in the dyke expecting to control the media flow throughout their organisations. Give people the tools to get on with communication, but then get out of the way. The real value that IC can bring is in expert advice - not in trying to craft every message and manage every mechanism.

If IC wants to be taken seriously, it should be looking at the models being set in other functions - Finance, HR and IT for instance.  More and more, those other functions are outsourcing and automating transactional business. Of course, in the last few years, much of this has been driven by the economic climate. Teams have got smaller and in order to make their workload manageable, it has been essential to find new ways of doing the time-consuming but less high-value areas of the job. What has emerged in these functions are a two-speed operation: a few people still looking after the bread and butter process work, but more senior, more able or just more business-focused team members taking on a business partner/expert adviser role further up the business chain. Where such advice works best is before decisions are made. It's a model IC should be fighting for.

I'm ambivalent to the term 'business partner': when a service department is helping a business unit director, it's no more a partnership than when I'm supplying my expertise to an internal client. We'll meet at a point of mutual interest, but I'll always know who's boss. I prefer the concept of expert adviser - and that expertise will become valued and trusted the first time you say 'no' to something.....and are proved right.

We've all had the situation when the CEO or someone equally influential comes along and says: "I need to get this message out now." Sometimes it's a no-brainer: it has to go and everything else gets shoved to the side to make it happen. But on other occasions, your expertise tells you it's the wrong thing to do. Is the message that important? Is the timing right? How does it fit in the context of other communication happening at the same time? What will be the reaction of the organisation? If you have a good case for saying no - and have the evidence to back that case, you prove your worth by challenging the authority figure. But how often does IC do that in reality? How much more likely is it that we stop being an expert and revert to the comfort zone of packaging again?

If IC wants to finally nail a valued role in the organisation, it has to stop being the packager, get into the decision making loop and be far more prepared to challenge far more often.

Testing the business temperature

I'm researching an article at the moment asking economists if they believe we're heading for recession in the UK. So far, the view is rocky times, but probably not a recession which is a specific economic term meaning two consecutive quarters of negative growth. However the sample is pretty small at the moment.

It has made me think about how recession-proof my business is, since comms is often an easy target when companies look to cut back on costs.

So far, the signs for Leapfrog aren't bad. Financially, this is set to be our best year since 2004/2005 and the core client base is holding up. It actually seems that comms teams are taking the brunt in-house - teams are contracting, and those within them are being asked to do more. The result so far is that I'm actually being asked to do more too, to pick up the inevitable overload, although it's more day-to-day practical stuff with less high-powered (but high value) consultancy.

My take is that there are fewer big coms and change projects starting, but core communications within most organisations and with their external stakeholders have largely remained unaffected. That means more being asked of over-stretched in-house teams, with the result being more pickings for micro-businesses like mine who can come in, get the job done without fuss and get out without affecting the headcount or denting the budget too much.

What is happening is more haggling over costs, and longer gaps from invoice to payment - and neither's great when you're at the end of the food chain.

However, I've decided to stop taking on third-party generated consultancy work. That's the stuff where I go out to the end client as a representative or associate of another comms business. It's something I've done from time to time over the last eight years for three or four consultancies, but my experience is that while the pay may be good, the work is often less satisfactory, and there's an additional level of stress involved in being beholden not just to the end client, but to the consultancy too.

I simply operate better on a direct basis, and while I might well regret the loss of the occasional injection of cash that such projects bring, I'm slowly trying to change the way I work - and this is a necessary step.

By contrast, I'm actively pushing for more tactical work via agencies - a piece came in this morning, and I'm talking to a publisher about another. It's the kind of work that can be done relatively easily, with strict deadlines and something tangible at the end.

As economic times get tougher, there's likely to be little security in the kind of work I do, but I'm banking on being able to continue the tangibles of writing, whether it be scripts, magazines or whatever, rather than relying on the intangibles of consultancy - which has a habit of getting pulled at short notice when the going gets tough.