Dare to Dream - Part 4: Making your dream doable

Making your dream doable

Hopefully the last few chapters will have shown you how it’s possible – in principle – to make your dream irresistible to your key decision-makers.?And that’s all fine and groovy, but will do you no good if you can’t actually do it.?

This needs careful thought.?The last thing you can afford to do is get your leadership team all excited about what you can do for them if they say yes to your dream, and then find yourself unable to deliver on those promises.

So,in the spirit of safely developing, we now need to turn our attention to the question of how to make sure you’ve got all the bases covered.?Which aspects of your working set-up need to be DFVP??And how can you make them so?

Chapter 15: The Sweet Spot

If your dream is going to work, long term, we believe there are four key pieces of the puzzle which need to be DFVP – for you and everyone you work with.

A.?Business knowledge

This is probably the trickiest to nail down, because it can vary from organisation to organisation, and even from team to team within the same organisation.?But as far as the IC Team is concerned, that knowledge should surely extend to a basic grasp of how organisations fulfil their purposes (whether public or private sector).?And it should include a firm understanding of the purposes of the organisation for which they work, and of any business function(s) they serve.

In short, how does this business function make the organisation as a whole run better??What does it need in order to fulfil that purpose??And how does the organisation make people’s lives better – both outside and inside??

They probably also need to have as good a grasp as possible of the business calendar: what major changes are on the horizon for which they may need to plan.?And understanding the basics of change management would probably be useful.

Some folk are a little puzzled by that last one.?Change management??Why??

Change Management

In Chapter 11 we looked at the absurd situation of people saying “It’s not an internal communication; it’s an HR communication”.?We frequently come across folk making a similar assertion about ‘Change Communication’.?Hmm.?Let’s think this through.?We’ve already established that business comms can justify their existence only through the actions their audiences take or avoid as a result of having been communicated with.??

All business communication, then, whether internal or external, must either facilitate behaviour change, or head it off.?Therefore every internal communication is a change communication.?Understanding change dynamics will always be useful for an IC Specialist.?

Beyond these few topics there may be others you feel would be appropriate for yourself and your team.?And then there’s the question of your clients.

Clients' knowledge

In Chapter 4 we discussed the causes of the challenges you currently face.?As an example we looked at clients not putting aside enough time to brief you properly.??And one cause we suggested was that they might have had responsibility dumped on them by someone else.?So the person you’re dealing with might not have the necessary business knowledge to answer your questions – which will likely cause delays and threaten the TRACELACE-ness of your work.

So ensuring all parties involved in your work have the necessary business knowledge may sometimes be a matter of procedure, or even business policy.?You always need to be working only with clients who have the necessary knowledge at their fingertips.

B.?The design of your working practices

In Chapter 4 we also cited the design of the Briefing Process as another reason why some folk might not set aside enough time to brief you properly.?Whether or not that’s the case for you, it’s unquestionably true that the way your working practices are set up will be crucial to your credibility and effectiveness.?

Chances are you have numerous working practices.?But we would suggest that, as a starting point, you need to make sure these eight are DFVP:

1. Language Standards
2. Channel Mix
3. Briefing Process
4. Campaign Planning
5. Approvals Process
6. Message Calendar
7. Outcome Feedback (on individual communications/campaigns)
8. IC System Feedback (checking the above seven are doing the job)

C.?Technical skills

It’s also vital that you and your team have the necessary skills to run these practices effectively.?Your briefing process needs to be asking all the right questions.?But if the person using those questions doesn’t know how to analyse the answers – to tell if they truly have all the information they need before moving on – the process is still going to come up short.?

Crucially, though, despite the marketing blurb of some training companies, there is no such thing as ‘Skills training’.?People do not acquire skills on training courses.?(By the time you got to the end of your first driving lesson, were you ‘skilled’at changing gear, or parallel parking or manoeuvring the car in fast moving traffic?)?

Developing skill requires repetition and experience.?Most training courses can do little more than provide insights, models and templates.?The acquisition of skill happens only when that content is put repeatedly into practice.?And we all know that getting used to new ways of doing things is likely to slow us down for a while?But in business, not only are people often not given more time, they frequently have less.?If there’s no one covering their work while they’re off in the training room, they’ll return to a backlog which they need to catch up on.?

This is a reality which, sadly (even ironically) the real world rarely acknowledges.?But if you and your team are going to safely develop, the timeline and budget for developing your dream need to embrace it.

D.?Sustainable mandate

Finally – and often most stickily – is the question of your mandate.?There’s no point in having DFVP business knowledge, practice designs and skills if you don’t have the mandate to use them every time.?This seems to be the greatest stumbling block of all.?So we’re going to devote the next four chapters to three different types of mandate you can develop, to maximise the possibility of you being able to live your dream – wherever your career takes you in the future.?

About the author

Russell-Olivia Brooklands (ROB) has been working in the field of Internal Communication for over 25 years.?Through his consultancy work and training programmes he’s helped IC Specialists to up their game on four continents, in blue chip companies like GSK and Airbus, and major national and international bodies, including the European Central Bank and the UN. He was one of the founding Directors of the Institute of Internal Communication.?And he’s leading the IC Practice Governance initiative, to help IC Teams better support line managers in becoming increasingly effective communicators.

You can find him at [email protected]