This email should have been a conversation

Is Internal Communications the biggest obstacle to effective, strategic internal communication?

Here’s a quick quiz. How many of the following statements feel true or triggering in your current communication role?

1. Requests are often channel-first? “We need you to email this to everyone”
2. Requests are consistently last minute “We’re rolling this out next week”
3. Not invited to project kick-offs or planning sessions? “You seem too busy so we thought we’d wait until rollout”
4. Requests focus on the message and content to be sent and not the required outcomes? “We’ve developed these slides, we just need you to make them look better on the poster”
5. You use the ‘All’ distribution list more than any other segmented lists?

Congratulations, if you answered yes to any of these, you might be your own biggest problem.

Sure, there’s a degree of comfort in memes and stories of how ‘the business’ doesn’t understand or value what you do, you unfortunate comms hero.

The Uncomfortable Truth and What To Do About It

But the difficult truth is that these are all symptoms of a communication function stuck in tactical service provision. And if you answered yes to most of these, you know it too. You can feel it.

But there’s good news. You can change this in most - but not all - organisations.?

• Invest in developing your briefing, influencing and negotiation skills
• Invest in educating other functions about how communication can be effective by being effective and demonstrating that
• Invest in coaching and tool development for your internal partners

Scrap your briefing template*. Take a ‘this email should be a conversation’ approach. The benefit of a conversation-based approach is you bring your internal partners on the journey with you.?

Using a briefing template in isolation misses the opportunity to understand outcomes and develop solutions. Using a briefing script allows for deepening understanding for both the business area and the communication professional.

Show your work - both the process and the outcome. Using an approach like COMMS: Context, Outcome, Message, Method, Support is a great start.

What’s the cost of these investments??Mostly your time.?

It takes more time. Upfront. And then it doesn’t. You are educating your internal stakeholders with each interaction. You are helping them understand what you need from them in order to deliver their outcomes. And they will get better outcomes as a result.

It's a virtuous cycle. But it only works if you break the vicious cycle. ?

But wait, I hear you say ‘this couldn’t work here’.

It could. You won’t know unless you give it a go.?

Some things to keep in mind

It won’t change overnight. You are driving culture change. You already know that saying things once doesn't drive change. You know that change requires working with stakeholders. You know that behaviour change needs a compelling 'why'. You know the way you deliver information impacts how it is received and acted on. You know that rolling out a template - without supporting context and benefits and skills - is a recipe for change failure. That's why you'd never use a briefing template to streamline operational communication requests without bringing your internal customers on the change journey with you.

In addition to time, it needs a few things from you - and if you’re lucky enough to be a team - your team.?

It requires you to be on top of key insights about what else is happening in the organisation, about audiences, their needs, capacity and preferences, about the performance of different communication methods (and yes, that does mean you’re going to need to measure things).?

It requires sponsorship from your leaders.

Be prepared for some resistance.

Because, depending on the culture in your organisation, the minute the communication function starts shifting the expectation from being a post office to being a valued partner, there might be some other parts of the organisation that haven’t bought the value proposition yet. They will have their own soul-searching to do: why their requests are last minute, what could have been different if they had engaged the communication function earlier, why they are struggling to articulate the outcomes clearly.

You, you excellent communication leader, have an opportunity to meet their opposition as an opportunity to shift the way things are done: to engage early, to add insight, to demonstrate how effective communication can help them, to surface issues of conflicting priorities and clashing deadlines, and fuzzy outcomes.?

This is the way.

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