What makes a good communication practitioner?

Have you been thinking about the competencies you need in your communications team lately? Digging out some old files made me wonder how clear most of us are about the skills and experience our organisations need from us.

Two things have happened to me recently.

First, over coffee, a recruiter friend commented that he keeps seeing the same jobs come around every 12 to 18 months. He was wondering if Comms professionals are moving around more or, whether employers are getting worse at knowing who they wanted to hire.

As someone who trains and coaches communications teams it got me thinking about the increasingly smart comms leaders I work with - surely we're getting better at knowing what good comms look like?

Second, I decided to reorganise my home office as an important deadline needed to be ignored and I found a copy of a report I wrote with Sue Dewhurst for Melcrum, a CEB Company in 2007 looking at competencies among internal communicators.

I’d forgotten how proud I was of this work.

It was the first time that anyone had attempted a comprehensive study of what communicators were actually doing and how they developed. Previously, researchers (including Sue and I) had jotted down our subjective thoughts about what organisations needed in their communicators.

Possibly, because these models tended to be done by people who were not new to the profession (i.e. old fogeys), they tended to overstate the importance of strategic thinking and generally hanging out in deep carpet land on the Executive floor.

Competency models

Our survey of several hundred real people worldwide told a slightly different story. But not in ways people might have expected.

When the statisticians had finished crunching the data, we saw that core practical, technical skills are essential table stakes for communications advisors. You won’t hold the confidence and ears of the big cheeses for long if you can’t write, project manage or make the slides work. Your advice might be sharp and insightful, but it’s useless if your stakeholder if talking to someone else about logistics for their All Hands meeting.

Making things happen , what we called Craft (writing and design) and Innovation and creativity were three of the 12 competencies we defined. Our respondents told us that these are the things they need to display every day; attending beard-stroking meetings was less of a regular feature of practice.

Since then, people like Ralph Tench and Prof. Dr. Ansgar Zerfass have done brilliant work across the communications profession which reflect current practice, not just for internal comms. And there is a wealth of other thinking in this area now.

It's a people thing

Generally, the data isn’t just saying you only need to be great at hand to hand media relations, or nippy on Instagram. It’s saying that practitioners need to be both skilful at the mechanics and be able to make relationships work. The competencies that came from our conversations and polling, highlighted themes like developing the comms abilities of others, building networks, influencing, understanding how the whole organisation works and being a consistent listener and intelligence agent.

Variations of these messages appear in most of the work that I have seen. Outstanding communicators are not either journeyman craftspeople or c-suite whisperers; they are people who work well with people. The job calls for a human touch and, dare I say it, kindness.

Despite what some commentators would have us believe, we don’t all need to be a chimera spawned by the union of a McKinsey partner, a yogic seer and a psychotherapist. We need practical skills, people capabilities and a fundamental humanity .

And if the same job vacancies are coming up time and again, is that because either employer or candidate don’t understand what is needed to do the job? Are hirers talking the language of strategy when all they want is someone to spot typos in a press release? Or are communicators destined to disappoint because they want to become Harvard Business Review case studies for leaders who think good comms means their kids see the corporate TicTok?

Or are we all failing to specify that we just want to work with nice people who care about other people?

But looking at the job ads and during my work developing communications teams, I sense that leaders often have too little time to define for their team and their Talent Acquisition colleagues what they really need. Too often we fall back on asking for a set number of years in the job or specific experiences. Sometimes we look for membership of a professional body or, very rarely, a communications-specific qualification.

These can be good guides but only after we have done the thinking about what the organisation needs from its comms and what it will take to deliver it. Without the time to reflect on the qualities of the people we need shaping our conversations, we are condemned to that cycle of hire and hire again.

I know that I've blathered on elsewhere about the attributes and attitudes of good comms professionals and it's frustrating to see the churn and the confusion that it seems to generate in organisations about what great communications could look like.

I'd love to hear how you tackle it in your organisation.