GUEST POST by Geoff Barbaro, co-founder of Corporate Growing Pains
There is so much uncertainty in public relations. Constant discussion on who owns which part of the communications landscape.
Calls for more and more evaluation to prove PR’s worth to the CEO (and sometimes to achieving corporate goals!). Debates about convergence, integration and which department communications should be in.
And, of course, the big one – what should practitioners call themselves and their profession.
These are all symptoms of a profession struggling with its very foundations. PR has replaced the foundations with formulaic concepts of marketing communications, media relations, crisis management, internal communications and stakeholder relations.
Artificiality and Dehumanisation
Public relations has fallen into the same trap of artificiality and dehumanisation as management, businesses and organisations have generally over the last few decades.
There needs to be a return to the foundations.
Communication is a human activity. More than that, communication is integral to every human endeavour. PR has no mortgage on it and can’t control it, but can help organisations utilise it to achieve a vision.
Organisations are groups of people.Those people have values that they share and are shared by their customers (or did until HR lost its way and started recruiting on ready-made skills instead). They identify a problem and have a solution to that problem (or did until accountants lost their way and insisted on diversification for risk management based on rigid cost accounting). They can make the solution available to everyone who experiences the same problem (or did until managers created marketing that focused on product instead of people).
As I watched a group of late primary school students march down our street chanting “we want a high school” I saw how far business organisations have moved from being human organisations.
These students didn’t want to be separated from their friends just because there’s no high school in this area (which has four primary schools). They had values they shared, a problem and a solution.
Modern organisations looking for long-term success are moving back to this approach, and we see movements like Steve Denning’s Radical Management, Umair Haque’s New Capitalism and Gary Hamel’s Management Innovation Exchange becoming increasingly popular as a result.
Leadership Communication
Public relations has to move this way as well, and recognise its own foundations.
Clearly, if the underlying basis of an organisation is to achieve a vision, then the fundamental basis for all organisational communication should be 'leadership communication'.
Leadership is based in shared values, identifies shared desires (aka problems) and drives action towards achieving a vision (aka solutions) to benefit others. Recognise that as being the foundation for an organisation? This is how organisational alignment is created.
So I developed a framework for leadership communication and Verb Publishing put it in a book called The Leader’s Beacon: The 55-minute guide to Leadership Communication.
The Leader’s Beacon:
- Moves communication away from management by objectives, plans and campaigns and into more creative and adaptable frameworks that are better suited to the complexity of human communication.
- Creates a framework that could be used in any culture, however open or closed (other than authoritarian), and that could be adapted by individuals to be very personal and simple to implement.
- Provides a system that caters for the uncontrolled, multi-faceted and chaotic nature of communication and people in organisational relationships.
The Leader’s Beacon isn’t solely influenced by the Western English speaking world, in particular North American business and communication writings.
Public relations frameworks must be flexible to cater for local multicultural and global communities, breaking away from traditional command and control models of business and communication that are still dominant in North America.
With a leadership communication framework in place, all of the specific types of PR plan and campaign can be developed in ways that reflect the shared values, the humanity and the aspirations of the people who make up organisations, including customers.
It is time for public relations to re-establish its foundations if it is to be a relevant profession for long-term, sustainable organisations.
The Leader’s Beacon: The 55-minute guide to Leadership Communication is available from Amazon. It is published by Verb Publishing (UK). More information on this book and other 55-minute guides is available here.
Geoff Barbaro established Corporate Growing Pains with Michelle Delebet in 2010. He is an Associate Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management and a long-term member of the PRIA. He tweets as @Geoff_Barbaro and @CoGrowingPains (with Michelle).
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