The IC juggling act
January 17, 2012 Leave a Comment
When I started out in the world of internal communication, it very quickly became abundantly clear that IC is a tricky juggling act.
In many companies, IC teams are small, sometimes relying on a sole practitioner or even having IC as part of someone’s ‘real’ day-to-day job. This means that just being able to write isn’t enough.
It’s also not enough to be able to create nice presentations or interpret and boil down large quantities of raw data into a manageable form.
It isn’t even enough to do all that and be able to update an intranet using some fancy wysiwyg tool.
The IC role – from director to grassroots, coal face comms – needs all of the above and more, especially in this ever-changing social media-driven world.
You need to have the right influencing skills, solid negotiation skills, advanced time management capability and nerves of steel. Calmness should be a prerequisite.
Of course, senior managers and the majority of your audience only see the outputs of IC – the ‘communications’ produced by internal communication. The analogy of a duck comes to mind: you can see the head, body and feathers calmly wading across the water; you can’t see the frantic paddling going on underneath, powering the engine (I know – ducks don’t have engines).
Where I worked prior to my current post, there were two of us in IC – I was lucky enough in 2010 to be able to recruit someone to work for me so that we could concentrate both on the day-to-day tactical comms and the longer-term strategic comms.
But it’s still the output which gets seen and critiqued / criticised.
Communications are always the first to get hammered in a people survey, but I think it’s down to people’s interpretation of what internal communications are and what the IC team is responsible for. We don’t write and publish the canteen menu…
So, now in my new position, I want to make sure that both senior teams and end-user audiences are fully aware of what IC does (and doesn’t) produce and realises what a tough job it can be at times.
