Communications is essentially a leadership discipline. Any
individual who cannot communicate effectively will find it difficult to lead.
So, the task of the communicator is to support the leader to
develop her/ his communication skills.
An effective communicator must understand her/ his leader,
who is the leader talking to, what does the leader want to say, what matters to
her/ his audience and what the audience wants to say to the leader. Very often,
we tend to focus on the first two aspects. A communicator falls into the trap
of putting what the leader wants to say at the centre whereas the audience
falls in the periphery.
In the book ‘Power of Communication’, the author lays out
the tenets of communication succinctly.
He defines communication as:
An act of will
directed towards a living entity that reacts.
And what’s the purpose of communication: To build trust and
loyalty towards the brand/ leader.
With this in mind, here are five communications ‘killers’.
1. COMPLEXITY
This is precisely what happens when communicators lack
clarity about the target audience, its preferences and its receptivity to the
company’s messages. A journalist once told me – what’s a headline that needs to
be explained. Spot-on. What’s a message that the audience has to crack its
brains to understand. I agree that the audience isn’t always a homogeneous set
but that is what makes the communicators role more strategic. In an era where
business interests drive geopolitics, where heads of government openly bat for
their home companies, can a communicator afford to take his eyes off various
strata of audiences – from government to consumers. In a democracy, where
consumer perception drives government thinking, can a B2B company say that
consumers are not my audience?
It’s a communicators job to simplify and humanize the
company’s seemingly complex product or service attributes. That would mean
intense engagement with the business stakeholders, asking the right and
sometimes “basic” questions as well as gathering and understanding customer/
target audience feedback. Many a times,
that would mean helping the spokesperson interpret the message in layman terms
(eg. using analogies) without losing its impact. Of course, the communicator
may face resistance. For instance, a leader may ask why he cannot be more
direct and take the bull by the horns. In many cases, my response to such
questions is that media, whether traditional or social media, is not the ideal
platform to fight your battles. What will the audience gain from this battle?
Are they even interested?
Sound understanding of the audience will help the
communicator hold her/ his ground. A communicator should question everyday -
How well do I understand my audience?
2. GENERALIZED MESSAGING
The best measure of a message is to replace the company’s
name with that of its competitor. Does the message still hold true? If so, the
communicator has failed to build the right proof points.
For communicators, messaging would be their raison d’etre.
This is where communicators devote or ‘should devote’ a large part of their
time. The rise of public relations came about because of the need for
differentiation in a highly cluttered and fragmented market. As audiences
evolve, flashy catch-phrases and celebrity endorsements are not good enough.
Differentiation in messaging is core to brand positioning.
Also, we need to think how is my company being positioned in
the larger narrative. If my arguments are not convincing, do I need to be in
the narrative. Some communicators say that we cannot miss being in that story.
My answer to that is what value have you added by being there. If you’re a tag
along with the others, your spokesperson’s comment is simply a tick in the box
for the journalist and for the audience, you are another one of the long list
of me-too brands which they couldn’t care less about.
Communicators must make the message specific, contextual and
structured to fit the audience, situation and purpose. Are we ready to make
that effort or just getting the story out is good enough?
3. MONOLOGUE
Because we’re shouting from the rooftop doesn’t mean that
our audience is listening. Remember, we’re talking to a living entity that
reacts. If there is no reaction, most probably, no-one is listening. Time to
ask - Is the communication getting one-directional? A crucial metrics for
success needs to be audience feedback, and more importantly “target audience”
feedback. How many people shared your company/ leader’s comment? How many left
comments and what were they saying? It's not a bad idea for most social media
platforms to add a ‘boring’ tab for posts. That would be a more effective
measure than the ‘like’ tab, at least for communicators.
4. PLAYING DEFENSE
In an insightful piece titled ‘As world becomes morevolatile & social, role of Communicator intensifies’ by Gary Sheffer,former GE CCO, he mentions how he misunderstood the CEO’s question on how to
handle a possible crisis situation as how he would react to it whereas what the
CEO was asking was whether he could address the cause so that the crisis
wouldn’t occur in the first place. As communicators we tend to get into
firefighting mode quite instinctively. Can we shift focus to helping prevent
fires? Getting to the cause and addressing it beforehand is how the
communicator wins the CEO’s trust. And we thought crystal ball gazing was only
for wizards?
5. DIVERGENT VOICES
Who wouldn’t like to be in front of the camera, giving
bytes. The question is how many spokespersons are needed to talk on a subject
to a finite set of media. Perhaps, the most crucial ability of a communicator
is the ability to say ‘No’, with solid reason of course. The worst thing to
happen to a company is to have every division/ function take the liberty to
send out a message at whatever forum and in whichever way it deems fit. The
chances of divergent messaging are high leading to confusion in the minds of
the audience. So, what does this company actually stand for? Yes, a company can
stand for many aspects depending on the audience set but the underlying
positioning cannot be divergent. A communicator would do grave injustice to
her/his role if she/he cannot ensure a coherent message across all business
divisions and functions.
No-one said being a communicator is easy. More communicators
fail, not because they are poor communicators but because they are poor
leaders. A successful communicator must demonstrate the qualities of a leader,
both internally and externally in order to command the respect that her/his role truly deserves.