I recently finished a team mentoring assignment for a brilliant county council comms team. It’s one of the most enjoyable pieces of work I’ve been given the opportunity to take part in. As always, there are many lessons. So I thought I’d share a few.
by Darren Caveney
The programme was tailored towards the needs of the team. But we further tweaked it as we worked our way through the sessions. We covered everything from ‘how to be brilliant’ through to 'creating killer campaigns and strategies’. It’s such a privilege to get to work so closely with a team and to really understand their world but also where all of their strengths lie.
Here are my key take-aways.
1. Putting mental health and wellbeing first
There’s no brand new revelation in that statement. Placing mental health and wellbeing on the agenda is a good start. But, placing it at the very top of a team mentoring agenda wouldn’t necessarily be the norm would it? A lot of organisations talk about mental health but not all carry through fully following promising words.
It was a tough session for some of the team. But, it was very important to get out the frustrations, worries, triggers and just the general tiredness of two years of pandemic-operating comms. The sessions which followed latterly absolutely benefitted from getting any pent up problems out in the open early on, and issues which could be addressed or improved were flagged and targeted.
As I always say, you can have the best comms strategy, campaigns and resources in the world. But if you’re mental health and wellbeing is off it won’t end well for the individuals affected or the wider team and organisation.
Hats off to the whole team for making mental health and wellbeing the number one priority and talking so openly and honestly about it.
Possible solutions
Have these conversations first and foremost, whether individually, in teams or both. Whatever work best for people. Talking and identifying issues is vital to be able to assess what adjustments can be made to remedy or reduce problems.
For bigger issues, providing tailored support to individuals will be easier once the conversations have increased awareness and confidence can be built moving forwards.
2. Rekindling that creative spark
Every one is creative. Comms people especially. But, as Bruce Daisley said:
“The truth about creativity is that it tends to thrive only when we create space for it”
And this is arguably the number one challenge for communications team across the UK right now. The pandemic has ramped up expectations for what and when teams deliver now and the demand ‘side-wash’ flowing into many teams now is pretty overwhelming. It was never going to be sustainable to continue that way and the fall out is there for all to see, as discussed in lesson one above.
Too many meetings, too many emails, too many work requests, too many priorities, too much, too much.
It’s easy to say be creative but we have to first shed teams and individuals of some of the shackles – more of this in lesson number four.
Possible solutions
Crowd-sourcing plans and campaigns in small groups is a lovely way to approach work. Homeworking – whilst having many, many benefits can hamper this. So, meeting in the office, a coffee shop or even on a walk can bring rich rewards in terms of creating great ideas and work together.
Lobbying senior management teams to protect lunches, agree maximum meeting times and ban out of hours emails unless there’s a genuine emergency might be a good place to begin too in terms of enabling a more creative environment in which to work. Collaborating on this with other departments such as HR might be helpful too.
3. Skills pay the bills
What are the core required skills of comms pros in 2022?
Here’s a snapshot of what we came up with:
Story-teller
Diplomat
Influencer
Listener
Creative thinker
Negotiator
Psychic
Wheeler-dealer
Risk manager
Talent spotter
Enabler
Educator
Data intelligence monitor
Trainer and developer
Yes, there are many more – my Comms Team Job Description lists most of them. But in reality, jobs are so much more than what appears in even the best job descriptions.
Possible solutions
The trick is to understand the skills already under your roof. I use a tailored skills matrix I’ve developed to explore this with teams and individuals – a good one will help to identify the skills as well as the gaps.
The breadth and depth in most teams is amazing, and sometimes outstrips what an individual actually delivers day-to-day in a role.
So, understand the assets you have and deploy them in key campaigns and in your own in-house training. Ask an internal expert to run bitesize training sessions for others in the team to spread the knowledge base.
These exercise really help to shape annual appraisals too – both to agree the potential trainers and the training needs.
4. Meeting mania, endless emails, time tight
Time and diary management is one of the most valuable skills a comms person can have these days. We should run workshops on it. I’ve joked before that I think we should. But, would anyone come along? It doesn’t sound very sexy now does it. But the reality is this:
“No one will come along and make our diaries better for us.
That day isn’t coming”
It’s on us to do whatever works and is most practicable in our organisations to bounce off more meeting requests to retain time to think, plan, create, deliver, curate and review.
I’ve spoken to many, many comms pros who still talk about having seven or eight meetings a day. That’s just a capacity and creativity killer. People are burning out, or are already burnt out. I know it’s easier said than done but we owe it to ourselves to tilt the balance if things are out of control.
Possible solutions
Where possible drop into meetings for 10 minutes to cover comms before heading back to the ‘to do’ list which is sat waiting for us. Of course you can’t do this for every meeting but there will be meetings where you can.
Improving, refining and reducing processes which are time sappers is also worth looking at. We – or rather, you – proved during Covid that things like sign-off procedures can be massively reduced (and, interestingly, trust in many teams actually increased as a by-product of this)
Setting - organisationally - maximum ‘meeting hours’ per day could really ignite teams and individuals. How about a 50% max? So, if you work an eight hour day (stop laughing at the back) at least four hours a day would be free to do the actual core fundamentals of the job. Just imagine the creative boost and freer mind to focus on the biggest priorities.
That, my friends, is where the comms gold lies.
Darren Caveney is creator and owner of comms2point0 and creative communicators ltd
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