Have you ever been ghosted? I’ve heard from friends navigating the dating scene that it’s sadly an all-too-common occurrence. You meet, you feel a strong connection, you’re talking every day on WhatsApp discussing plans for a brilliant future together and then one day – Nothing. Nada. Zilch
by Catherine Farrell
They just disappear, and your plans go up in a puff of smoke leaving behind a sense of loss and desolation.
Creating the comms dream
As comms professionals, ghosting is often part and parcel of our working lives. You meet the key people in the organisation you’re tasked with doing activity for, you talk at length over coffee and there’s a sense of shared goals and dreams for the future.
You visualise together the creation of a great piece of content which will set the tone of things to come. You wax lyrical about the speaking opportunity or placed editorial that will establish them as an expert in their area, the interview with a journalist that you have established a relationship with over many years of sustained effort. You discuss and get excited together about a creative campaign idea so you can practically taste the outcomes, the uptick in adoption, the increase in enquiries or sales.
But then reality hits and they realise they can’t commit the time to make it happen in the way you talked about. And like a love rat, or the main female character in the latest Chris Evan’s flick, they go to ground and hide.
Bringing on the bargaining and the biscuits
You send hopeful emails, then increasingly desperate messages and texts as you realise your deadlines are sliding and you might be letting people down.
You try flattery, you try passive aggressive meeting actions and introduce tactful mentions in minutes. In some past comms roles. I’ve even bought biscuits and sat on people’s desks to try and persuade them to meet their commitments. While the biscuits were positively received and the conversation continued to be cordial, we never captured the promise of those heady early days.
In the more virtual working world created post-pandemic, the biscuit approach isn’t as viable as it once was, and ghosting is an even easier option. Messages are much easier to ignore than people, no matter how pleading the tone. Excuses about access are simple to give and neatly shift the responsibility. It’s not me, it’s the permissions on the file you’ve shared or the uncontrollable nature of my inbox.
The damage in disappearing
While professional ghosting doesn’t create the same devastation as a doomed affair of the heart, it can still create feelings of hurt and sadness for what might have been.
It can even be career damaging, if you’re in a new workplace and colleagues not following through on their promises might look like a personal failure or a mistake on the part of the comms team. The coverage not secured, the souring of a previously harmonious interaction with a journalist or influencer, the time spent chasing which was stolen from other tasks and made you look less productive.
So log your interactions as evidence of what might have been but be prepared to cut your losses and continually line up plan B and plan C.
Victims of our own success
But as we’re all adults in the workplace, why does this behaviour get encountered by talented comms colleagues time and time again?
It might be because we’re too flipping personable and persuasive and coax the ‘yes, let’s make this happen’ in the first instance. Then when the workload begins to bite, focus understandably gets diverted onto something else that’s important.
Although it is a strategic function that can make a real difference to organisational goals, comms is often seen as a ‘nice -to-have’ and so when the going gets tough it gets ditched. And no one likes to be the bearer of bad news and do the dumping.
So this is where the ghosting comes in. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the term as, “the act or practice of abruptly cutting off all contact with someone (such as a former romantic partner) by no longer accepting or responding to phone calls, instant messages, etc.”
But not knowing what’s happened and why, whether it’s professional or personal, isn’t nice.
Ghostbusting
So, unless you’re a secret agent, or going under cover to save the world, please put on your grown-up shoes and tell us things have changed. We understand the need to pivot, in fact we pride ourselves on our ability to do it well.
In my current role supporting the programmes in NHS England’s transformation directorate understandably the demands of delivering complex national tech projects have to take precedence.
Let us down easy – you misunderstood the requirements of your role, you haven’t got capacity, it’s not you it’s me. Then we are free to move on and find an alternative plan of action like the creative professionals we are. There are always plenty more fish in the sea – and this includes the world of work.
Catherine Farrell is a communications manager for NHS England. You can say hello on Twitter at @catherinefarr18
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