All posts by Sebastian

Hand to mouth

Talking to your employees

Do you remember when you were at school, sitting in assembly, and if you wanted to surreptitiously chat to your friend next to you, you’d cover your mouth with your hand while you spoke? That way of course the teacher wouldn’t be able to see it was you speaking – and it was as effective as the child playing hide and seek who covers their eyes and thinks they can’t be seen.

I was in a meeting the other day and I realised that I had discovered the adult version of the hand-in-front-of-mouth ruse. It’s the Blackberry under the table ruse: “If I hold my BB down beneath table top level, no one will know I’m looking at my emails.”

I’m sorry, everyone knows you’re looking at your emails, you may as well have hoisted a flag and sent out a press release to the other meeting participants – actually, just send them an email, because they’re probably looking at their BB’s too.

Trusting your instincts

Communicating in a crisis, Talking to your customers, Talking to your employees

A good take on the Murdoch phone hacking saga today in the Guardian http://bit.ly/oTq5Zp. Deborah Orr discusses the ‘working towards the Führer’ analogy put forward by historian Ian Kershaw, where basically Hitler’s advisers would implement policy according to what they thought were Hitler’s wishes – a sort of please him at all cost approach even if the overall circumstances favoured a different tack.

It is an extreme comparison of course, as Orr says, but how far did/does this type of culture seep through the News Corp culture?

For the communications team in a corporate environment, the Chairman/CEO are big stakeholders in what goes out and, rightly so, often have a big influence in those communications. The dilemma however is when communication is shaped against the better judgement of the comms team because they know what their Chairman/CEO is expecting to see.

Managing that interaction is difficult, but for a comms manager, not losing sight of the bigger picture and trusting your comms instincts should override any other consideration.

Taming your untamed CEO

Working with the media

I read a good piece on the BBC website the other day profiling FT journalist Lucy Kellaway’s research into the seven deadly CEO sins.

So, how many of these does your CEO display?

  • control freak
  • vain
  • ditherers
  • bad at listening
  • bullies
  • afraid of conflict
  • no good at small talk.

The bad news of course, for most in house PR professionals, is how you deal with that many headed hydra when shaping your external communications?

Give as good as they get
This is precisely when a good external media trainer (preferably an ex or current working journalist) can come into their own and there aren’t many grizzled old hacks who won’t be afraid to give as good as they get. But make sure you get them in for a decent session – with half a day you can make real progress.

The chief exec will say he/she doesn’t need media training (vain), will keep putting it off (dithers), will be uncomfortable at dancing to someone else’s tune (control freak), and will no doubt try and talk you out of it (bullies).

Keep trying though – remember, your CEO doesn’t like conflict.