Jun
2010
One voice?
Okay… I’m about to have a bit of a rant…I think there is a bit of a misconception among some comms practitioners around the term “consistency”.
I sometimes hear practitioners encourage their leadership to be more aligned or consistent. Even sometimes to speak with “one voice”… and to be honest when I hear that I cringe slightly.
After all we are not living in some kind of Orwellian dictatorship where it’s a ”thought-crime” for a leader to go “off message”…
I’m not knocking the use of messaging frameworks (here at H&K we have a tried and trusted methodology for them). I am certain that they have their place… as… well frameworks. They are guidance notes for the organisation – and indeed the individuals who use them – around what the compelling narrative around a particular issue, topic or strategy should be.
They should never be seen as verbatim scripts that our leaders read directly from… (you laugh – I’ve seen it done…).
We should encourage individual leaders and stakeholders to put things into their own words. After all we want them to put the message into some kind of context so that their colleagues see it as relevant and meaningful… Ultimately it’s the general thrust of the argument we want them to put across. And it’s going to sound much more authentic if they’re given the space to use words that they might actually use on an everyday basis!
Funnily enough this very topic came up when I met Dominic Walters who chairs the newly-coined Institute of Internal Communications last week. As you know I chair the CIPR Inside group and so it felt like a timely meeting.
We agreed that we had in many instances a shared agenda. And that some of our colleagues should meet to understand where our “red lines” of differentiation were.
More importantly we agreed that there needed to be plural voices arguing for our agenda.
As you can imagine I’m all for that…
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