Building Strategic Alliances Within the Organization
By David Dozier, Ph.D., professor of public relations, San Diego State University
Excellence in public relations and communication management was the focus of a 10-year, three-nation (Canada, United Kingdom and the United States) study sponsored by the IABC Research Foundation. The study began with a dozen employees, ranging from janitor to CEO in 321 organizations completing an extremely detailed questionnaire. That was followed by interviews with employees in some of both the best and the worst organizations, asking them to explain their course of action.
The goals of the study were to understand:
* What makes for excellence in communication, and
* How does communication affect the bottom line
Organizational cultures can be categorized as a) authoritarian, with centralized power and control; b) participatory, encouraging shared goals and consensus, and welcoming the contributions of women; and c) transitional from "a" to "b."
Although participatory environments foster communication excellence, transitional settings currently have the best "managerially intense" communication.
IABC Research Foundation findings affirm the observations of others:
1. Organizations where senior managers expect technical communication professionals to provide strategic insight (environmental scanning, issues management) in addition to their technical functions have the most effective and excellent communication. Senior managers who expect only traditional technical support evoke a less-than-excellent communication function.
2. A public relations "excellence core" is knowledge. Exploit the complementary strengths of your team. Public relations and communication must be able to answer the "what if" question and establish expertise in the eyes of management.
3. A frequent response to the question "What made you into an excellent department?" was to cite a crisis in which public relations stepped in, built strategic alliances (inside and outside the organization), and showed its usefulness. Afterwards, public relations representatives were included in weekly top-management briefings. This is in line with a positive "demand-delivery" loop: The more public relations met a higher-up's needs, the greater the demands on public relations, and the greater the resources made available for public relations.
4. Research is another "excellence core." Use polls, surveys, customer and focus group responses to predict the behavioral consequences of outside events and proposed organizational moves. Become known as "the eyes and ears" of the company.
5. Reposition communication to attain and deliver excellence. Develop and use media relationships. Reframing problems helps identify new resources, solutions and image.
Note: Public relations practitioners have changed from 25 percent female in the 1960s to 60 percent female in the mid-1990s. Those firms with mentoring programs, management training programs, flextime and child care were both good for women and possessors of good public relations departments.
[Reprinted from proceedings from the 2nd Annual Symposium on Strategic Communication Management, sponsored by the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University, Calif.]
