
44’s Alan Coates explores how his 12 years as a communicator has been good training for his first few weeks of being a dad and shares his new parent’s guide to internal communications.
So, you’re in a new role and you’re excited. Sleep doesn’t come easily. You’re learning what goes into talking the talk and walking the walk – even if it starts off as a crawl. Everything is new. Everything is scary. And yet you want to do everything you can to not let anybody down or start anybody screaming.
OK, so the last one is hopefully not a common new baby/new job parallel – but there are plenty of things to think about when you start your new role as any kind of communicator: whether your audience is internal, digital, or stakeholder.
What I’ve put together below are the resources I turn to when I feel like I want to lean on something robust, trusted, and reliable – a mini guide to internal communications that helps inform the decisions I make every day.
The MacLeod and Clarke Report – Basic anatomy
It might sound a bit dry starting the list off with a government-backed report from 2008 – but if you’re in the communications industry, this is a real touchstone of insight.
Penned by David MacLeod and Nita Clarke, the Engaging for Success report highlights four key enablers of success: Leadership, Engaging Managers, Voice and Integrity.
As true now as when it was written, it’s a must read to give you the basic anatomy of internal communications.
How to Win Friends and Influence People – Learning to talk
It is perhaps significant that when I started to progress in my career, one Christmas I received two copies of this book: one from a trusted colleague and one from my dad. It felt important to read it.
Dale Carnegie’s 1936 book is more than timeless, it was ahead of its time. Rather than focusing on top-down management pressures and reward/punishment, it explored the importance of honesty, patience, engagement and learning how to listen.
If you want to communicate in the best possible way, Dale’s principles should be on your bookshelf, stuck onto your noticeboard, and in the forefront of your mind.
The Elements of Style – First day of school
As a communicator you are an editor. You may not have a red pen. You may not do much writing. But you are an editor of other people’s work, which then goes out into the world of work with your signature on the bottom. This is where the classic volume from William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White comes in.
How to make the paragraph the unit of composition. How to put statements in the positive form. How to avoid loose sentences. How to deal with tense, emphatic word placement, and how to omit needless words. It’s all there and will help you edit the work you receive and give you the language you need to feedback constructively.
I guarantee that if you put a copy of The Elements of Style on your bookshelf that you’ll reach for it far more often than the dictionary or the thesaurus.
Making the Connections – Learning to draw
Bill Quirke has penned a couple of seminal volumes. Communicating Corporate Change is one, but I prefer the second, Making the Connections, as I find it a bit more universal.
If you’ve attended an IC seminar or conference, you’ll have likely heard Bill’s name and work referenced, and it’s time you found out why.
Learning to draw the connections between strategy and operational action; using engagement to lead that change and raising the role and importance of internal communications itself within the business are all shapes and colours you need to know.
But what do you think of our guide to internal communications?
In preparation for being a new dad I’ve come to realise even more acutely that there’s not one way to approach it. To continue my metaphor, the same obviously goes for how you approach your new role as an internal communicator.
So, what are the resources you use? What are the touchstones that you keep coming back to? How do you turn every day into a new opportunity to grow? Get in touch and let us know…
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