Writing 1: the challenge to management

I was angry at first, then depressed, but now I’m back in the fight.

I had to research various company journals this week, looking for interviews with senior managers. I wanted to see what others had done, hoping for some inspiration. After an hour, I was angry. What marked these pieces out for special concern was their lack of original thinking, or, indeed, any discernible thinking at all. And woe to the cynic who says I was looking for originality in the wrong place.

The articles I read were of the most profound dullness – paragraph after paragraph of platitudes, comparative figures and pious hopes. I wondered how they had come to be published. The answer was that these pieces contained the thoughts of the Gods. They had spoken from on high. So they must be published. That, or something like it, seemed to be the reasoning.

Responsibility for these abominations lies in two places. Firstly it lies with editors. The question that should precede the commissioning or publishing of each and every article is: is this good enough to publish? Will this interest people? If the answer is ‘no’, it should not see the light of day.

This is true even of words written by the Chief Executive himself. He has no right to bore his readers, and not only because they may be his workforce. As a communicator it is your job to warn him that he may lose people, and urge him to say something that will be meaningful. You may be the only person in the organisation who can do this knowledgeably, and can back it up with cogent argument.

If you are afraid to do this you are in the wrong job. Editors are hired, inter alia, to warn, to see the problems and solve them. Just be ready to defend your point of view.

Articles like the offending pieces I read, are often the result of lazy briefings and result in what most in-house magazines and intranets are full of – words that no-one wants to read. “It’s time we did that article on the figures, I’ll send an e-mail to the finance man and tell him we need 1000 words.” Fundamentally this is an insult to the readers.

But though editorial laziness can be to blame, I reserve my chief anger for managers. That is, those managers who have still to learn that emitting sound is not the same as talking sense. The challenge for management is to say things that are worth listening to. Remember that no matter how good at alchemy your communications team is, they cannot produce gold from dross.

I have seen managements eventually grow resentful of their communications teams. They see them as a constant reminder of a higher purpose, and a constant reminder that that purpose has not yet been achieved. They are the triumphator’s slave. He who, riding with the victorious commander on a golden chariot through Rome to the adulation of the city, reminds him that he is only mortal.

It must get a bit irksome. But good communicators will be pushing management all the time.

But what do you think?

When I had finished researching these articles, the source of my complaint, I asked myself: When was the last piece of really imaginative reporting I had read in a company publication? When was the last piece of internal or external communication, read in a house journal or website, that had set me alight, or had changed my perception. When was the last time a Finance Director’s article stopped me in my tracks with its perspicacity or gave me furiously to think. When last was my intellect thoroughly engaged by reading an interview with the Chief Executive?

Is this too much to ask? Too much to hope for?

If your answer is no, and you are a communicator, please refer this article to your management and ask for their opinion.

If your answer is yes and you are a manager, then please consider your position, for these are the things that you are meant to be asking your communicators to help you do.

Are you?

© Roger Murphy 2008