Start building better relationships at work with these three easy steps
Does your organisation see you as a service provider or a strategic partner? If you regularly hear things like: ‘Can you write a media release for tomorrow,’ ‘We just need a brochure,’ or ‘Our report (that you’re just hearing about now) will be ready to launch next week,’ chances are you’re squarely in the service provider seat.
Don’t despair. You are certainly not alone.
Being brought into work at the last minute or not getting the opportunity to provide good communications advice are common challenges in our profession. The good news is that you can take steps to turn this around.
We are often hired for our communications skills rather than subject matter expertise. While we know that learning quickly is one of our essential skills, this might not be obvious to people who have spent years in the organisation or industry you are joining. That is why focusing on building strong relationships across our organisations is critical.
Strong relationships are at the heart of communications success. The better you know someone, the better you can understand what they do and in turn teach them more about what you do.
So, what are you doing to build strong relationships across your organisation? There are practical steps that you can start now that will pay off in the long term. Working with your team, think about how you can really get to know what your organisation does and the people who do it. Some initial ideas include:
Be a guest at their meetings - see if you can join the monthly/fortnightly/weekly meeting of key teams. Ideally you should be doing this with the teams that deliver the core work of your organisation. Once you’ve got an invite, use this as an opportunity to hear what they have coming up. Also brief them on what your team is working on.
See what your organisation is about first hand - whether it’s workshops, construction or scientific research that your organisation does, it’s important that you spend some time seeing it done. Take every opportunity you can to see this work being delivered.
Be a friendly face - If people know who you are they are more likely to talk to you about their work. Take every opportunity you can to be present and visible. This could include asking a question at an all staff forum, attending social events and saying hi to people in the kitchen, lift or hallway.
Requests for communications assistance on tight (often unrealistic!) timeframes or materials that aren’t the right solution can also arise because of misplaced assumptions. Our non-comms colleagues may assume that something that worked last time will work again or that you only need a day or two to pull together a media release for a report that has taken others months to compile.
It’s important to remember that assumptions can go both ways. They might not know that you are responsible for supporting multiple areas of your organisation and have a busy workload or that you must get approvals from busy people before any materials can be released. What don’t they know about your role that might make things easier in the future?