Black Belt Dojo

Taxing times

It's been an interesting few days in the UK - the saga of the missing tax data rumbles on although the media seem to have gone quiet for a few days...

If you've missed it - the brief story is that a junior official at the UK Tax authority sent a couple of CD's containing personal and banking data of 25 million people to another government aganecy through an internal post system. 

And the discs got lost. 

And the data wasn't encrypted. 

And now we're all meant to be panicing that some master criminal is hacking into our bank accounts right now...

Now, the thing that interests me is that politicians have to find a way of pinning the balme for this seemingly simple error on the most senior politicians in the government. 

You could just point out that its all bad luck.  It all happened because a junior member of staff was trying to cut some corners to get the job done.  And the six other discs that have got lost in the recent past?  Well I bet few organisations of the size of the UK tax people can claim that they don't loose stuff either.

Yet politicians have to find a way of connecting the bloke in the post-room in Newcastle with the minister in charge of the department.  If you can put a smoking address label in the hands of the Prime Minister himself - even better.

The circumstantial case is looking quite good.  Morale at the department has fallen a little and the trade union hasn't been slow when it comes to fingerpointing.  A massive change program which includes job losses and new working practice is always going to throw up people making the connection between what could be a simple slip-up and the pressure to reform the organisation.

However, there is a point here.  Even if the political name-calling doesn't generate much insight it is worth asking a few questions about whether you can have such a thing as  "systemic failures" or "institutional incompetence".  In recent years allegations of deepseated problems have been pointed at organisations as diverse as BP, the Metropolitan Police Service and Cadbury's chocolate. 

Is there very much that internal communcators can do?

You'd probably say that we should provide a conduit for listening to the complaints and concerns of employees.  And I can certainly think of one situation where a focus group I ran once predicted with frightening accuracy a disaster that came to pass 10 years later.

But, if we're honest - how realistic is it that we'd make a difference?  If Senior Management are ignoring the feedback through normal channels or have created a climate where people won't speak out - do we honestly think IC would make the difference?.  Then there is the issue of how you judge when feedback is important insight or just the natural noise that a change programme will generate.

There's a role in making sure people internally are reassured (always hard when politicians are desperately trying to make local leaders the scapegoats at any cost).  And that's about it apart for helping the organisation return to business as ususal as soon as possible.

Yet - you can bet we'll be one of the parties that is blamed if it all goes wrong.

So that all makes me wonder.  PR teams have been running scenario planning for years to sharpen up their crisis plans.  I wonder if IC people should invest a bit of time now and again to think through how they would handle a crisis - how they might predict it and how they might advise senior leaders to cope with it...and how they define their role in preventing

Liam

Measurement or spying?

I've just seen this story on the BBC about how the UK post office has been condemned for carrying out a spot of communication measurement.

Am I jet-lagged and fuzzy-headed, or is it a bit of an over-reaction to describe using mystery shoppers to check whether customers are getting accurate information about why their local post office is closing as "spying", "sick", and like using "the tactics of the secret police to demand Maoist conformity to their line"? 

All the more so that it's coming from a political party who, I'm sure, would never do anything as terrible as - shock, horror - media training their politicians to use consistent key messages.

Am I missing the point here?

Sue

Look who's talking!

So, it's not true then. Apparently scientists have found we females don't chatter away madly and men are not strong silent types after all. We all talk as much as each other. (Strange, the things scientists spend their time on.)

According to Relate, the marriage guidance people (who now appear to be called 'relationship specialists'), what's more important is whether people are introverts or extroverts. Introverts get much of their energy from their internal world, so they're happy to think things through to themselves. Extroverts get their energy from other people, so they talk more.

Classic quote from Relate's Paula Hall in this BBC article, who says the problem isn't how much people talk, it's how much people listen:

"If women listened more we might find men talked more than we thought, and if men listened more they might find that women actually don't talk rubbish all the time. Some of what we say is actually valuable."

How about a study on which of the sexes listen more then? Now THAT would be interesting!!

London 2012 - should we laugh or cry?

I have to smile at all the coverage about London's 2012 Olympic logo. The Metro has broken up all the shapes and made its own pictures out of them. I'm told some TV programme yesterday had viewers sending in their own logos.  According to the BBC, 17,000 people have signed an on line petition to get it scrapped.

Having an aversion to most things sport-related (although I've recently discovered the delights of hanging out with the village cricket team on the odd sunny Saturday afternoon with a glass of pimms in my hand) I can't get too worked up about the logo, but I do wonder about a different question.

On the one hand the powers that be are being hung out to try for throwing £400,000 at a logo everyone (allegedly) hates. Not helped, I have to say, by making the usual kind of lofty and vaguely ridiculous-sounding statements that often get trotted out with new brands and values (no wonder visions & values are such loaded terms, and have to agree with the guys at Open to Everyone that it doesn't exactly cover the comms & marketing industry in glory).

But on the other hand, everyone's talking about it. Loads of media coverage, blog posts and commentary galore, people going to the trouble of signing petitions and designing their own logos. Even total non-sporty-person me is actually writing about the Olympic games! Shock! Horror!

So is the whole 2012 thing instantly off to a horrendous start, with reputations damaged and an agency never about to work again ... or should we be celebrating the fact that people are getting involved and having conversations? Is no publicity bad publicity?

What do you think?

Sue

People power

Just seen this story on Digital Spy reporting that Orange has rejected plans to sponsor the next series of Big Brother after staff objected.  They apparently told the Independent newspaper:

"We asked our staff what they thought about sponsoring Big Brother as we like to get them involved in the decisions their company makes. In this case, the majority of our staff felt that we shouldn't sponsor Big Brother. Having taken this into consideration and having evaluated it further with our sponsorship team, we have declined this opportunity."

I think there's a lot of talking goes on about consultation and involvement but there's often a lot of lip service paid too, so good to see them doing this and making the statement publicly as well.

That's all from me for now. Am in Lisbon, have finished for the day and the sun's still shining!

Sue

PS Have discovered a regular Dojo reader at the conference today who up to now hasn't psyched herself up to commenting yet. Come on, give it a go - you know who you are ...!

Honesty: not the best policy?

In last week's edition of PR Week an audience of PR professionals and students voted against a motion that 'PR has a duty to tell the truth.'

Leading the debate against the motion was the infamous Max Clifford. Memorable quotes: "I've been telling lies on behalf of people, businessmen, politicians and countries for 40 years." "All PROs at all levels lie through their teeth." "PR is about getting the right results for the client.  I get results, but they are sometimes based on lies."

Ouch. I can imagine Max Clifford saying those things. But I found it incredibly depressing that so many PR people in a room agreed with him. No wonder Edelman's Trust Barometer Survey shows the most credible spokesperson for information about a company is 'someone like me' at 53%. The CEO comes in at 32%. A PR person, 15%. As Simon Cohen, founder of ethical PR agency Global Tolerance said in PR Week, "It's bad PR to say you're in PR now."

Internal comms - tarred with the same brush?

Fair enough, we like to think the PR and internal comms worlds are different, but I don't think we can kid ourselves that we're seen as whiter than white. Once upon a time we were immediately seen as the independent ones that would listen with an open mind to both senior leaders and the front line, and help build the relationship between the two. Someone once said to me "Internal comms people are a bit like priests. I trust you enough to tell you anything."

How times have changed. Yes, thanks to carefully-developed relationships and personal integrity, you can still be seen as a trusted independent. But it no longer comes with the territory. As far as a lot of people are concerned, we're just internal spin doctors. I'm routinely asked to 'put a positive spin' on things. (But only once. After that people learn to avoid my best glare and a mini lecture.) In a manager training workshop last week, when I'd run out of time to convince someone why answer A was better than answer B, I resorted to "trust me - I'm a comms person". He looked politely but pointedly back and said "That is one very good reason NOT to trust you."

What are we here for?

I guess it comes down to your definition of what your job is all about. I've always liked the CIPR's description of public relations as being about building mutual understanding and relationships between groups. Building understanding of the strategy so that people can translate it into individual actions. Building human relationships and getting dialogue going so that groups actually work together instead of against each other (easier said than done).

But Lee Hopkins reports in his blog an argument by Ragan's David Murray that we've forgotten how to be mediators and facilitators and become instead 'the official (and unrespected) mouthpiece of management, complete with a toolbox of management jargon and rhetoric'.

Is he right? Is that what we're really up to? Is it what people perceive we're up to even if we're not? And if the answer to any of those questions is 'yes', what should we be doing about it if we don't want to be seen as the Max Cliffords of our organisations?

Sue

 

 

Reputation (mis) management

Last week my local council wrote to ask whether I thought a local authority merger should go ahead. I don't understand much about it, but as they'd taken the trouble to consult me, I put the letter on one side to read up about it and send in my views

I found out this evening that my parents did the same. But they've now put the letter in the bin, after Shropshire County Council's head of communications made the news for e-mailing colleagues telling them how to navigate the technology to be able to place multiple votes in a BBC on line pole on the same subject, to help sway the vote in the Council's preferred direction.  My parents have taken it as a signal that the Council really isn't interested in their views and the whole consultation is just a PR exercise. 

Helpfully, the head of comms has said:

"I have actually got quite a lot of feedback from people internally about this who feel quite rightly that it doesn't sit very happily with our core values about being open and honest in terms of the way we communicate"

Quite.

It's now the lead story on our BBC local news site. I'd say Shropshire county council's consultation exercise has definitely done a fair bit to influence their reputation.  Just not quite in the way they might have intended.  It's a good example of how a consultation or survey exercise done well, with the right intention behind it, can pay dividends. And done badly or with any intention of manipulating results or pulling the wool over people's eyes, it can well and truly backfire.

Sue

give it a rest!

So ... is anyone actually managing to get a break over the festive season? Do businesses slow down anymore?

I've just said thanks but no thanks to some M&A work. I spent between last Christmas and new year waiting for the Ofcom decision on the ntl/Telewest merger, in between trying to unpack boxes in my new house. It finally came through on the afternoon of Friday 30th December - just when I'd decided it was probably safe to leave the house for an hour. Cue flurry of calls on the mobile saying "Sue! Quick! Where are you?!". 

This year I'm having a break.

A quick look on BBC Business on line reveals NASDAQ making a hostile takeover bid for the London Stock Exchange, the Bank of America 'eyeing Barclays', and two steel firms doing battle over who gets their mitts on Corus. Sounds like some of our comms colleagues will be having a busy old time over Christmas, and a fair few employees will be feeling a bit uncertain about what the new year will bring.

I remember when people used to bring games in on the last working day before Christmas and slope off down the pub at lunchtime, never to return til New Year. Oh for the good old days ...

Sue

PS  Now he's safely installed 'down under', Alex Manchester has started an Oz blog! It's an entertaining, non-work related read. And at least the posts about nasty poisonous things will keep you from getting depressed about the ones about glorious sunshine and barbies on the beach ...