Blind as a Bat

My very good friend Linda has recently undergone eye surgery on both of her eyes. The first surgery went fairly smoothly and within a day or so she was pretty functional. The second surgery was yesterday and she's having a bit tougher time bouncing back as she can't open the 'good eye' and the 'newly fixed eye' is under a patch. She's managing okay but while visiting her yesterday and making sure she had everything she needed at hand while she took it easy in bed, I got to thinking about the value of our sight as communicators. Maybe not as big of a deal as it once was, for sure. But I can't imagine how hard it would be to adjust.

It's the joy of being able to sit down and read print on paper of a good book, or skim through the newspaper or scan web pages that I would miss. I don't like noise and I tend to block it out quickly so if I was forced to listen to an audio book, I think my mind would block it out as white noise and I'd start thinking about something else. Or possibly I could listen, and sure I might get the story, but oh, how I would miss the joy of reading it. I love to watch my cooking shows, not for the dialogue, but to see the beauty of the ingredients and foods they create.

I am very thankful that Linda was able to get the surgery required to correct her vision. She's way more tuned in to technology than even I am, and she's comfortable listening to an audio book - which is what she's been doing for the past couple of weeks since her first eye surgery. But she, too, is an avid reader and I think, like me, she would greatly miss the viceral joy of holding a book and reading quietly.

So while technology has come a long way in making life much easier - or at least more accesssible - for the blind - I am very thankful to have my sight and plan on using it to its max every day for many years to come!

"Because I Have A Voice"

The title of this post are the words of King George VI as told in the movie "The King's Speech." It's a wonderful movie and one I highly recommend, especially to communications professionals.

It's easy to forget that communications does not come naturally to everyone. When we live and breath it as part of our daily work, we an easily take it for granted. In this movie, Colin Firth had me sitting forward, gripping the arms of my theatre seat and almost gasping for air as he struggled, in his portrayal of King George VI, to utter a few simple phrases. The affliction was worse depending on who and how many people he was addressing.

It's heart wrenching to realize how many people really struggle, every day of their lives, to have their voice heard. A voice can mean a lot of different things too - it can mean the straightforward act of speaking, or it an mean the plight of a minority group trying to be heard by the masses. It can be a child who doesn't get attention or love, despite all the toys and clothes heaped on it. A voice can be a stand against abuse or neglect. We all have a voice - but are we able to make it heard?

The movie "The King's Speech" touched me on so many levels, certainly as a communicator who helps others get their voice heard, but also as the daughter and friend of women who have died of cancer, and as the witness of bullying in the workplace. It touched me as the ex-wife of an alcoholic, and as the aunt of a beautiful, intelligent teenager.

Because I have a voice, I share my knowledge and experience here on this blog, and in my work and personal life. I encourage you to let your voice be heard too.

The Comparable Value of Life Experience

As a veteran communications professional, I've had responsibility to hire junior communicators during my career. One question that comes up regularly is whether a university degree adds to an applicant's qualifications. On the surface, the answer would be yes. But what if an other applicant, with no university degree, has other valuable skills or assets? How should those be judged when narrowing your selection?

For myself - I feel I have something better than a university degree from 25+ years ago. When I graduated from high school, I went to Europe for a year as an exchange student in Sweden. While most of my friends were partying it up through their first year of university, I was learning an entirely new culture, new language and independence that has stayed with me ever since. While my high school friends spent the second through fourth years of university catching up on grades so that they could graduate, I had joined the Canadian Armed Forces and was learning about team work - something you cannot survive basic training without - and self-discipline. During my three and a half years in the military, I learned about national pride, international awareness, structure, and of course communications in the most literal sense of the word as I was a telecommunications operator.

I don't discount for a second the value of a university degree. I would like to have one. But I would want it in addition, not instead of, my life experience and a double diploma from a well known and highly regarded technical college and I have taken a lot of university courses as a part time student. However, I also have something way more valuable than a degree. I have accreditation from the International Association of Business Communicators. Like the shoemaker's children, communicators seem not to be all that great at communicating how truly valuable an ABC (accredited business communicator) title is. I'm here to tell you how valuable it is.

First of all - you need to have a minimum of nine years hands on, full-time experience working in the communicatons/public relations field before you can even begin the accreditation process. Once you have that, you are required to submit a portfolio of your work with full and detailed case studies demonstrating what your role was in the work, what the objectives were, what was achieved and how you evaluated it. That is a lot of work - and that portfolio is then judged by top international communicators. Only if you pass this first test do you go on to the written and oral exams which are also marked by top international communicators. Achieving your ABC means you have met stringent international standards in the communications field. As a CEO, would you rather have on your senior management team - someone who earned their bachelor of arts degree in the 1980's or someone who has achieved international communications accreditation?

In the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins, one company is lauded for its stance on education. "Nucor illustrates a key point. In determining 'the right people,' the good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience. Not that specific knowledge or skills are unimportant, but they viewed these traits as more teachable or at least learnable, whereas they believed dimensions like character, work ethic, basic intelligence, dedication to fulfilling commitments, and values are ingrained."

I love that I have the life experience, from military to travel to education to work, that I do have. I grew up in a house where my dad would get up at 2 in the morning and uncomplainingly go out in a blizzard or terrible rain storm to fix a downed telephone line. I grew up in a house where being frugal was not a fad, it was how we survived. I grew up in a house where my mom made sure we ate breakfast and made us lunch before she went to work for minimum wage and tips at the curling rink restaurant most evenings. I love the work ethic and life experience I have come to call my own. How lucky I feel to be who I am.

The Christmas Card Debate

There is a debate raging right now in offices across the country. It's an annual debate and one that started about 15 years ago with the increased use of electronic communications. Should we or shouldn't we send out Christmas cards (the secondary debate is should we or shouldn't we call them Season's Greetings cards).

I am going to start sounding like a broken record but in this case, that's a good thing. I'm being consistent. Whether or not your company sends out Christmas cards in the mail depends on what your brand is all about. When you have a solidly defined brand, a lot of the questions become much easier to answer in areas such as communications, marketing, human resource management and so on.

For example, when I was at St. Boniface Hospital Foundation, we had established that our brand was first and foremost about compassion. Everything the hospital, research and foundation stood for was in support of human compassion for those who were ill or were family or friends of the ill person. So as much as I personally don't like to send or receive Christmas cards, it made a lot of sense that as a Foundation we should send out Christmas cards to our biggest supporters - both donors, volunteers and suppliers.

Back it up a few years to when I was at Agricore United where we had established our brand was integrity. Everything we did was done with integrity - how we interacted with our farmer customers, how we interacted with government, with competitors, with suppliers - had to be done with integrity, adhering to moral and ethical principles. Among those ethical principles was a commitment to controlling costs. There was little advantage for us as a corporation to send out copious amounts of Christmas cards. It was contrary to our brand. However, sending out a handful of personal greetings to key customers and supporters from individual officers of the company did make sense. Did it have to be cards? Not necessarily - many of those greetings were made by phone which is more personal.

The debate on whether to send or not to send Christmas cards is going to carry on for years to come and now there is an added wrinkle in the mix -- the option to send an e-card. I suggest that you think about how you feel when you get an e-card from someone you regularly do business with before deciding if you want to send one out to your regular customers and suppliers. It may be more cost effective, but does it have the personal touch you are intending in the first place when deciding to send out cards?

If, after reading this entire blog, you are still unsure what your company should do I have one final suggestion for your Christmas card dilemma. Calculate the cost of printing and mailing the cards, add in the time required for your staff to sign, address and stamp the cards. Take that entire total and make a donation to a cause that is closely aligned with your organization's mission. Then add a post script line to automatically come up on every email going out from your company throughout the month of December that says something like: "To honour our clients, suppliers and supporters, ABC Company has made a donation to DEF Charity this holiday season. Thank you for your continued support."

Don't forget to put the same message on your website - front and centre - with a small explanation of why you chose to go this route, including some information on the charity and its mandate. You can also provide a comment box so that visitors to your site can let you know what they think of this idea - evaluation is the key to quality future planning.

In a Crisis

Anybody who thinks sitting down and banging out a crisis communications plan on their computer is the end of that project has a lot to learn. Mostly because a crisis communications plan (CCP) is a living document and it is never at an end.

Well, arguably once you have to implement a CCP full scale you might consider it to have reached an end, but that just means you have all that real life experience with which to start a new CCP.

My experience with CCPs is quite extensive, having worked in two industries that face very serious, dangerous situations daily (forestry and agriculture) and another two industries that face very serious, reputation damaging situations daily (insurance and finance). Different types of crisis, but often the same type of response. And that response starts long, long before the crisis.

This is where having a truly strong brand in place makes a world of difference. If you have built a brand that includes a strong commitment to the community and social responsibility, based on actions not just words, it becomes much easier to manage public opinion in a crisis. And if, while building that strong brand, you have also built a solid relationship with the media based on the basics of media relations you'll find in another post on my blog, you're in a good position to call upon them to help you get out your message when in a crisis.

The thing with crisis is that you never know exactly what is going to be thrown at you - but if you and your colleagues on the crisis response team have done your homework - you have a pretty good guess. Preparation and planning involves a lot of 'what if' scenarios and research. The best crisis response team that I have been a part of was led by Mike Maida, a member of Agricore United's Risk Assessment Department. He was relentless (in a very good way) in making sure we had examined every possible crisis and disaster that we could face. It was great leg work and when we had a collision of an anhydrous ammonia truck with a civilian vehicle, we knew what to do. Everybody knew what their role was and who to call. It was a horrible situation that was made just a little bit less horrible by a quick and compassionate response from the company.

Most CCPs are designed for a massive disaster, such as an earthquake or explosion at your headquarters. It's a good way to think worst case scenario, whereby your entire plan would have to be implemented. In reality, though, most crisis are going to be a bit smaller in scale and will call upon only a portion of the entire plan. And taking it one step further, you could spend a lot of time drafting that plan, meeting with your crisis response team regularly to make sure it is current and understood, and never have to use it. That would be the ideal situation.

Brand Consistency

It takes a lot of work to establish a brand - both with your employees and the public. However, it can take very little to undermine it. One of the easiest, quickest ways to undermine your brand is to show inconsistency in what you are delivering to your audience.

Some people find it hard to understand why this is so important - why is something like always using the same font, for example, necessary? These are the same people who will unwittingly erode your brand by making little changes to suit their personal tastes. That's bad news.

A good example of this is a former colleague who was responsible for sending invitations to various stakeholders. The invitations were to brunches, lunches and special events. To ensure consistency of the brand, I had templates created for a variety of documents, including an invitation template. The template included the correct logo, approved corporate colours and the approved, single font in the body. It was easy enough to use: simply place your cursor on the area that needed updated (ie. date, location) and fill in the new information. The font stayed the same.

For this former colleague, however, invitations represented a chance for her to stretch her creative muscles. On one invitation she had sent out, prior to the template creation, she used five different fonts, a variety of colours and clip art. Not a very professional representation of the organization.

Even with the invitation template, this person, like some you will work with, still needed to have it explained why she couldn't use more than one font on an invitation. She really wanted to use a variety of fonts and script types to 'dress up' the invitation. She needed to understand that consistency, even in use of font, helps to show that the organization you work for is also consistent. Being consitent is a very good attribute for any company - so long as you are consistently good at what you do. Being consistent removes the guess work for your audiences -they learn what to expect from you and grow to appreciate and demand that consistency.

Whether it is using the same font, the same layout, the same logo, greeting with the same positive attitude and smile or serving the same delicious food or drink, a consistent brand is a winning brand.

Branding - So Much More Than a Logo

One of the main challenges of working in communications is helping an organization to identify what its brand is and then reinforcing that brand over and over again. For too many people a brand is easily dismissed as being the logo or colors - that is the visual identity of a company, not its brand.

Brand at its purest is an organization's "personality". It doesn't start with how you want to be seen - it starts with how you are already being seen. What is the impression people have when they think of "ABC Company"? Do they have a feeling of delight, warmth, compassion or is it more likely to be a feeling of antipathy, fear, distaste? And who wants to give that second impression to their customers unless you're the Mob?

The best way to determine what your brand is at this given time is to do a lot of research - ask your customers, your employees, your suppliers. Everyone has a different relationship with your company so will have slightly different viewpoints. Once you know what people already feel about your company, determine from that what you want to keep (reinforce) and what you want to toss (regroup).

Building a brand to be what you want takes a lot of work and very little of it actually comes from the communications department. Certainly all the materials prepared by communicators must have the tone and message that you want to reinforce. However, building the brand starts with your people - how does your receptionist greet guests, customers, suppliers? How do your people act at meetings? How do your people treat suppliers? Who are your ambassadors and what are they saying about your company? If you can get to the point where your customers are your ambassadors, recommending you because you represent exactly what they want in the type of service you provide, you have achieved brand nirvana.

If people on your team can't accept the brand that you want your company to represent - then they aren't going to be very good at living and breathing that brand. But before deciding that it is time for them to move on, be fair and give them a chance to really understand what your brand is - what is that feeling you want your customers to have when they think of your company? If your people still can't grasp that, then it is time for them to move on while you build your team with the right people with the right attitude.

It's not unusual to want to be a brand that makes people feel really good and positive feelings - but not every type of service or product is going to instil those kind of feelings. The important thing in identifying what your brand is, is to first be very honest with yourself about what you provide, and what is possible. Then dream. Then build. Then achieve. Branding is so much more than a logo, isn't it?