What makes a great internal communications manager or officer?

1. You must understand your organisation’s strategy and goals. In fact, you should try to understand them better than most managers. Once you do, you’ll be able to write communication material in a way that links to the strategy and goals. Your MD will love you forever!

2. Understand how people can contribute to the company’s success. It’s not enough to know the strategy. Get a clear idea of how people can contribute too. If generating new sales is the no. 1 issue, then reflect that in your communications.

3. Get to know the MD. Ask him or her what s/he sees as the biggest problem in the organisation. Then come up with a communications plan to help solve it.

Top tip: Ask the MD if you can attend executive meetings to observe, so you can further boost your knowledge of strategy and goals. Make it clear that you need this knowledge to do your job properly and that you’ll adhere to strict confidentiality standards.

4. Get to know the senior team. They are busy people, but still make the effort to get to know the top people. You should have ‘official’ opportunities such as attending meetings, but also ‘unofficial’  ones, including those two-minutes chats at the coffee machine.

5. Get to know the sales team. If your organisation has a sales team, get to know the key figures. Find out what their issues are and see how your internal communications work can help.

6. Act as a link between departments. To turn yourself from a communicator to someone who actually contributes to positive change, make the most of the ‘company wide’ knowledge that your role gives you.

Here’s a quick example:

The problem is that the sales people in the field don’t always get consistent answers to technical problems from the help desk.

Your solution could be to report this back to the help desk manager and offer to run a session where two salespeople explain the issue and work out a solution with the support staff.

That might not sound like a typical internal communications officer’s job. But shouldn’t the internal communications function be about making things better, rather than merely reporting what everyone else is doing?

7. Build even wider networks. Get to know people in every department, at all levels. If you do this you will never wonder what you should be communicating, because you’ll always know what’s going on ‘out there’ in the organisation. Also, keep in touch with the marketing and PR people because internal messages need to take external messages into account, and vice versa.

8. Get onto company projects. One of the best things I ever did when I worked in internal communications departments was to get involved in other projects. I learned a lot about other parts of the company, got to know more people, and saw new opportunities for valuable internal communications work.

9. Learn marketing techniques. As you will see in another article in the tips section on this website, internal communications is essentially a marketing activity. Educate yourself about good marketing techniques.

10. Work on your skills. As an internal communications expert, you need to use a wide range of skills and behaviours to perform well. Here are some of them. Which of these to you need to brush up on?

·         Interviewing, writing and editing.

·         Diplomacy, networking, presenting and event management.

·         Project planning and management.

·         Photography and sourcing new stories.

And of course time management . . .

 . . . because if you are doing your job well then more people every day will ask you to help get their message across your organisation.

For more free advice and inspiration . . .

Use the form on our contact page to request your free information sheet with two more articles:

·         An easy-to-use seven stage communication process.

·         How to create effective feedback systems.

NOTE: I operate a careful privacy policy. I will never sell or rent your email address or other contact details to anyone else. You will never get mail from other organisations as a result of requesting free information sheets. You might receive additional information from us from time to time, but this won't happen often and you will be able to ask that we stop sending you emails at any time. In short, I hate spam and I will never send any.
Richard Groom, Owner & Senior Writer    

Tips menu page

Main internal communications page

Ó Sally Newman & Richard Groom 2003