Communication Studies

When It Comes To Communications, Here Are Six Key Things I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Then.

By Thomas J. Roach

Many of us who find ourselves in communication jobs have never studied communication. English and journalism courses were as close as I got. Then six years out of college I became a director of corporate internal communication, and a wrinkly old guy from the accounting department gave me a book on communication theory. I felt like I was being handed a treasure map.

I never finished reading that dense book, but it told me that there was more to communication than grammar, inverted pyramid and speech outlines. Two years later I was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in communication studies at Northwestern University, which lead to a career of public relations consulting and teaching.

So, what do I know now that I didn’t know when I was handed the book?

Communication is Tricky
We all have a lifetime of experience as communicators and our intuitive understanding of the subject is immeasurable. Most of the time, that’s all we need. However, sometimes our intuition is wrong. For those of you who earned your communication jobs, like I did initially, in the school of hard knocks, here are six key things I know now that I didn’t know then.

  1. Never lie or mislead someone. Nothing is more important than integrity. Communication has no value if the source can’t be trusted. Communication careers are full of temptations, but no one can pay you enough to make it worthwhile to lie. Most of us know this already, but research confirms it absolutely.
  2. Communication is not a single act; it is a process. We tend to expect communication media to inject opinions into people’s heads, but ideas penetrate the public slowly. Publishing and broadcasting is easy, getting people’s attention is hard. If the public hears the message, they need to think about it and discuss it for it to have meaning. Then it usually needs to be mediated again. Then more discussion is required. This process can be repeated for days or years before a consensus is reached. When the public seems to respond immediately to a message, it is probably because they agreed with it already.
  3. Speeches, editorials and letters from the CEO don’t drive public opinion; peer groups do. Communication should be the third step in a four-step process that starts with researching your audience, is followed by planning, and ends with an evaluation step. We need to listen to our public groups before we communicate so we understand their values and vocabulary, then speak to them on common ground using words they understand, and research again when we are done to see if we resonated with peer group dialogue.
  4. Telling people what to do is the least effective way of getting things done. Top-down authoritative management is the biggest problem in business today. The closer the decision-making is the customer, the better the results. Whenever possible, good managers set goals, facilitate and monitor and let work groups manage themselves.
  5. Shareholders and customers are only two of four categorical public groups. Granted they are the most important, but we manage them by managing our relationship with the general public and our employees. Reputation with your community carries over to reputation with shareholders and customers, and well-informed, highly motivated employees provide quality products and services to well-informed, highly satisfied customers.
  6. We manage communication to manage our legitimacy. Organizations need to have clear identity statements that they never violate. Mission statements should accurately identify the nature and scope of the business and commit to ethical methods for achieving goals. Messages to shareholders, customers, the community and employees should never overstate, understate, or contradict identity statements. Someone reporting to the chief executive officer needs to monitor this business mantra and have the authority to overrule any statement or activity that violates it.

Ultimately, communication is not about media and messages: it is an expression of identity.

Thomas J. Roach Ph.D., has 30 years experience in communication as a journalist, media coordinator, communication director and consultant. He has taught at Purdue University Northwest since 1987, and is the author of “An Interviewing Rhetoric.” He can be reached at [email protected].

Related posts