Manager's Guide to Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management

David M. Dozier, Larissa A. Grunig, James E. Grunig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136688317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Business

This book reports findings of a three-nation study of public relations and communication management sponsored by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Research Foundation. The Excellence Study provides communication managers and public relations practitioners with information critical to their own professional growth, and supplies organizations with tools that help them communicate more effectively and build beneficial relations with key publics. Communication excellence is a powerful idea of sweeping scope that applies to all organizations -- large or small -- that need to communicate effectively with publics on whom the organization's survival and growth depend. The essential elements of excellent communication are the same for corporations, not-for-profit organizations, government agencies, and professional/trade associations. And they are applicable on a global basis. The study identifies three spheres of communication excellence. These spheres consider the overall function and role of communication in organizations, and define the organization of this book. They are:
* the core or inner sphere of communication excellence -- the knowledge base of the communication department,
* the shared expectations of top communicators and senior managers about the function and role of communication, and
* the organization's culture -- the larger context that either nurtures or impedes communication excellence. This text also examines communication excellence as demonstrated in specific programs developed for specific publics.

1

What Is Communication Excellence?

Excellence in public relations and communication management takes many forms, yet a few key characteristics underlie all excellent communication programs. Look for the common thread of excellence in these diverse examples:

• The medical director at a blood bank could see the impact of effective media relations at the peak of the AIDS crisis. Often, the deadly HIV virus passes through blood transferred from an infected person to someone not infected with the virus. In the mid-1980s, many people feared that donating blood was risky. In nearby cities, blood donations dropped 15% to 25%, but donations at this blood bank dropped only 3%. The blood bank's chief financial officer estimated the savings in revenues not lost at $986,000 to $2.1 million. Senior management credits the top communicator with a big part of this success, because her extensive media contacts helped contain and combat unfounded misinformation about donating blood. Another communicator at the blood bank learned research techniques in college. The blood bank uses informal media contacts as well as focus groups, surveys of volunteers who organize blood drives, and survey evaluations of each blood drive to track community perceptions, trends, and issues affecting blood donations and the blood bank. The blood bank built communication excellence, in part, on the knowledge that both communicators bring to the organization.

• The director of corporate communications in a large chemical manufacturing company explained that he plays an active role in strategic management. “If there are strategic issues that require planning,” he said, “communication is involved.”

Why involve communicators so intimately in strategic management? “Everything you do strategically in a company has to do with relations with the outside world,” his boss explained, noting that communication is more than simply transmitting information. “It's a two-way function.” He also noted that the Bhopal tragedy in India pushed all chemical manufacturers to change, to become “willing to be more open to the public.”

As with many organizations in the Excellence Study, crises and turbulence pushed this organization toward communication excellence. The chemical manufacturing company has built excellence, partly because the organization's sophisticated managers demand excellence from corporate communications. The top communicator understands those expectations and has the expertise to deliver.

• A woman runs a one-person communication department in a small economic development agency in the southern United States. Armed with a master's degree in environmental science with a concentration in community relations, she had been with this organization about six months when we interviewed her. We wanted to talk to people in this organization because it scored low in overall communication excellence among those participating in the 1990–1991 survey. Although only a newcomer at the time of the interview, she already played an important role in strategic management. She was developing programs to monitor the impact of communication programs on the agency's clients. This progress occurred in an organizational culture that the chief executive officer (CEO), a man, described as “traditionally male.” Why had there been a change in attitudes toward women?

“Part of the reason I was hired was because I had a much different background from the clerical types [who previously handled communication],” she explained. “Females [communicators] were expected to not only write the press releases but type the envelopes, get the stamps, when we could be spending our time doing management work.”

Are stereotypes of women changing?

“The president is rethinking [my role],” she replied. “Others in the organization look at me as a resource for other things … other than just writing or editing.”

The economic development agency is taking the first steps toward communication excellence by empowering the woman who manages communication for the organization.

• A not-for-profit organization that conducts research and promotes health issues illustrates another side of communication excellence: the culture of the organization itself. “No one is left out,” the CEO said of the extensive consultation system at the organization. Department heads share information at weekly liaison meetings. The organization uses its universal voice mail system extensively.

“It's simple,” the top communicator said of the organization's highly participative culture, “we talk to each other.” In addition, she often spends days with field staff “doing what they do.” The top communicator stressed “keeping in touch with the real world” by “working in the trenches” to gather valuable feedback from volunteers and local affiliated associations. This not-for-profit health organization built communication excellence, partly because the nurturing character of the organization encourages participation, teamwork, and two-way communication.

These four organizations provide snapshots of different qualities of communication excellence. We picked them from the organizations that participated in both the initial survey and the case study follow-ups to the Excellence Study. This is the largest, most intensive investigation ever conducted of public relations and communication management. Nearly a decade in the planning, execution, and reporting of results, this $400,000 study will affect communication practices and scholarship well into the 21th century. (See the appendix for details about how the study was conducted.)

In 1990–1991, top communicators, their bosses, and a sampling of employees in 321 organizations in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States completed questionnaires. These questionnaires provided over 1,700 separate pieces of information about communication practices in these organizations. In 1994, 24 organizations from the original 321 participated in case studies. These case studies included face-to-face interviews, phone interviews, and an examination of communication materials.

The Excellence Study continues to spawn new research in other nations. Translated versions of all or parts of the questionnaires have been administered in Greece, India, Slovenia, and Taiwan.

KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF COMMUNICATION EXCELLENCE

By sifting and organizing information from the study and by examining it from various perspectives, the research team identified a set of key characteristics that distinguish excellent from less-than-excellent programs.¹

This book provides communicators with powerful tools to pursue communicationexcellence in their organizations.²

This is not a cookbook or manual— you will not find “10 easy steps to communication excellence.” It runs deeper, with a compelling logic that is at once more elegant and less cluttered than any 10-step, how-to guide.

To fully appreciate what it is, communication managers should understand what communication excellence is not. Some aspects run counter to our gut-level expectations.

SURPRISES ABOUT EXCELLENT COMMUNICATION

At speaking engagements in a dozen nations around the world, the research team has discovered four recurring communicator expectations about what the Excellence Study would or should show. After we present our findings, audiences often pose questions or make statements about excellence. Let's address those first.

“Yes, But What About MY Industry?”

Many people expect concepts of excellence to be different, depending on the industry, types of organization, or nationality. Instead, we found that communication excellence is universal—It is no different in Canada, the United Kingdom, or the United States. It is the same for corporations, not-for-profit organizations, government agencies, and trade or professional associations. That is because communication excellence involves knowledge or expertise that transcends any particular public, organizational division or unit, industry, organizational type, or national setting. The traditional communicator crafts that a practitioner needs to communicate with employees in a large manufacturing corporation may differ from the specific communicator crafts that a trade association needs to communicate with legislators or regulators. Specialized, traditional communicator crafts do not define excellence. Although excellent communication programs do have strong traditional crafts (see chapter 4), communication excellence is something more than technique.

“Can You Name the Organization with Perfect Communication?”

As mentioned in the introduction, communication excellence represents an ideal or perfect state that no organization can reasonably expect to achieve fully. There is no one organization that the Excellence research team can point to and say: “Communication in that organization is fully excellent in all regards, so go copy it!” In fact, when we looked at how the study's top dozen organizations performed on all of the indicators that made up their overall excellence scores, several measures were only somewhat better than average.

Why? Each organization has multiple measures that, when appropriately weighted and combined, provide an overall measure of communication excellence. If we think of these multiple measures of excellence as an organization's report card, then even the top performers had some Bs. None had “straight As.” The statistical tools used to generate report cards for organizations isolated important qualities of excellence from actual organizations studied. Then these qualities were extrapolated to determine what perfection would mean for each one. Although every organization studied had some elements of communication excellence, and some achieved higher levels than others, none was perfect. Think of perfect communication as you would think of perfect parenting: a lofty goal to pursue, but probably not fully achievable in the real world.

“Can Our Communication Department Be Excellent When Our CEO Isn't?”

No. We found we could not separate excellence from the role that communication management plays in running organizations. We communicators award gold quills and silver anvils to our outstanding peers. Indeed, such recognition for outstanding performance is an important function of professional associations. But the very phrase communication excellence suggests an artificial separation of communication from all the other organizational contributors to overall effectiveness.

As discussed later in the chapter, you can not have communication excellence if you don't have a shared understanding with senior management about communication and its function in organizations. You may have the potential for excellence in your communication department, but unless senior management values communication and supports it, and unless communicators and senior management share a common understanding of communication's function and role, you cannot establish an excellent program.

“Why Are My Writing and Editing Skills Devalued?”

Findings from the Excellence Study do not devalue the traditional skills of professional communicators. Ch...