PR Leadership: Preparing for a senior role

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Years spent growing and winning clients, impressing senior management or holding the fort in challenging situations can provide a solid base for a senior role in communications.

Yet, too often the transition from running a small team to being a consultancy head or a director of communications is brutal.

Suddenly the buck stops with you. New responsibilities for pay, rations, promotions and restructuring come your way. Turning a healthy profit can be a new challenge.

What then are the skills and experiences that aspirant MDs or communications directors need to gather to make the step up to senior roles easier and more manageable?

The earlier in your career you take responsibility for leading campaigns or accounts the easier it is to recognise the unique elements that come with heading a project.

You will care about the plan and how it is being implemented. You will worry about how the budget is being managed and have a strong desire to be associated with success.

A steadfast approach to media relations seldom exposes you to all these experiences.

Great leaders always having one thing in common – they know their people very well. It is not good enough just to know their names or only their strengths and weakness.

You need to know what makes them tick, how they are looking to grow and what new challenges they will respond well to.

Fear of the calculator, spreadsheet and financial protocols will not aid senior aspirations. You must understand numbers, how profit and loss accounts work and appreciate the relationships between fees, costs and margins. Excel should become a close friend.

As organisational structures have flattened senior jobs have been harder and harder to come by. Hence the need for a senior sponsor remains vital as does developing influencing skills at all levels. Being trusted and respected for your opinions and insights allows you to stand out.

Leadership will often involve having a broad perspective on a very wide range of issues. Therefore, future senior players should never forget the need to stay abreast of industry trends, embrace views of leading business commentators and be familiar with what keeps senior executives awake at night.

Head down, working hard and delivering to time and with impact are all vital. Yet, it is also important to develop a distinct style of working and to be clear about the values that govern how you work. Be sure you cultivate styles of working that appeal to the modern desire to lead in an open, authenticate and energised manner.

Success breeds success – and in many businesses the aim is always to make winning a habit. Finding ways to work with winning teams is vital.

To achieve excellence you will need to balance being brave, recognising and responding to failures, being tenacious and passionately driving team work. Polishing and perfecting these challenges often underpins a rise to high office.

No journey to finding a senior role will be easy but preparing early, developing good skills and behaviours and the right kind of outlook will give you a better, and fighting chance.

Kevin Read is chairman at Bell Pottinger – overseeing Managing Directors in their Corporate, Brand, Digital, Consumer and Design practices.

This article was first published on prmoment.com

REEXAMINING REPUTATION

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The promises you make, and the actions you take to fulfil them, are often claimed as two of the building blocks of reputation. The third pillar being how others judge you.

With such a mixture of factors it is easy to see why the term reputation is loose and that there is no easy way to consistently and meaningfully measure what we mean by it.

If we look more closely at how others judge us it becomes clear that there are very distinct groups who might take an interest.

In simple terms we can break them into those directly affected, those who may through a longer chain be influenced or caused to change behaviour and those who may have wider ‘observer’ status.

Their distinct status in relation to those who they judge will impact on their opinions. Judgement can never take place in isolation. It is not a simple, single external judgement as sometimes implied.

Often it will not be until an organisation or individual seeks approval for actions will it be known whether ‘reputational support’ will be forthcoming or denied.

Equally, not all judges of behaviour can be treated equally. Identifying the highly influential, whether on the basis of power, influence or respect is critical when assessing reputation.

The modelling of influence has become an increasingly important aspect of modern communications. Many roots can be found within social network analysis which developed theoretical models on the behaviour of individuals, groups and protagonists in the pre Facebook and Twitter world.

Modern social media analysis now allows us to build the digital maps of connection, information flow, and virtual visualisations of critical influencers.

Such glimpses tempt us to think that we are closer to measuring reputation and planning campaigns that have real traction given our promises and actions.

However, we should not be seduced by the ability to observe connections and flows of information more easily.

When considering how our promises and actions will be regarded it remains vital to consider societal attitudes, cultural frameworks, expectations of behaviour as well as being sensitive to delivering new thoughts and approaches.

Equally the need for organisations and high profile individuals to be demonstrably effective ‘corporate citizens’ has moved from the idyllic background to the highly observable foreground. Another pressure for the makers and defenders of reputation to embrace.

DISCOVER POWERFUL PR THINKING

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As the world of public relations changes there is a growing need to understand how the industry, now valued more than ever by business leaders throughout the world, contributes innovative thinking that enhances, builds and defends reputations whilst also contributes to brand value and balance sheet goodwill.

This blog will explore best practice (in-house and consultancy), new conceptual thinking, how the industry is continually adapting to the social and digital world and invite guest contributions.