Why Internal Communication is Hard

After working in just about every field of communication over my 25-year career, I’ve come to this conclusion: internal communication is pretty tough stuff.

No offense, Marketing and PR, you certainly have your share of challenges. But internal communicators grapple with some especially complex conditions within an organization that simply don’t plague external communicators in the same way or to the same degree.

Here are three reasons why internal communication can be so hard:

#1: Leadership needs to commit--really commit. I’m not talking about a leader--or even a committee of leaders--signing off on a budget, participating in an event or approving a communication campaign. I’m talking about commitment in the form of daily, aligned action. Leaders and managers--every one of ‘em--play a pivotal role in focusing and engaging employees: articulating the vision, offering clarity, creating the right environment, modeling behaviors. A single renegade leader can translate into tens, hundreds or even thousands of employees working at cross-purposes.

There’s no hope for organizational alignment without leadership alignment.  Internal communication efforts fail when we ignore or attempt to bypass this truth. For internal communicators, facilitating leadership commitment to the message, and then equipping them to carry it forward, must be top of the priority list.

#2: That pesky right-hand, left-hand thing. The process of getting work done in an organization is relational: I do this, then you do that. A new strategy or change effort goes awry or comes to a grinding halt if any one player isn’t in the game. 

Change is messy. It’s a dance of people and process. Helping everyone see their roles and how the pieces fit together can be hard, especially in a global, dispersed, matrixed workforce (and exponentially harder if leadership isn’t aligned and committed--see #1).

It’s not enough to communicate vision, strategy and top-down expectations. Internal communicators must also consider what they can do to free the flow of information across the organization, to facilitate collaboration and conversation among those bringing the effort to life. (AAhhh, here’s where we can point to something that’s making our lives easier: social media tools.)

#3: We make it hard.  It’s rare for internal communications to command the same talent, resources or budget that businesses commit to external communications. Perhaps we’ll never see that inequity shift--and we certainly won’t if internal communicators don’t continue to grow their strategic abilities and value. While the practice of internal communication has certainly become more sophisticated over the years, internal communicators still too often find themselves viewed as the folks who maintain the intranet or write the CEO’s talking points. These are important activities, but they don’t define what should be the meaning of our work: cultivating the engagement, alignment and environment that move the organization towards its goals. Until internal communicators think, talk and act this way, we’ll just keep making it hard for ourselves--not to mention our organizations.

Comments

[Natasha Tygart]

Internal communication can really be hard. Atleast, now, I understand it more.