For the past couple months, I have been working on compiling 16 different “role profiles” of some of the traditional and not-so-traditional roles that you can find on current communications teams. For each profile, I have interviewed several communicators holding this position to pick their brains on the key responsibilities and skills that their role demands. The resulting role profiles reflect not only their current responsibilities but also some of the more aspirational activities that they would love to add to the list in the near future to increase their impact and effectiveness.
However, not all communications teams have a large number of communicators which can be strategically allocated among all of these 16 (or more) different roles. A quick look at our membership shows that a quarter of the communications teams have 10 or less people and about half of them fall in the 20 and under full time staff members category. So what do you do when you have a small team that requires everyone to wear “multiple hats” to get the job done?
One of the roles that is growing in importance on communications teams (regardless of the team size!) is the communications generalist. The communications generalist is essentially a communications functions’ “mini-head”. She or he has experience in multiple aspects of communications and can be flexibly deployed across various communications activities and projects.
While all teams benefit from having communications generalists, they are particularly valuable for “small shop” teams because they allow them to focus on variety of communications tactics that more specialized roles might not be able to deliver on.
Our members who hold this role emphasized that the generalist has to be a well-rounded, capable communicator. However, there are five key competencies that they believe make a high-performing generalist stand out from the crowd:
As always, I would love to hear your thoughts? Do you have generalists’ positions on your team? Do you agree with the key competencies and the responsibilities for this role? Let me know.
Relevant CEC Resources:
Commenting Guidelines
We hope conversations will be energetic, constructive, and provocative. All posts will be reviewed by our editors and may be edited for clarity, length, and relevance.
We ask that you adhere to the following guidelines.
1. No selling of products or services.
2. No ad hominem attacks. These are conversations in which we debate ideas. Criticize ideas, not the people behind them.