Working with cross-functional partners is a common source of woe for Communications. Though the circumstances vary quite a bit, I’ve discovered a pattern over time in the villainous caricatures I hear most about:

• The party poopers
  Crime: Vetoing Comms’ best-laid plans to try new things
  Usual suspects: Legal, IT
• The land grabbers
  Crime: Asserting dominance—and taking all credit—in areas of overlapping audiences/interests
  Usual suspects: HR, Marketing

All cheekiness aside, we at CEC have noticed communicators working hard these days to deepen their integration with cross-functional partners. Most agree that social media has really forced this issue—and it’s fitting, really, given that social media is all about blurring historical lines and creating forums for new types of collaboration and communication.

One of our favorite examples comes from Ford. While Ford’s PR and Marketing are structurally distinct departments, they’ve fully integrated their strategies and resources. According to Ray Day, Ford’s Vice President of Communications, the two groups collaborate on just about everything—including planning, budgeting, agency management, and performance metrics—and blend their unique expertise to get the most out of social media opportunities.

CEC members can find more information on Ford’s success story—among many others—in our brand-new release on Communications resouring and collaboration.

I’d love to hear from communicators out there.  Would your own cross-functional theme song be less Lean on Me, more Great Office War?

By Lisa Schievelbein

Here at CEC, the irony is not lost on us when we fail to practice what we preach to communicators.  For example, our team has produced some pretty cool insights about intranet management, yet few of us visit our parent company’s own “digital landfill” for anything but the cafeteria menu. (Like many CEC members, we wistfully covet information-sharing platforms like SabreTown and The WaterCooler.) But in the last few months, as Kayleigh and I shifted our primary focus from intranets to org structures, I’ve been encouraged by the potential for “human” solutions to make a real impact on information sharing.

As I shared in a previous post, we’ve had quite a few conversations lately about org structure (and have many more in our immediate future).  Interestingly, we’re hearing less about large-scale restructuring and more about the injection of new Comms roles to drive the existing system’s performance.  These roles are often focused on cross-group coordination, with some positions expressly designed to “socialize” information—both within the Comms team and across the company.

One of the examples we liked best comes from Deloitte. Like many companies nowadays, Deloitte is keen to promote its thought leadership in the marketplace; unlike most, the Deloitte Comms team has invested in a specific position—the Senior Manager of Thought Leadership—to propel this strategic objective. This individual has two primary responsibilities:

• Harvest: Uncover and document thought leadership around the organization, and make it more accessible, internally and externally
• Brand: Leverage and brand the organization’s premier thought leadership pieces

This staff member works with a variety of functions (some revenue-generating) to capitalize on the best thought leadership opportunities for Deloitte. It’s still early days, but the Head of Comms believes that it’ll eventually be possible to demonstrate a connection between the function’s efforts and revenue generated.

CEC members can find more information on Deloitte’s innovative concept—among many others—in our brand-new release on Communications org structures.  And everyone can check out Rick’s new post, “A Sense of EnTITLEment,” for more on the subject of emerging job titles in Communications.

Folks, speaking of Rick: he’s leaving his fellow CEC bloggers in the dust with his number of blog comments—including one from the Chairman of Southwest Airlines.  So, why not hook a sister up and share the most interesting Comms title that you’ve heard lately?

By Lisa Schievelbein

Deep down, every communicator is a voyeur.

 How do I know?  For the last few months, Kayleigh and I have been analyzing the organizational design of CEC member teams, and let me tell you—communicators just love peeking at org charts. They have different reasons for this, but I think one is particularly powerful: a hope that some formula for success can be found in the neat boxes and lines on a PowerPoint slide.  (As you can imagine, the let-down factor is inevitable.)

Here are the coolest things we’ve learned from our research process:

• Certain principles behind org structures are definitely better than others. For example, you’re probably better off using strategic objectives as an organizing device than, say, discrete audience groups, as the latter can focus your energies on stakeholder silos at the expense of the bigger picture.  (CEC members should check out the structural evolution of Best Buy’s Employee Comms team along these lines.)
• That said, org structures themselves are rarely “transferable” across Communications teams. After all, each team is a unique snowflake in terms of headcount (from “half a person” to 50-plus), business priorities, and workflow.  Two very successful teams often look nothing like each other!  As this appreciation set in, we soon realized that CEC members needed more from us than a few giddy peeps at org charts.  (As Kayleigh likes to put it, we had bigger fish to fry.)
• We’re increasingly convinced that skills are more important than structure to the design of the best Comms teams. After all, a function can have a very forward-thinking org chart with a tight line to the CEO, but what does that matter if the communicators themselves are still playing an old-school game?  I’m actually reminded here of Jim Collins’s argument about the “talent on the bus” in his classic bestseller, Good to Great.  Collins states that great leaders focus first on “getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats” (emphasis mine).  In essence: if you’re rethinking your function’s operations, you shouldn’t focus on where people are sitting until you make sure they’re going to drive the type of performance you need.

Incidentally, Collins makes a related point that I find especially relevant for Comms today: “If you begin with ‘who,’ you can more easily adapt to a fast-changing world.”   I do think that the wild swings of the communication environment in recent years have revealed a need for a very different type of professional—a belief confirmed by members who talk with us about their ideal next hire.  In these conversations, we hear little about classically trained communicators (although good writing is still a “must-have”), and a lot about creative business people who are highly adaptable across channels, audiences, and projects.  More specifically, here are the 5 top skills that your peers are clamoring for:

1. Listening: to learn about our stakeholders across many different channels
2. Analytics: to derive insights from the stakeholder data we collect
3. Project Management: to manage to key outcomes, yet be nimble about getting there
4. Training and Coaching: to make others more effective at communicating directly with stakeholders
5. Social Media Aptitude: to capitalize on new communication tools and behaviors in building stakeholder relationships

What might this look like in practice?  Here’s a great example from USAA: their Employee Comms team recently created a new position, Director of Employee Feedback. (Bet you haven’t heard of that before!)  Our good friend Betsy Pasley uses all five of these skills in delivering on her team’s mission—to enable employees to effectively support company goals.  (CEC members can learn more about USAA’s story here.)

This is just one of many examples we’ll be sharing in an upcoming presentation about Organizational Design.  Be sure to email Kayleigh at kokeefe@executiveboard.com if you’d like to be informed when it goes live on our website.  In the meantime, feel free to challenge us on our hypotheses and share your own “Communications Skills Wish List” below.