Strategic Communications and Public Relations leadership typically manage at least 3 – 4 ongoing business priorities at the same time. The resource cost of each priority is time, and potential trade offs between priorities. With the Strategic Communications Academy, we can help take over the coaching and training priority, and help leadership save time. Or at the very least, not lose any more time, while we contribute towards supporting business goals and priorities.
According to a focus group we ran with over 20 Strategic Communications and Public Relations leaders in agencies, consultancies and corporate roles, they generally manage between 3 – 10 business priorities in support of revenue and organisation goals.
These priorities are typically revenue and customer-focused, such as market growth or expansion (for new brands or new products) as well as client and stakeholder management.
What was interesting to us is that coaching and training was consistently represented in the list of priorities, but the category was always somewhere in the bottom half or third of the list.
We interviewed some of our focus group participants to understand this observation better.
Coaching and training is important but not as important as revenues and client
What we found is that leadership recognises the importance of having well-trained and competent teams. This is reflected in their list of priorities. However, from a resource perspective, that is, time, money and talent, placing priority on earning revenue or keeping clients or managing internal stakeholders is deemed to be more important.
Time is the critical lever and currency here, as time spent on training is regarded as “lost” to the organisation since it cannot be deployed for client and stakeholder work or impact. Other team members have to step in for the person/people doing training and that adds on to their workload.
Additionally, leadership shared that by focusing on training, senior team members are also losing time, especially if they are the internal trainer as time is spent on understanding the competency or skills gap, preparing the training materials and conducting training.
Challenges with training their workforce
From a training perspective, leadership pointed out that it is challenging to find relevant training programmes that map to their organisation’s priorities. Many are topic-based, and these are replicated across many platforms and service providers such as LinkedIn and Google.
They find that post-training, their talent does not actively use the training in their daily work; instead they revert back to comfortable or past practices, that might not be effective.
In fact, there is a belief that their talent goes through The Forgetting Curve. This is when talent does not apply lessons learnt during training within the first 6 days and forget nearly 75 percent of the information. Ideal outcomes for coaching and training from leadership’s perspective is to save or not lose senior team members’ time and for talent to be trained on skillsets to become competent at their discipline or function. This is different from learning technical knowledge, for example, how to use a content management system, or how to use a service provider’s platform or dashboard.
The Strategic Communications Group (SCG) is a one-stop infrastructure and solutions provider for strategic communications and marketing functions, teams and practitioners.
Through the Strategic Communications Academy, we provide coaching and training services for teams and practitioners on skill sets and competencies.
Services includes building basic and foundational capabilities on writing, media relations, the use of content and the application of communications through to developing good project management skills and client/stakeholder relationships for practitioners.
SCG also provides consultancy services to organisations looking for growth through market entry, market expansion, as well as product and service launches.
Send an email to academy@strtgcommsgrp.com OR book an exploratory consultation through this link OR complete this form and we will connect with you shortly. We work with brands in the corporate, professional services, retail, travel, and technology spaces.
How can the Strategic Communications Academy help leadership/senior members not lose time, and talent gain skillsets and competency?
Based on these insights from leadership and our own iterative process, we have designed our platform to focus on a few key things.
The first is that our platform is created to help leadership and senior team members not lose additional time on coaching and training skillsets and competencies. Leadership can (and should) continue to focus on revenue, client management and stakeholder impact. We can help your talent increase their efficacy and efficiency, and help your organisation stay ahead of the game.
The second is that we focus on first principles and not only on providing technical information. The value of technical knowledge is enhanced when the talent understands the first principles of why, what and how to use it specifically, in relation to their client or brand. Our digital desk allows talent to receive feedback and refine their understanding of the topic.
The third is to level up on demand. Talent learns best when they need to use skillsets and information on a work challenge or situation. Their focus and determination to learn is increased when they can apply what they are learning to their current situation. This is the nature of both short feedback loops and micro-learning. Our training topics are available 24/7 through the platform, created to be learnt in a short time, and geared towards application.
The Strategic Communications Academy can be a partner and ally supporting your business priorities
The academy works with progressive organisations to provide talent with a structured training programme and curriculum covering hard and soft skills and capabilities related to the practice of strategic communications. Connect with us through email at academy@strtgcommsgrp.com to set up a meeting. Let us help you coach and train your talent and support your business priorities at the same time.