A familiar lament of communicators is that business leaders fail to see the value in what they do.
After all of these years, even with all that we know today about the tremendous enabling power of strategic communications and all we know about the value of marketing around communities and conversations, we still have organizations with communicators who complain, vent and rant about those who don’t buy in or support communication programs.
Listen closely. You can hear them right now.
“My business VP just doesn’t get it.”
“They think we’re nothing more than wordsmiths.”
“The business team doesn’t value what communication can do for our organization.”
“They think we’re an expense, not an investment.”
I began thinking about this after stumbling across Robert Holland’s treatment of this topic. In his blog post Fight the Good Communication Fight, he encourages communicators to stick with it when confronted with a situation in which your business doesn’t “get” what communication can make possible.
I agree with Robert. We shouldn’t give up… but stick with it. And, moreover, we should welcome the challenge because it forces us to think more strategically so we’re better able to sell and market our programs.
I say communicators stop the complaining, venting and ranting. Instead, they should look in the mirror and ask themselves if they have done their best marketing job on those they need to convince or win over. Selling, persuading and influencing… that’s what we’re supposed to excel at, no? Are we holding ourselves accountable?
We can’t always point our finger at the leader of the day and say, “Yep, he just doesn’t get the value. Poor me.”
Like Robert says, we need to stick with it and fight for the breakthrough we want… and we can’t wait for the breakthrough to happen all on its own.
Those who are most likely to succeed don’t wait for the ship to come in, they swim out to it.
