Gatehouse Blog
Lost in the Bermuda Triangle?
Given that I haven’t posted once in the last four weeks, you might be forgiven for thinking that I have been lost in the Bermuda Triangle or perhaps on another planet.
But the reality is more mundane -I’ve simply been incredibly busy and therefore haven’t been able to devote any quality time to updating the Talking IC site (a major blogging crime if ever there was one – once again I ask for your forgiveness!)
I have been away though (small excuse) – I’ve just returned to the UK from Hong Kong where a colleague and I have been running a two day Gatehouse workshop on internal communication strategy and planning for one of our clients.
It was a really enjoyable and highly interactive session with a great bunch of communicators from across the Asia Pacific region. There were delegates from the UK, Australia, Vietnam, Pakistan, South Korea, Indonesia, China, Malaysia, and a handful of other countries – a wonderfully diverse group.
I don’t want to discuss the workshop in detail (client confidentiality), but what struck me was that despite all this diversity, communicators often face the exact same challenges wherever they are in the world. Whether you’re a communicator operating in London or Beijing, you’re likely to be grappling with very similar issues and obstacles.
I’d like to focus on some of these issues over the next few weeks.
Of course I wouldn’t dream of discussing the specific challenges our client is facing, but I would like to pull out a few broad themes which emerged during the workshop and which come up again and again in discussions I have with fellow communicators in the UK and overseas. These themes are:
- The relationship between internal communications, marketing and HR
- How to align internal communication to the business strategy
- How to build an effective virtual comms team
- How to engage senior leadership and make business case for internal comms
As part of my commitment to keep this blog refreshed and up-to-date I’ll be writing individual posts about each of these four challenges over the coming weeks – providing some thoughts, musings, ideas and resources that I hope will prove useful to those of you who facing similar issues.
I’ll start early next week by exploring the sometimes tricky relationship communicators can have with HR and marketing professionals – a theme which takes me right back to the Bermuda Triangle…..
