Ideas for University Education and PR
This week I had the pleasure of speaking to the students in “Issues Management & Crisis Communication” at Bowling Green State University. Thanks much to Dr. Terry Rentner, who invited me to be on the panel.
As a BGSU alum (’86), I am always proud to help my alma mater. I was joined by Stephanie Johnston of Transcend Strategy Group and Robert Moll of IRI consultants. We had a great, interactive discussion with the students in the class. I was impressed by their preparation and knowledge of the current state of public relations regardless of whether they were a journalism, PR, or sports management major.
Some of the things that we talked about included lessons in controlling the narrative, battles with the legal department, the value of lifelong learning, the wide variety of tasks and industries a person works in when they are in the agency business, the difference between a problem and a crisis, and how you persuade your client or boss to do the right thing.
This was especially interesting to me because I was speaking to a group of PR and communications majors, but I was an English major at Bowling Green. I never spent one day in a PR class. And in fact, Mr. Moll was an English major at Syracuse.
So, while there are many paths to a public relations career, and I think we have all experienced that over the years, it was interesting to get a chance to think about how people are intentionally preparing for this career.
The panel agreed that communications have never been more important to the enterprise than they are today. It was a theme that ran throughout the panel discussion, from employee recruitment and retention to dealing with the generational layers in the contemporary workplace to interfacing with an increasingly fractured public, strong communications must run throughout an organization and be practiced even by people who are not professional communicators.
It made me think, oddly, about how we had a program when I was at Bowling Green State University called “Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum.” The idea was that everybody should have writing as part of their university education--even in geology or nursing. This is similar to the idea that everyone in an enterprise needs to communicate well, even in HR, even in finance.
As someone with grey hair who is now on panels and not listening to them, I came away with three thoughts.
Communicators Need a Broad Understanding of Organizations
First, because competent communications are imperative across the enterprise, people preparing to enter the communications field should be familiar with all parts of the organization they are entering. If that's a for-profit business, they need to have been exposed to finance, legal, HR, etc., in order to understand and provide strategic counsel. The same would be true at a nonprofit, just with a different focus and different ideas.
Sad news: in today’s data-driven world, they should probably know some math.
Students at BG are Learning to Think Strategically
Second, and I think this was the part that I was most excited about, is that communicators need to think strategically. And that's a mindset that can be established in University. That might sound obvious, but a recent article by the developer of the PESO model talked about the lure of tactical thinking--the lure of the latest new shiny thing. (Raise your hand if someone ever told you to get a Twitter). But professional communicators must think strategically about what they are trying to accomplish and what business objectives they are promoting. You don’t need a Twitter account, you need better relationships with stakeholders.
Lifelong Learning is a Lifeblood to Communicators
Third, communicators do indeed have to be lifelong learners. That phrase is typically used to describe book learning, classes, degrees, certificates, etc. Those are certainly important. A structured lifelong learning program is vital to success in the communication field.
But an important part of that lifelong learning is to be a good listener. All of us on the panel talked about learning from people in our field and about learning from other experts. We can also learn from the public and learn by listening and observing what goes on around us.
Because a great communicator, above all, understands people.
Again, thanks so much to Dr. Rentner for having me back at my alma mater. I take every opportunity to speak to a class, because I enjoy it but also because I believe it's important to give back to the profession that I have been so blessed to be a part of for nearly a quarter century.