If there’s one thing that rips my knitting more than anything else, it’s non-comms people telling us how to do our jobs.
It happens to us all. In fact, it probably happens to every comms team in every industry.
That’s because everyone’s a comms expert. Right?
Obviously, they’re not. But we are. Or we’re supposed to be.
That’s why I focused on professionalising the comms service in my time at Police Scotland.
If we want to be treated as professionals by non-comms colleagues, then we need to be professional.
One of our senior leaders was speaking at an internal event recently and said “80% is good enough”.
That’s maybe true some of the time for policing, but not all the time.
And I don’t think it’s right for comms either. I can’t settle for less than 100% in the accuracy of what our department produces. Misspelling a victim’s name, for example, is clearly not acceptable.
A former Chief Constable called me once to complain about a typo in content that had gone out about a trial outcome. He told me the SIO and team were responsible for securing a conviction and Corporate Communications was responsible for telling the public about it. We all had a part to play and typos in our content let everyone down.
He was right. That mistake reflected on me as the head of comms and it reflected on the department. The public notice these mistakes too. We’ve all seen comments about spelling mistakes which detract from the purpose of the content we’ve put out: “You can’t even spell properly, what chance is there of you solving this crime?”
Everyone makes mistakes. When I was working as a journalist, I wrote a picture caption about a baby swan. When I came into the office the next day, a copy of the paper had been left on my desk, opened to the relevant page, with a note on it saying: “A signet is a ring. A baby swan is called a cygnet. Editor.”
My initial reaction was that the story had gone through the news desk, the subs and the back bench, and no one else had spotted my mistake. But I realised it was my mistake, and I had to own it.
As a trainee journalist, I was told “you’re only as good as your last story”. You might be an award winner but if the next thing you write is only two pars and there’s a typo in it then you’ve no credibility.
So, I really believe that if we want to be seen as comms professionals, to be taken seriously, we need to strive for that 100%.
Never assume anything, except that you’ve probably assumed something. Ask yourself, what have I assumed in what I’ve produced? How do I know what I’ve written is correct? Accuracy and attention to detail are critical. Check your work and check it again. Get someone else to check it too.
I’m writing this from the perspective of having been a journalist, but this applies to everyone who works in any comms field.
Your heads of comms need you to be like this.
They need you to strive for perfection, to have professional curiosity, to have situational awareness about whatever you’re dealing with. If you work in a media team, they need you to be confident enough to pick up the phone and challenge a journalist about inaccuracies in their reporting.
Ask anyone in our team and they’ll tell you I’ve been an absolute pain in the backside about this kind of thing.
But if I’ve been successful at making colleagues see our team as professionals - others can judge – then it’s because I wasn’t prepared to settle for less than 100%.
Now, the next thing that rips my knitting is incorrect use of apostrophes and semi-colons…