Communicate with a communicator?
I work at a communications agency as a communications consultant. Everyday I’m surrounded by people who claim that they are experts in the field of communication and how to create attention, awareness and knowledge around almost any subject. They claim that they can make any message clear for the identified target audience. Heck I’m one of them!
Almost every day, I am struck by how terribly bad we are at communicating among ourself at the agency. We huff and we puff about how people in the office don’t see the greater picture, don’t understand the importance of a specific message or just don’t understand that everyone needs to help out in the kitchen… We complain about colleagues being stupid and not understanding or listening, at the same time as we preach to our customers the importance of understanding the target audience and how they receive a message in the best possible way. Again, I’m one of them!
So why is this? Why is communicating amongst communicators so terribly difficult? Why aren’t we able to give the same attention to our own communication as we do to our customers? I am sure that if we work with our own internal communication, we would understand the customers better, give better advice and in the end, create more business!
My thinking is that we just don’t give ourselves the time. All our focus is on our customer that we often forget to look at ourselves. We are all so busy giving other people advice on how to master the science of communication that we forget to give the same advice to ourselves. Or even acknowledge that it is us, the messenger, that needs to change to b able to get the message across. As I said, if we do work with ourselves the end result will be happier colleagues, happier customer, more work…
So next question: How do we change? How can the adviser be advised? Let me know, because as I said; I’m one of them!
