Page 171 - Corporate Communication

Cornelissen-06.qxd 10/9/2004 9:05 AM Page 159

Communications Practitioners 159

2. The expert prescriber role: in this role, the practitioner operates as the
authority on both communications problems and their solutions.The client or
management is often content to leave communications in the hands of the
‘expert’ and to assume a relatively passive role.
3. The communications facilitator role: this role casts the practitioner as a sen-
sitive ‘go-between’ or information broker. The practitioner serves as a liaison,
interpreter and mediator between the organization and its stakeholders.
4. The problem-solving process facilitator role: in this role, practitioners
collaborate with other managers to define and solve communication and stake-
holder problems for the organization. Unlike the expert prescriber role, here
practitioners work with management and are more likely to play an active part
in strategic decision making.
Reflecting on these four role types, Broom also observed that the expert pre-
scriber, communications facilitator and problem-solving process facilitator roles were
closely correlated, but quite distinct from the communications technician role. David
Dozier equally suggested that these four practitioner roles could be reduced to more
general ‘manager’ and ‘technician’ roles because the expert prescriber, the communi-
cation facilitator and the problem-solving process facilitator roles all represented
a broader managerial role. Reworking Broom’s data, Dozier identified two major
conceptual roles: communications technician and communications manager.

1. Communications technician:communications practitioners are characterized
as technicians if their work focuses on such activities as writing communications
materials, editing and/or rewriting for grammar and spelling, handling the tech-
nical aspects, producing brochures or pamphlets, doing photography and graphics,
and maintaining media contacts and placing press releases. Dozier and Broom
define a technician as ‘a creator and disseminator of messages,intimately involved
in production, [and] operating independent of management decision making,
strategic planning, issues management, environmental scanning and program
4
evaluation’. In other words, a technician tactically implements decisions made
by others and is generally not involved in management decision making and
strategic decisions concerning communications strategy and programmes.
2. Communications manager:practitioners enacting the manager role predomi-
nantly make strategy or policy decisions and are held accountable for programme
success or failure. These practitioners are primarily concerned with externally
oriented, long-term decisions, rather than solving short-term, technical prob-
lems. Activities within the manager role include counselling management at all
levels in the organization with regard to policy decisions, courses of action and
communications, taking into account their public ramifications and the organi-
zation’s social or citizenship responsibilities, making communications pro-
gramme decisions, evaluating programme results, supervising the work of others,
planning and managing budgets, planning communications programmes and
meeting other executives. Communications managers also typically use research
as the bedrock of their work, employ environmental scanning to monitor the
organization’s environment and help it manage relationships with key stake-
holders. And because they possess needed intelligence gained from research,