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communications practitioners still lack the requisite knowledge and skills to fully
enact the manager role,particularly in areas such as financial management,the strategy-
making process, and the use of communications in organizational development and
change. As a result, these practitioners and the communications disciplines that they
represent may be sidelined by companies and treated as a peripheral management
discipline – one viewed as unimportant to the overall functioning of the corporation.
Pincus, Rayfield and Ohl refer in this regard to a belief commonly held among some
parts of senior management that communications adds little to corporate perfor-
11
mance as it is a ‘fluffy’discipline that is insufficiently focused on the practicalities and
demands of the business. Practitioners in senior positions who are expected to enact
the manager role thus bear a responsibility to show and communicate the value of
communications in terms of what it contributes to the organization.
There is a lot of bemoaning in the hallways of marketing and communications offices of
how CEOs ‘don’t understand communications’, when the real problem is that marketing
and communications professionals do not understand the intricacies of business manage-
ment well enough to become part of the governing coalition. 12
In other words, the development of practitioners into full managers is, as we have
seen,crucial to the status accorded to communications and its input into management
decision making. To make this developmental shift, practitioners, particularly those
who come from a communications technician background, need to be trained and
educated to become fully knowledgeable and skilled as communications managers. In
this sense, thinking in terms of technician and manager roles and what competencies
and skills are needed in each capacity thus also suggests a trajectory of professional
development in terms of what is needed of practitioners within organizations if they
want to progress from technician to manager roles (see Box 6.1). This professional
development from technicians to managers is important at the local level – at the level
of individual organizations – but is also central to the development of the practice and
occupation of communications management as a whole, in terms of whether this
occupation acquires professional status.The next section of this chapter picks up on
this latter point and suggests ways in which the occupation can be further developed,
and also what this requires of the different parties (i.e.practitioners,teachers and trainers,
senior managers, professional associations and academic researchers) involved.

Box 6.1 Management brief – using role types
for professional development programmes

KPN, the Dutch telecommunications provider operating in Western Europe, decided
in 2003 to audit its communications workforce on their competencies and skills. The
audit was conducted to determine the strength of the communications workforce,
and areas for development, and to provide an input into a professional development
programme for practitioners. Central to the audit was assessment of practitioners on
three key competencies and skills areas: (1) the knowledge and use of communica-
tions theory, processes and tactics, (2) the knowledge and use of management and