Page 30 - Corporate Communication

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Circumscribing Corporate Communications 21

important task of how an organization is presented to all of its key stakeholders, both
internal and external. Business communications and management communications
are more technical and applied 29 – focusing on writing, presentational and other
communications skills – and their focus is largely restricted to interpersonal situa-
tions, such as dyads and small groups within the organization. Business communica-
tions, for its part, tends to focus almost exclusively on skills, especially writing, and
looks towards the communicator himself or herself for its focus, while corporate
communications focuses on the entire company and the entire function of manage-
30
ment. The corporate communications function, as I have already started to suggest
above, is also broader than vocational, technical skills alone because of the concepts,
principles and management approaches that fall under it.More specific,the function’s
central concepts of stakeholder, corporate identity and reputation (see below),
cannot be understood,approached,let alone managed,by mastering communications
skills alone. Communications practitioners, or rather ‘managers’, thus need manage-
ment competencies to analyse the position and reputation of their own organization
with all of its stakeholders, determine the corporate profile or ‘identity’ (i.e. the corpo-
rate values, messages, images and stories) that needs to be projected, develop and plan
communications programmes for it, and evaluate the results that these programmes
have achieved afterwards.

Corporate communications as a management function

A central concern stemming from this understanding of corporate communications
is the need for organizational structures, rules, routines and effective procedures that
actually facilitate this process of decision making and execution concerning corpo-
rate communications. 31 Having such structures, routines and procedures in place
becomes even more pertinent in consideration of the many communications practi-
tioners, working across all areas of internal and external communications, that need
to be coordinated in their work so that a clear, forceful and consistent image of the
organization is projected to each and every one of its stakeholders. In other words,
corporate communications is not just a catchy umbrella term for the many different
communications disciplines in an organization, but, as a management function,is
actively charged with overseeing and coordinating the work done by practitioners
within each of them.Van Riel, in his book on corporate communications, equally
suggests that corporate communications is ‘an instrument of management by means
of which all consciously used forms of internal and external communications are
harmonized as effectively and efficiently as possible’, with the overall objective of
creating ‘a favorable basis for relationships with groups upon which the company is
dependent’. 32
Together with this view of corporate communications as a management function
comes the understanding that corporate communications is at the same time a man-
agerial profession from the perspective of practitioners, suggesting that a number of
management competencies need to be acquired by practitioners (alongside the requi-
site vocational skills) to work and survive within it.The concept of strategic manage-
ment enters into, and elaborates on, both these levels.At the level of the profession,