I was recently asked as president of the Institute of Internal Communication to be interviewed for a feature in the IoIC’s member magazine, Voice. Don’t get me wrong, the whole thing was handled really well and professionally, the excellent team at Voice mag wasn’t the issue. The issue was me.
I am comfortable in talking about my views on our profession, and can discuss IC’s purpose, value and direction at length, but being asked the more ‘how you got here and why’ feels unnatural. It may be that as a former journalist, I am used to telling the story, and being on the asking side of it.
The same applies in client work – you’re listening out for client challenges and points of view, not self-promoting. Either way, preparing for the interview did make me think about the road to here – the twists and opportunities, the successes, the mistakes made and lessons learned, and most of all the people who I work with and worked things out with along the way.
So, the article intro says that I ‘share my journey from aspiring spy to internal comms expert, revealing the importance of curiosity, storytelling and evidence-based content in shaping the future of workplace communication’. I talk about my early experiences of internal communication from the 1980s, how IoIC ended up being baked into my career, the importance of tribe and community, as well as what frustrates me about IC’s progress today.