Making the grapevine bear fruit — developing communication competence

The big challenge for communication management is to encourage and enable line managers to improve the quality of their day‐to‐day communication. Communication is a core management competence. In the flat, devolved, team‐based organisation structures, which are fast becoming the norm, good mangement is synonymous with good communication. The role of central communication departments such as Corporate Communication or Internal Communication has to expand to meet this challenge. Traditionally, communication has focused on the production, packaging, targeting and distribution of messages — using skills which are borrowed from journalism and marketing. This skill set needs to be extended so that the centre can facilitate and support the communication of local line managers. As a first step, the centre must make managers around the organisation accept their responsibility for communicating with their staff. Developing an open and communicative style often requires a major shift of behviour for mamnagers. Organisations try to encourage this shift by broadcasting ‘open communication’ as one of their values. Including communication as a key performance indicator in the appraisal process increases managers' accountability for their daily communication with staff. Performance evaluation can be designed to make managers accept that they need to improve their communication. These are new areas for communication managers. What is clear is that unless they find effective ways to address the real issue of line managers' communication, they will miss a huge opportunity and find themselves increasingly relegated to the management side lines.