Reputation for Goods Hands
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Despite a popular delusion, even the most charismatic and powerful leader cannot be the only manager of their reputation. It's the retinue that makes the king. That is why you can perform dramatic acts, can spend great money on good deeds but lose one chance for winning recognition after another. Simply any work including that of managing an image/reputation is to be done by a person whose brain works properly. You should choose him/her more carefully than your personal therapist, lawyer, fitness instructor and beautician put together.
Unfortunately, the situation is quite the opposite in real life. Good reputation of famous people, big companies, high-quality goods and services is in somebody’s amateurish hands more often than not. At best, these fail managers of reputation appear in PR industry due to the old boy network, in moderately severe cases due to the HR’s negligence, in the worst case scenario due to their own talents of bragging.
I’ll take the risk and summarize the principles to be followed when employing a press secretary for yourself or a PR expert for your company.
1. Honestly answer the question why you need a PR expert whenever you are looking for a specialist for you personally or for your firm. If it is for the sake of your prestige or “to keep up with the joneses” – choose the exterior and regalia. If it is for the sake of work and results – see points 2 and 3.
2. If you are looking for a press secretary whose task is to take care of your personal image, the main thing to pay attention to is psychological and worldview compatibility. Expertise is a necessary condition but it might be not enough. The press secretary sometimes has to become an alter ego of his/her boss – his/her speechwriter, his/her mouthpiece in critical situations, and his/her face in the eyes of the world. In a sense, his/her bodyguard, only assuring not physical but information safety.
3. If you need a PR expert for your company whose job duties will not include that of a press secretary as a priority (he/she will have a subordinate with this job function, or personal PR of the company’s top management is not considered to be a primary concern), pay special attention to the applicant’s career trajectory. And whether business tasks and corporate culture of the companies where he/she used to work correspond to these very parameters in his new office. It often hurts me when I see that people who are accustomed to clear policies and procedures of proper international corporations cannot get used to intuitive and authoritarian conditions of Ukrainian enterprises. Or how experts given to Slavonic liberties struggle for breath in the former type of corporations. Or how hard it is for those who took risks and left business for politics or civil service where absolutely different competences are required.
4. In all the cases (1-2-3) you should form clear expectations regarding your new employee and the criteria for measuring his/her performance efficiency. Communications can be external and internal, a press secretary and a PR manager do different things, IR and GR are not the same. Besides, there is no technique that would closely define and make it possible to forecast the effect of PR events on sales results flawlessly.
I am absolutely sure that specialized PR education is secondary. PR is an interdisciplinary sphere, a kind of quintessence of the accumulated intellectual capital and applied experience. An ideal PR expert is a person of encyclopedic learning and of super soldier skills. He/she can get highly specialized training either as his/her second education, or as post-qualifying education, or generally in the battlefields.
For business “PR pros” it is vital to get their training in economics or kind of economics (marketing, etc.) to be able to understand the laws according to which business corporations function. Experts in political PR may find it useful to gain knowledge in political science, basics of political analysis, state and local authorities structure, administration of the budget, etc.
Distilled water of the majority of academic PR programs (except those where practicing experts are invited to teach) does not facilitate to the birth of the high-quality personnel. Unfortunately, almost nowhere, even in western business schools, students are explained that the most proper PR means responsible work that is client-friendly in fact rather than in word.
When looking for a PR expert who will become your advisor and companion-in-arms, trust your intuition and common sense in addition to the HR’s advice. Though, you’ll have to update your “hardware” a bit. And gain insight into what reputation is and why a person who carries some weight in the modern world or is willing to should take care of it.
Tags: Career; Image; Reputation; Work