"Our school punches below its weight." "Our school is not as visible at it should be." "We need to strengthen partnerships and engage more broadly with the business community." These are common refrains I hear from university presidents, deans, marketers and other school leaders. I would argue that it is virtually impossible to move the needle on these concerns if faculty are not engaged …
Does Your L&D Department Have a Communications Messaging Map?
Help employees to make time for learning. Increase manager involvement so that their direct reports feel the liberty to engage in learning activities. These are the top challenges for talent development professionals according to the 2018 LinkedIn Learning Workplace Learning Report. The Report is based on a survey involving talent development professionals (1,200), employees (2,000), executives …
Activism from Leaders: Slow Down and Reflect Before Speaking Out
Many pundits applaud the idea of CEOs / organizations taking a side on societal issues. My opinion: many of these pundits are expressing this point of view based on whether the CEO / organization’s position aligns to their beliefs. Let’s say that an organization’s CEO takes a stand against the NRA. Many of the pro activism pundits who view the NRA as a problem (which would be me), will applaud …
Lessons on Running Communications Workshops from Nikhil Dey of Genesis Burson-Marsteller
One of the best parts of my job is running communications workshops for clients. I am always keen to learn from others who do similar work. On that note, I am delighted to have picked Nikhil Dey’s brain on this topic. Nikhil is President of the award-winning India-based PR agency Genesis Burson-Marsteller (part of the global firm Burson-Marsteller). Among Genesis Burson-Marsteller’s services …
Experts Beware: Practice What You Preach
Let’s say that there is a particular leadership expert whose work you have admired for many years. You have consumed this person's content across various mediums and refer to it often for inspiration. Then one day, you find that the person that you so highly revered has actually been accused of abusing his power to sexually exploit women. Despite your initial shock, the women’s claims turn out to …
Episode #8: How a CLO Helped Change a Learning Culture through Smart Communications
How do you get employees excited about learning? This was a question that Abhijit Bhaduri was grappling with back in 2009 when he was the Chief Learning Officer at Wipro, the information technology services company headquartered in Bengaluru, India. This was quite a challenge, particularly given the size of Wipro (160,000 employees at the time across 54 countries). It was important for Abhijit …
How Researchers Can Adopt a PR Mindset
By Kevin Anselmo Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine, noted the following in a BBC story: “Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact. All those counterfacts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people.” Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2016 was post truth: an adjective defined as ‘relating to …
Why Researchers Should Communicate Their Work to External Audiences
Welcome to my Research Translation Writing program. The below video explains how researchers can benefit by communicating their work to external audiences. Learn more about the program. …
Academics: Please Stop Rambling during Media Interviews
It was painful to sit through. A while back, I was listening in on an academic's interview with a journalist. Each answer was probably about eight minutes long as he segued from one topic to the next without giving the journalist an opportunity to interject. He was going on and on, flippantly using big words that the average person would need to look up. His points were communicated in a dry and …
Research Perspectives on the Challenges and Opportunities Facing Education Leaders
Frustrated by bureaucracy at your institution? Perplexed on how to manage the rankings process? If yes, you are not alone. My former IMD Business School colleague Janet Shaner, now the Founder of a consultancy called Top 10 Learning Solutions, surveyed management education professionals and unearthed some of their common challenges and opportunities. I believe there are insights from this …
Increasing Power and Influence as Communicators
Why does it seem like certain folks in organizations accrue more power and influence than others, even if their work or intelligence might not seem all that exceptional? Stanford University professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a very interesting book that provides the rationale as to why this happens. There is guidance in this book that is probably useful for most any professional function. In …
How to Make Your Bio Stand Out
Look around the web at various schools and research organizations and you will see a variety of different ways in which bios are presented. Perhaps you think your bio is stale. Maybe you haven’t updated it in many years. Or alternatively you might be curious to know about other compelling ways that faculty members and researchers write their bio. Here are some tips and ideas from others that you …
Using Strategic Marketing Communications to Cascade Learning into an Organization
Training is estimated to be a $350 billion industry worldwide. However it represents just 10% of the the 70-20-10 L&D model, which was informed based on a survey of executives. (70% of learning is from challenging assignments, 20% is from interacting with peers and 10% from training). How can the learning from the 10% be integrated into the 70% and 20%? You may be familiar with a training …
How Media Relations Can Support Integrated Marketing Communications Goals
Technological advances, the ever-changing communications landscape and the disruption in the higher education space necessitate that marketing and communications departments strategically work together towards common goals. This means that everyone is aligned on what the objectives are and how to achieve them through the collaborative effort of those responsible for earned media (media relations), …
Podcast Episode #62: How to Benefit from Medium
Have you experimented with Medium, the online publishing tool owned by Twitter? Not happy with your results? If that is the case for you and you want to discover how to change this narrative, then you will want to listen to FIR on Higher Education episode 62. Paul Redfern and Carina Situs from Gettysburg College delve into the strategies and tactics that have contributed to the school’s success …