Opinion
Back in the golden days of journalism, when staff rights were few and classified ads kept the senior staff expense accounts fat, the gruff, rotund Chief of Staff of our newsroom called me over and told me I was heading out to the Mallee for three days.
"Mate come back with four good yarns or don't bother coming back at all," he said.
I started to chuckle obligingly. He didn’t. I tried to cover my laugh with a conscientious frown and hurried off.
Why tell the story now? The threat of missing promotion, being sidelined to an irrelevant post, or being thrown into the next round of job cuts is an anxiety familiar to some workers in many professions, but will be particularly familiar to those in journalism and academia.
The threat of a diminished career tends to be either paralysing or motivating. I realized then that winning the attention of another relies not on the phenomena you find along the road, but instead how you present that so it is interesting to others.
This is just as relevant to academics as it is to journalists. No philanthropist wants to hear your thesis, they want a few sentences or a picture that speaks to them – a new angle, or a new story. No Executive Team want to know every detail of your project, even though they might say they do. They want to reassurance that it is different, affordable and will get done.
Learning and teaching committees want to know about pedagogy. Industry partners want to know about IP and RoI. Your kids don't want to know anything at all, other than what's for dinner. Engaging each audience is a mix of politics, strategy and skill – but can save huge amounts of time and effort, and sometimes delivers outstanding results.
Strategic communication skills are fundamental. The ability to not just inform, but interest the audiences you need to reach can make a major difference.
People have asked why we are offering a visual storytelling workshop for academic staff, equipping staff to build skills to tell their own story more effectively using their phone, and a strategic communication workshop, looking at practical ways to retail your story to audiences so they want to hear more. It’s not to get a like, or a headline, or a moment in the sun. They are all nice, but not the end goal. It’s to cut through, stop people turning off so quickly, start people wanting to know more.
With declining professional communications and engagement services internally at many institutions due to slimmed-down professional staff numbers, the courses we have started are of course just one small part of a solution. We started them because they are symptomatic of a wider issue – university staff need more practical and relevant training opportunities to help them directly engage and sell their ideas to an often reluctant public.
Visibility and voice are critical tools for staff at a time of change – but staff at the academic coalface are too infrequently resourced, empowered or trained to engage critical audiences effectively.
No one is going to tell them not to bother coming back to the office if they fail to interest the VC, or a donor, or a prospective student group, or a research partner, in this day and age. But nor will anyone quickly seek to leverage their research and teaching capabilities – and our institutions and the careers of those who sail within them are the poorer for it.