The blurring of lines - are you giving your team the skills to thrive?
As a consultant at VMA GROUP I spend my days talking to Directors of Communications across all sectors and industries. A regular theme is how best to develop their team and deploy, often stretched, resources appropriately. This is backed up in our bi-annual Business Leaders in Communications Study. One of the key discussion topics of this year’s report has been whether communications directors should employ specialists or generalists.

In other words should you build a team based around functional disciplines or should all of your team be able to write a press release, organise a town hall and contribute to the Twitter feed?

A Group Corporate Affairs Director of a leading retail bank said to me recently, “I would rather have a strong bench of communicators than several individuals with one strength."

Not all communications directors agree of course and there are certain areas where this just isn’t appropriate. For example, there is strong case to be made on the regulatory and IR side that you do need specialists. However, it is an interesting point to consider. Will VMA GROUP be looking for candidates with a good blend of internal, external and digital skills in 2015? Should Communications Directors be ensuring that their media relations team spends time in the internal communications department and vice versa?

The upside
We have all talked about the convergence of skills for many years. For example, there are less and less internal communications teams reporting to HR departments these day