GCS Heads of Discipline: 5 minutes with Russell Grossman
There are 7 GCS communication disciplines: Data and Insight, Media, Strategic Communications, Internal Communications, External Affairs, Marketing and Digital. A selection of the GCS community is appointed to represent each discipline. Our Heads of Discipline are:
- Media – Andrew Darby, Department for Education (DfE)
- External Affairs – Kate Whitty-Johnson, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC)
- Marketing – Chloe Saklow, Department for Education (DfE)
- Strategic Communications – Clara Eaglen, Department for International Trade (DIT)
- Internal Communications – Russell Grossman, Office of Rail and Road (ORR)
- Digital – Ed Bearryman, No10
- Data and Insight – Pamela Bremner, Home Office
This month we spoke with Russell Grossman, who leads the Internal Comms discipline across government, for an interview.
Russell, tell us a little bit more about yourself…
I started in the Civil Service as Deputy Director, Change and IC at HMRC in the mid noughties and was then Group Director of Communications at the Department for Business for 8 years before moving to Director of Communications at the Office of Rail and Road (ORR). Before the Civil Service, I worked in senior comms roles for the BBC and Royal Mail and also worked in consultancy. I’ve headed internal communications across GCS since 2014 and I’m the SCS sponsor for the GCS Fast Stream and GCS Talent.
Originally from Blackpool, me and my long-suffering wife of 38 years live in North London. We are blessed with 4 children (one of whom also works within GCS but would rather not be named here) and 5 grandchildren.
Why is staff engagement so important to you? What do you see as the biggest obstacle to engaging with your audience?
We know the more people feel involved in the direction of an organisation – including its vision, values, changes etc – the more that organisation will collaborate to pull together as one. People want to know the why of what’s being asked of them as well as the what. Engaging people in this is part of the DNA of successful organisations.
The biggest obstacles IMHO are leaders regularly moving the goalposts of change, which creates confusion and ambiguity, and managers underestimating the time it takes people to come on board with this stuff.
But ambiguity is nevertheless a thing, and so along with functions like HR and ‘transformation managers’, internal communications is there to help sort out the patterns in the mess for the great people we have working in the Civil Service.
Bottom line is IC helps explain the value people bring to an organisation in the work they do and helps them feel personally valued for doing that work.
The movement ‘Engage for Success’, of which I’m a board member, defined a 4-step formula for maximising engagement : (1) having a compelling story of what people in the organisation are there to do; (2) having managers who are genuinely engaging and motivating, that people want to follow; (3) the ability for an organisation to actively listen to what people say about their work lives and experience; and (4) the way that an organisation’s vision and values actually match what staff feel and experience in their day-to-day lives.
This then leads to true engagement. The formula was devised in 2009 and its veracity has been proven many times.
How do you think innovations in technology will improve or hinder communications/engagement with audiences from an IC perspective?
Some aspects have been great for internal communications – the most obvious being the ability to reach a lot of people quite quickly, with things like e-mail or intranets, or to listen back via sli.do or yammer etc.
But nothing is a substitute for people meeting face to face and understanding the subtleties and the nuances behind the way that we humans have dialogue.
So there can be (far) too much reliance on e-mail (which is a channel but not necessarily a communication) and not enough on genuine human interaction. Without being too controversial, this is a good reason for people working together in an office rather than alone at home.
That said, Teams, Google Meet, Zoom etc does allow us to reach each other efficiently and I think seeing the person is often up to 80% as good as physically being with them.
I do worry though that some managers see video tech as a means not to have full in-body interactions for difficult conversations like poor performance and for group activity like brainstorming.
And ChatGPT has been nowhere near this piece, by the way.
We’ve just released the Modern Communications Operating Model (MCOM) 3.0, what elements of MCOM do you and your teams use regularly?
I’ve not really caught up with MCOM 3.0 yet. I have to say – this may be controversial – that the move away from PDFs towards fully accessible websites is great for those who need it but it knocks out a lot of the creativity and the colour that allows us to read documents in a way which is appealing.
So I do struggle with constant clicking-through vanilla webpages and would like to see PDFs retained, still alongside accessible HTML.
Having got that rant out of the way, let me say that MCOM 2.0 (as its predecessor MCOM 1.0, which I was actively involved in creating) has been a great tool for ensuring a consistent, quality and professional approach to communications across the disciplines.
MCOM is a ‘how to’ guide putting all the advice, guidance, good practice and standards from across GCS into a single place – and this vital source of information helps us make sure everyone working across GCS, whatever we do, continues to develop outstanding government communication through great people, effective team structures and clear policies and guidance.
As a highly experienced internal communicator, and the head of discipline for IC, what advice would you give to someone who has recently joined government communications?
First, let me say I don’t regard myself as a ‘highly experienced internal communicator’.
I may be a ‘highly experienced practitioner in communications’, with one of my specialisms being internal communications. But the real internal communicators are leaders, and in the IC Practice our role is ultimately to help those leaders be better communicators with their teams.
In giving advice to a GCS-newbie, I’d say you’ve joined one of the most brilliant and professional cohorts of communications practitioners – certainly in the UK, and quite possibly in the world. I make the latter comment having been international chair of the International Association of Business Communicators, when I saw first hand a very wide range of comms practice globally, especially in internal communications. And I formed the view that in the UK we were pretty good.
But we have to maintain being exemplary, and we do so only through continuous improvement – which is where GCS comes in.
We also owe a duty to maintain that exemplary practice in an ever-changing world : to our own associates – the c7000 people in GCS; to the public we serve, and who ultimately pay our salaries; and, because of our size, significance and the complexity that we deal with every day in our work, we also owe it to the wider PR and communications profession to be the very best that we can be, every day.
So I’m very proud to call myself a member of the Government Communication Service – and if you’ve just joined us, I hope you will feel the same.
What are your tips on being an effective internal comms practitioner with little to no budget?
Much of what we do in internal communications does not require huge budgets and in many cases doesn’t require any budgets at all.
What it does require though is practitioners who can be curious and outreaching, applying themselves within their organisations to genuinely help leaders and managers be better communicators with their teams.
We do this best in coaching; by asking the right – sometimes challenging – questions; by ensuring that leaders understand the value of listening as well as talking; and by applying creative ways of doing it well. And in some cases, in seizing the moment, by not waiting for permission but asking for forgiveness later.
One final thought is the need to be gracious.
In the Civil Service, we work with a range of very talented people in professions such as legal and policy where people are inherently good communicators and so may (often, do) have good, often better, ideas than we might ourselves.
The way, for example, in which policy is crafted; the way in which people debate it, write it, articulate it, and ultimately sell it to a sceptical audience, means that if policy officials are any good they will also be good communicators.
And on top of that, many of our leaders – certainly the good ones – have reached their roles because they are good communicators.
So being gracious means that as comms practitioners we should listen to, judge on, and if appropriate accept comms ideas from these sources as well (and add to our armoury for use later) rather than – as I have seen from some practitioners – reject the idea because it wasn’t “invented here”.
What is the most successful tool you have used? And how did it help to harness collaboration in your workplace.
My brain. It helps with lots of stuff. Like allowing me to form productive, lasting and often caffeine-infused relationships with people – the basis for all good communication.
It also allows me to listen to understand, rather than listen to respond – and to recognise when some of the people that I connect with are themselves better communicators than I am, and I can learn from them.
Coming up to summer recess I’m arranging my usual series of coffee catch-ups with people I’ve not connected with in a while – it’s amazing what you can learn from people doing this.
And especially in internal communications, if you’re not spending good time connecting with your audience, who are all close by (virtually or not), then what are you doing?
Lastly, what podcast do you recommend for our communicators to listen to?
Two I’d recommend (and not just because I happen to have been on both of them) are the Engage for Success Radio Show on Soundcloud (also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts). This started in 2013 and has just recorded its 500th edition. It covers just about every aspect of employee engagement you can think of and is produced entirely by volunteers at Engage for Success, on a shoestring budget (but you wouldn’t know that). No 498, just out, is about building an irresistible employee-focused organisation.
The other is the Internal Comms Podcast by Katie Macauley of AB Comms. The latest is no 83 – How IC Can Drive The Agenda. No. 2, by the way, recorded in January 2019, features Russell Grossman on what it takes to be an IC leader.