Two Approaches to Structuring Your Team for Issues Management
For anyone considering the structure of a large media and issues management team, it’s really important to think about how to maximize the team’s efficiency and capacity while also minimizing silos and disconnection of information.
Having more people working on issues can create more firepower within your reputation-building shop, but it can also lead to challenges and risks that need to be mitigated. For example:
- inadequate approvals
- reinventing the key-messaging wheel based on lack of institutional knowledge
- poor line of sight into issues management for leadership
Over the past two years, I’ve talked structure with more than 150 communications leaders in the private and public sector. Many lead large teams with 10 or more staff. The surprising thing I’ve learned is that there is no single “best way” to structure your team, or clear consensus among leaders. But there are best practices.
Structuring teams often comes down to a decision on whether to integrate issues management with the broader media relations team, or keep the two sides separate. Think of issues management as a fire extinguisher and media relations as a megaphone. They do quite different jobs. Can they mix?
Integrating Issues Management and Media Relations
Integrating the media relations and issues management functions within the team is quite common. In a university context, this might result in many people—including faculty communicators—having a hand in issues management.
Pros:
- Staff who take requests directly from news media are plugged into the development of issue messaging and responses
- Faculty and unit communicators can bring specific context that a siloed issues team might miss
Cons:
- Issues work can distract media specialists from the proactive work they need to do
- Faculty/unit-embedded communicators may not have much experience managing issues, making it a steep and sometimes stressful learning curve
Separating Issues Management from Media Relations
Another option is to split the issues and media relations functions. I’ve talked to some leaders who see value in having an issues team working independently on problems within the institution. In parallel, the media relations and less specialized communications staff can push out positive reputational stories for the institution.
Pros:
- It mitigates distraction for the broader comms team; often these distractions involve larger, ongoing issues that continually pop up regardless of how much messaging you’ve put out there, and a specialized issues team has all that context
- Allows for a level of specialization that’s difficult to develop if 80 per cent of your time is spent creating and distributing proactive stories
Cons:
- Can lead to overload for a small issues team, and poor resourcing when you have surge and slowdown of issues requirements
- Can lead to siloing, whereby the issues manager might lack important context and relationships when working within an unfamiliar area of the organization
In my opinion, it all comes down to the needs of your organization—and in some cases, the capabilities of your staff team. Issues work can be a fun way to break up the monotony for some, and exceedingly stressful for others. The structure you ultimately choose needs to suit your team as well as it suits the organization.
It’s also important to make sure you have the right tools for collaborating internally on development of messaging in response to issues. UBC and a growing number of large organizations are using Broadsight to connect the dots on their media and issues work, and ensure line of sight/transparency when dealing with large volumes of work. How have you seen large media and issues teams built? What works and what doesn’t? I’d love to get your thoughts in an email.
