Emerging leaders are expected to “walk on water” (and blamed when they sink)
New research from Baylor University in the US reports that the public relations practice industry is failing to prepare practitioners for management.
Marlene Neill and a team at Baylor University, funded by the Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations at the University of Alabama, have published a useful study of what senior public relations leaders expect of the next generation.
The project sought the perspective of senior practitioners (30+ years’ experience) and emerging leaders (six years’ experience). The paper, published in Corporate Communications: An International Journal, sets out the issues facing practice, the competencies emerging leaders need, and where they fall short.
The seniors describe their idealised junior practitioner in terms of maturity, strategic fluency and executive presence. These are all qualities that they acquired over three decades with the support of career development infrastructure and organisations that no longer exist.
The authors dig out a line from the Commission on Public Relations Education report published in 2017. “Some of the people who put this list together,” said one contributor, “operate in a rarefied environment and expect entry-level people to not only walk on water, but be able to make it rain and fill the lake.”
A note about the dataset: the samples are small and largely US-based, but the patterns match what I hear from practitioners in the UK. Treat the ranked lists of skills as indicative rather than definitive.
What the lists say
The leading issues facing leaders over the past three years are described as AI, declining trust and misinformation, demonstrating the value of public relations, political pressure, and burnout.
These are matched to the competencies that emerging leaders most need: communication, strategic planning, ethics, listening and confidence. Senior practitioners describe gaps in communication, judgement and ethics, listening, interpersonal skills and business acumen.
It’s notable that communication tops both lists alongside business acumen and judgement. Ethics ranks third among the competencies needed and second among those lacking. These are the skills that interviewees tied most directly management competency.
Open-ended responses added managing upwards, running a meeting and financial proficiency. The recent CIPR State of the Profession report calls out many of these same areas.
Remote work has broken on-the-job learning
Practitioners acquire judgement in public relations by observing senior colleagues. You learn how to behave around a client by being in the room. Pitching skills are developed by being part of a team and a process.
When I started out in a technology agency in the early 1990s, I acquired knowledge and learnt practice by sitting next to senior manager.
That model of learning was based on proximity. Hybrid and remote working have removed this option. It must be rebuilt by deliberate design.
Questions for your next management meeting
Alan Milburn’s review into youth unemployment published by the Department for Work and Pensions that I wrote about in June identified this issue across the UK, accelerated by AI. It called on employers to purposefully design judgement back into the career ladder through real strategic problems, mentoring and practice.
This raises important practical questions for anyone managing a team.
When did your emerging leaders last watch you make a difficult decision, and did you explain your reasoning afterwards?
Who in your team gets access to training and mentoring, and who decides?
Could your emerging leaders explain the financial logic behind your organisation’s last major decision?
Please get in touch if these are issues you are managing in your team. They’re the focus of the Communications Management and Leadership course that I run each month.
Further reading
This article was originally posted on my Substack. The Wadds Inc. newsletter is read by almost 6,000 communications and public relations practitioners. We take a slower, critical perspective on the research, evidence and developments shaping the field. We put evidence before opinion, and we say how confident we are in what we publish.
