Communication as a strategic management tool within any organization

This post is also available in: Spanish

When we talk about communication from a professional point of view, we use to relate it automatically to that sort of skills that enable us to interact with other people such as the ability to perform a presentation to a wide audience, language, posture, gestures and voice proficiency, empathy, humor, the ability to solve unexpected situations, self confidence,…

This approach, applied to the field of the Internet, broadens the concept of communication to the proficiency in the abilities related to the Internet and social networking. Thus, the communication skills ranges from the mastery to create quality contents in a blog (—> article in Spanish), to the ability to interact with the world through the available social networks. In this case, communication consist of coping well on the Internet in order to connect you or your enterprise with the world.

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However, this approach is just a part of what communication means to a business or any other organisation.

Somehow or other, communication was always an important factor for the functioning of any enterprise. In recent times, communication embraced more and more a key role in the success of certain brands, products or services. The technical advances and, above all, the development of the information and communication technologies have a lot to do.

Nowadays, there are strategic management models and standards revolving around the communication between the organization and its stakeholders. In this point, communication goes beyond its own approach as a number of social skills, to become a necessary facilitator connecting the organizations´ objectives to their stakeholders´ interests.

In this context, the role of the communication includes:

  • on the one hand, the identification and prioritization of the internal and external actors influencing in the enterprise performance (actors analysis); in addition, to study where and how does each actor communicate with the world;
  • on the other hand, to identify and prioritize the relevant aspects of the enterprise (impacts analysis) which may interest each actor;
  • finally, to connect each relevant aspect of the enterprise with each stakeholder in the proper way.

In a nutshell, what, whom and how to communicate.

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The connection with the stakeholders (“the world”) provides a feedback that enables the enterprise (“you”) to set specific performance objectives and criteria, as well as other elements of strategic development.

Thus, communication goes from a mere set of social skills to embrace a comprehensive sense and usefulness, and becomes a strategic management tool for any organization.