Project 2: Management Plan
You’ve made the case for your new department. You quickly receive an email from one of your client’s VPs.
FROM: Raj Mangat, VP
TO: You
SUBJECT: next steps
Click here to open the email.
Congratulations! We enjoyed your presentation and—huzzah!—we were able to get your preferred staffing option approved. As you know, there will now be a flurry of HR and facilities activity as we set up the new office space.
While we’re waiting for our new department to materialize, we’d like you to take the work you’ve done a step further and put together a management plan. You already have a sense of who we are and how we operate as an organization. Now, you can take the lead in establishing a culture for the new unit. This will help us in our interview process as we can identify the candidates most suited to your plan.
We need the management plan fairly soon, so please get it to us in two weeks.
Thanks so much for tackling this! And say hi to Rebecca for us.
P.S. It might help if I sent you our management plan template.
Take a look at the template Raj shared to get an overview of what you’re going to do in the next two weeks. The major tasks can be broken down as follows:
Tasks:
In Section A of the plan, lay the foundations of your departmental culture, including values, leadership style, ethics, use of space, communication approaches, and so on. Cite at least eight sources.
Produce a sample calendar of communication events.
In Section B of the plan, envision a space for sharing professional news, insights, and opportunities.
Identify people, sources, events, and educational opportunities to follow.
Create three products to kick-start your professional development space. At least one of these should be in audio, video, or visual format, and at least one should be based on your client’s chosen industry or sector.
Create a visual of your own professional development network.
Time: 2 weeks
A Little More Context
You’ve worked in different types of environments and experienced different cultural norms. Perhaps you’ve worked on teams with strict hierarchies and little time for small talk, where employees maintained boundaries around their personal lives and weren’t encouraged to share ideas or grievances. You might have also worked in settings where everyone chatted with one another, people brought in brownies, ideas were welcomed from staff members at all levels, and hierarchies were recognized but not emphasized.
Organizational culture arises from organizational values. If your company prizes the bottom line above all, or meeting quality standards, it will have quite a different culture from a workplace that prioritizes getting along. Organizational values affect leadership style and the approach leadership takes to mentoring, coaching, managing conflict, communicating within and without the department, and many other activities.
Organizational culture is supported by documentation such as a code of ethics and other written policies. This is where your management plan comes in. Having this plan in place will not only help you operationalize your values, it will help you hire staff members who support your mission and vision. Most important, it will help your department serve as a functional part of the organization. To orient yourself for this project, it might be helpful to review Organizational Culture: A Primer.
Your client’s management plan asks you to envision a professional development space for your staff and begin the process of sharing recommendations and insights. As a strategic communications professional, you need to stay current in the field. You also need to add to the field—to offer ideas as an influencer. Chatting with others at industry events, sharing links with your team, presenting at conferences, publishing journal articles, and maintaining a blog are all great ways to communicate your experiences and build on already circulating ideas.
Parabolic Radio Episode 302
As owner of an agency, Thomas Becher, Director of Marketing and PR Services, ECU Communications, spent decades earning the trust of clients and coaching a staff to meet their needs. Find out how he handles the logistical and relational aspects of leadership… and building a workplace culture.
Planning Your Work
You have two weeks to produce your management plan; be sure to read through all the steps of the project first so that you can plan your time wisely. Here is a possible task breakdown:
Week 4: Steps 1–3
Week 5: Steps 4–9
Submission in Step 8
Planning Your Work
You have two weeks to produce your management plan; be sure to read through all the steps of the project first so that you can plan your time wisely. Here is a possible task breakdown:
Project 2: Management Plan
Step 1: Consider Departmental Culture (Section A)
At your client’s request, you’re creating a management plan for the new department. Use the New Department Management Plan Template as a guide. Feel free to add to, consolidate, or rearrange the categories. The idea is to be comprehensive and give your client a concrete idea of how your department will operate. Because Raj will want to know that your policies are supported by research, cite at least eight sources as you assemble your ideas.
Your focus for this week is Section A of the template. Add the required frontmatter and then dive in.
Culture
To get started, conduct some readings on organizational culture (some of the contents will be familiar from the primer), workplace norms, and organizational health. As you read, take notes on the attributes that you believe would be optimal for your department. Also refer to your Project 1 notes; your management plan should derive at least in part from the culture of your client company. A start-up will have a different dynamic than, say, Johnson & Johnson or a community college.
If you believe, based on Glassdoor reviews or other sources, that your client has a dysfunctional culture, think of the policies your department could implement to model improvements.
In Section A, Part 1 of your management plan, broadly describe the departmental culture you want to create.
Specify your departmental values, identifying key traits or behaviors you want your staff to exhibit. For each, provide a description, explanation, and/or example. A Google search may yield value statements from other companies or departments if you want some inspiration.
Departmental culture also supports—and is supported by—departmental policies. Will you allow telework in your department? Do you have expectations regarding work-life balance or working hours? Does your department have a dress code? Draft at least five policies by which you would like your department to abide. You might want to research organizational internal policies to get a sense of content, style, and tone. Provide enough detail so that anyone looking at the policy will know exactly what it means. For example,
Each employee receives one designated telework day a week and may not swap telework days unless given permission from his or her manager. ather than Employees can telework.
Finally, consider the use of space, always a hot topic. Debates continue to rage over offices versus cubicles versus open space—and exactly how “open” open space should be (Bernstein & Waber, 2019; Kalra, 2020; McGregor, 2018; Schwab, 2019). Literature on this topic is fascinating; you can read studies on how different types of spaces affect collaboration, interaction, and satisfaction.
Determining how to use office space involves more than just choosing where and how people sit; it also involves planning for meeting spaces, social areas, and so on. For instance, you might want to adorn your walls with timelines and process documents, awards, campaign artifacts, exemplars, or art that gives your space a warm feeling. You might want to designate an area of your suite as, say, a design sprint space or a lab for testing ideas. If your staff members are embedded in different departments, consider the spaces you’ll need in order to meet and share work and ideas, ensure consistency in approach, and so forth.
Describe your approach to the space your department will occupy and explain your choices.
Code of Ethics
Now, move on to Section A, Part 2 of the management plan. Your organization likely already has an ethical code, but a code of ethics at the department level can help promote an ethical work environment. As you already know from your readings in ethics in strategic communications, strategic communicators draw from the codes of various public relations associations in addition to guidance or mandates provided by the sector, industry, or organization.
Review the PRSA, IABC, and IPRA codes, study your client organization’s code if you have access to it, and browse to find other relevant codes. A general search for company ethical codes might provide some inspiration.
Draft a code of ethics for your new department that contains at least five principles. Explain or provide an example of each.
Once you’ve finished Part 2 of the management plan, go to the next step, in which you’ll work on parts 3 and 4 of Section A.
Project 2: Management Plan
Step 2: Consider Leadership and Conflict Resolution (Section A)
You’ve completed parts 1 and 2 of your management plan. Now, you’ll complete parts 3 and 4, which concern your department’s approach to leadership and conflict management.
Leadership
Leadership is more than setting priorities and assigning tasks; it’s outlining a vision for your department, communicating that vision, and motivating or inspiring staff to pursue the vision in a consistent, collaborative, and functional manner. It also involves taking the emotional pulse of your reports and maintaining employee morale.
Take some time to explore leadership and leadership styles. Reflect on the leadership approaches you’ve encountered in your career. Perhaps you’ve experienced authoritarian leaders who quashed experimentation and water cooler chats in favor of getting the work done. Or maybe you’ve encountered those who, using a laissez-faire style, left decision making and problem solving up to the team. You may have seen glimmers of servant leadership, transformational leadership, LMX theory.
Given that you’ve already painted a picture of your departmental culture, ask yourself which leadership approach—or combination thereof—seems best-suited to your new unit.
One part of leading is coaching and mentoring. Building a learning organization is a goal in many departments and companies, as is developing leaders. As you think through this part of the management plan, consider what kinds of orientation, onboarding, coaching, and mentoring activities you’d like your department to engage in. You’ll develop a professional development plan in Section B, but that plan is focused more on networking and keeping up-to-date in the field. Here, you’re focusing on in-house ways to cultivate knowledge, behaviors, and skills. Would you, for example, have your employees set SMART objectives based on their performance reviews and work with managers to attain the objectives? Would you partner with HR to develop asynchronous training opportunities for hard and soft skills? What would you give new hires for onboarding? How often would you assess performance? How could you provide actionable feedback?
Conduct research as needed and describe at least three ways you would facilitate employee coaching and mentoring.
Finally, leadership involves reinforcing departmental standards, or internal controls or key performance indicators (KPIs), as they are sometimes called. One way to do this is through rewards and recognition. Consider workforce rewards and recognition and compose at least three ideas for motivating your staff. Be sure to explain the why. If, for example, one of your ideas was to provide weekly donuts to those employees who finished work ahead of deadlines, your explanation might be that efficiency is one of your values and you want to promote this quality.
Conflict Management
No matter how well-managed a department is, conflicts will arise. This isn’t necessarily bad; differences of opinion, if handled professionally, can yield improvements in process or creative breakthroughs. You do, however, want to have conflict resolution strategies in place. Codifying these strategies is important; if all parties involved know what to do, escalations are depersonalized and the emphasis is on moving forward rather than getting mired in politics.
Put together a conflict resolution approach for your team. Consider how you would handle not only disagreements among staff at the same level, but those between reports and managers and between personnel in different departments.
Although this conflict management policy is for your department, you are free to also recommend policies for resolving inter-department conflicts.
In the next step, you’ll compose your policy on internal communication, recommending channels and approaches for every communications need.
Project 2: Management Plan
Step 3: Identify Internal Communication Best Practices (Section A)
You’ve completed parts 1–4 of your new department management plan. Now comes the part that is perhaps most relevant to your skills and knowledge: internal communication and reporting.
Internal Communication
Take a moment to consider communicating effectively within a department and all that this entails, including using the optimal channels of communication for different needs and employing best practices for communicating between and among internal stakeholders. You might want to refer back to your Project 1 readings on organizational structure. Depending on how your staff is organized and distributed within the larger organization, there might be different communication pitfalls to consider, both inter- and intradepartmental.
Communication policies should include types of communication (one-on-one; team meetings; in-person and virtual), communication products (newsletters, intranet posts, emails), communication best practices, and so forth.
As you may have experienced, internal communication dynamics help make the difference between a functional and a dysfunctional unit. For instance, have you worked at an organization in which managers failed to explain decisions?
Or where there are so many meetings, no one could get the job done? Perhaps you’ve worked places where you could speak your mind only to your peers and not to those above you, or where airing grievances to management was akin to shouting into your pillow. Conversely, you might have experienced situations in which management took your concerns seriously and prioritized operations over politics.
This is your opportunity to create a department in which everyone is heard, meetings are purposeful and thoughtfully scheduled, channels are used effectively, and the focus is on keeping everyone informed and working in concert.
As you complete your readings, jot down some notes on the best communications norms for your department. For instance, would you include Slack, Google Hangouts, or Microsoft Teams in your menu of channels? When would be the best times for your staff to use these less formal tools, and what would be the etiquette around their use?
Once you’ve composed some general communication best practices, consider how staff at different hierarchical levels should communicate with each other.
First, top-down. How will leadership communicate with reports? What kinds of meetings and touchpoints will occur, and for what purpose? Consider different needs: information dissemination, performance reviews, one-on-ones, and so forth.
Then, bottom-up. How will staff communicate with departmental leadership? What kinds of meetings or products are needed? For example, would you want staff to submit status reports, and how often? How could staff convey grievances, ideas, tricky issues?
Don’t forget about informal check-ins. Is your department the kind where staff could simply poke their head into the manager’s office and ask a question?
Now, consider how staff will communicate with each other. What kinds of lateral meetings or touchpoints are needed? How should information be shared, and questions asked and answered?
Same with departmental leadership. What kinds of meetings and other communications will managers have with each other?
If you haven’t already done so, add recommendations on how grievances should be handled, in addition to ideas and suggestions.
Some departments use suggestion boxes, others designate time during staff meetings for sharing discoveries and insights, and so forth. There are many ways of building a communicationally adroit department; use your creativity and draw from your experiences to recommend communication best practices.
Communication With the Organization
Now that you’ve completed the first section of Part 5, consider protocol around communicating with the larger organization. How will your departmental management report to organizational leadership? To the rest of the organization? Consider whether you need to distinguish the means and frequency with which you communicate with different departments within the organization.
Sample Calendar Month
Create a sample calendar month showing all the scheduled communications and communication products you’ve identified. You might want to create two calendars: one for internal communication and one for external.
There are many ways of generating a sample calendar. Word has a calendar template that you can modify and fill in. Copy your calendar or calendars into the management plan.
