Newsflash: Your Communications Team is Your Technical Team

Just like all businesses are technology businesses, leaders must embrace the reality that all teams are technical teams.

I once had the head of an engineering department at a very large technology company tell me that he didn’t see a future for me on his team because he didn’t have headcount for “non-technical” staff. As a communications professional, I intuitively understood what he meant and could respect the business decision, but on a personal level, the comment always stuck in my craw. From my early days pursuing a job a Wired magazine in the mid-90s to my time at Cisco, Nvidia, and Amazon, I’ve spent my entire career in technology, deepening my knowledge of technical topics, and using my knowledge to be a more effective communicator, contributor, and business advisor.

Throughout my career, I’ve often heard leaders refer to communications teams as non-technical. In my opinion, this is an all-too-common mistake. Typically, communications professionals are lumped in with the lawyers, corporate marketing folks, and others, and put into the non-technical bucket. Not only does labeling certain contributors as technical and others as non-technical create an us-and-them mentality, but it also serves to undermine business effectiveness  of the latter by limiting their full potential to serve as decision makers, trusted advisors, and growth enablers.

A common truism is that in the future all businesses will be technology businesses. By this, pundits mean that the forces of technology—AI, data pervasiveness, digital application ubiquity, etc.—are so powerful that to ignore them is to artificially stifle growth in any industry. The same is true of employees. In the future, all employees will be technical employees. In the same way that businesses need to enable digital and AI capabilities across their functions, so, too, will they need to recruit and upskill contributors with technical knowledge and skills across their departments, including in communications.

So, if we accept that in the future all contributors will—by their very nature— be technical, how do we build that mindset into the culture of communications:

• Don’t allow employees to be labeled non-technical – advocate to the business that all teams are technical teams.

• Encourage a dive deep mentality – give communications teams the time for self-learning and encourage them to continue to broaden their knowledge and skills as part of their professional growth.

• Don’t segregate communications teams – don’t set up a structure where there are dedicated technology professionals within communications teams; instead, set the expectation that all communications professionals are expected to be experts in the business, including its technology.

• Reward innovation – Whether through regular rewards and recognitions or fun ideas like a corporate “Shark Tank” program, build recognition of thinking big and innovating into the team culture.

• Offer opportunities for ongoing learning – Make technical training and certification available to all contributions and encourage them to use it.

At the end of the day there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by embracing a technical mindset across the entire business. The same is true of cultivating a technical talent in communications and across all contributors. Embracing the idea that all contributors are on equal footing as technical employees only serves to broaden the number of people empowered to drive future business growth forward. This is even more true in communications, where the company’s representatives are already out talking to external audiences about the technology and the business every day.