ATTENTION UK COMMS PROS: Help define the future of public relations as a management discipline

Stephen Waddington:

A Strategic contributor aims to solve the problem at the heart of our value proposition.

Public relations has been chasing legitimacy for more than a century.

We talk about being strategic, sitting at the management table, and contributing to organisational value. But too often, we’re defined by media relations, messaging, and reputation management.

The hard truth my doctoral research at Leeds Business School has forced me to confront is this: recognition as a management function will remain elusive until we resolve our lack of definition, evidence and professional standards.

Ask ten practitioners to define public relations and you’ll get ten different answers. Most will default to communication outputs. Only a few will describe our real potential: managing the relationships between organisations and the stakeholders that matter to them.

This confusion makes it easy for other disciplines, from marketing to management consulting, to grab the work and the budgets. It also makes it harder for organisations to understand and invest in our value as a management function.

What my research shows

I’ve spent the past three years reviewing more than a century of management and public relations literature. Three things stand out:

• Alignment earns credibility: where public relations is connected to organisational goals and strategy, it is recognised as a management function. Where it isn’t, it gets stuck in tactical delivery.
• Weak measurement blocks progress: without outcomes that matter to management, we won’t get the influence or investment we want.
• Patchy professional standards undermine legitimacy: compared with law, finance, or HR, our profession lacks consistent entry routes, qualifications, expectations for continuous learning and accreditation..

It is not all bad news. There is a cohort of practitioners who operate at the highest levels of management. There are also situations, such as the pandemic and other crises, where public relations has demonstrated its strategic value.

Help shape the evidence

This is where my research now turns to practice. I’ve developed a practitioner survey to test these conditions at scale. The survey takes 10 to 15 minutes and is open to in-house practitioners at all levels in the UK. It explores:

• Where your function sits in the organisation and how it’s perceived.
• How you measure and demonstrate value.
• The skills and competencies you bring to the table.
• The barriers that hold you back.

👉 Take the survey here

I recognise that Strategic’s readership is international and includes agency and independent practitioners. But for this study, the focus is on in-house practice, and the academic process requires me to limit the scope to the UK.

This is an opportunity to shape the evidence base that our industry needs to prove its value as a management discipline. Thank you for your support.