The Golden Thread
(Three minute read)
What is The Golden Thread anyway?
The Golden Thread is shorthand for a clear trail leading down through your corporate plan to on the ground delivery. For comms teams it’s also the basis for a strong internal narrative.
A successful Golden Thread starts with your Vision and Values, runs through your Mission and Objectives, and is felt deep into local team planning and even daily prioritisation. Critically, it’s then connected to your measures of success.
Without a clearly understood Golden Thread, business decisions can be based on reactive needs or the loudest voice.
But what’s it got to do with comms?
Sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter how many emails, posters, podcasts and events you provide, you still get that conflicting feedback. People are feeling under aware, but over communicated to. Sound familiar?
You have to have a thick skin in comms. What may be presented as a ‘communications issue’, can be a misfiring response to a wider frustration.
In this instance, if it feels like you just can’t get your messages to cut through, it may be your organisation’s Golden Thread has lost its way. Perhaps it’s unclear, perhaps it hasn’t been bought into in all areas, or it may simply not exist at all. This gap will no doubt trickle down into your communications activity.
What can communicators do to build a strong Golden Thread?
A confident and proactive comms team can share and apply their audience insight to help drive not just communications but business change.
In the ideal organisation, you would approach the top bods and work with them to identify and develop that Golden Thread as a narrative from which to hang their business decisions and your communications activity. Selling the idea, that by connecting up your local plans and people with your top level strategy you give it the greatest chance of success.
If this isn’t realistic for you, your own communications team can begin to create the Golden Thread from the bottom up. Use your corporate plan and measures to triage each request coming in: Does that project reflect our Vision, or could it? Is that message you want out tomorrow really aligned to our corporate priorities? If we combined this project with that, could we create better impact for a shared measure of success?
Applying that approach consistently shifts activity from scatter gun, towards ‘fewer, bigger, better’ and ultimately greater impact.
So pull out that corporate strategy poster, pack or whatever you guys do, blow it up big and put it on the wall. Physically print it out and stick it up. And if there isn’t one yet, make one.
Then if someone is pushing for your time and energy to be spent on communicating outside of the Golden Thread, point it out. Re-frame the request, rework it or cancel it altogether, and help build a business and comms approach with real clarity.
Credits: Shout out to Alex Noonoo and the great Internal Comms team at Parliament.