What Is Capacity Building and Why Is it Essential for Organisational Success?
Sometimes an outside perspective is the clearer perspective.
—Shannon A. Thompson, author
Capacity building is about bolstering and ultimately transforming your brand’s PR and communications function via bought-in services from an external firm.
While the key to effective capacity building is a collaboration between the external firm and the in-house team, there are distinct things, from soft yet important skills like a fresh perspective and an unbiased view to technical competency and breadth of experience that the firm brings to your team, making the process transformative.
Here are 4 reasons why capacity building is critical for success:
Outsider’s Perspective
An external firm brings an outsider’s perspective to much-needed solutions to your organisational and communication challenges and needs.
In fact, when groupthink has led to a drop in performance or continual lagging behind the competition, they bring us on board.
“We are like bees that go from flower to flower,” says CEO Farzana Baduel, referring to working with several companies at a time. This allows her to identify the best communication practices for a particular company quickly.
“We work with 3-5 clients at the same time, so we get to see a lot, and are able to quickly piece together the big-picture issues in a company culture that might be invisible to PR people embedded within the company.” Someone within the company might not be able to notice what are otherwise predominantly existing repetitive cultural or management issues in their industry, like uncreative culture or lack of trust in employees.
Unbiased View
Capacity building involves suggestions to the C-suite for improving their PR, marketing, or communications processes. It might also involve suggestions to allocate increased budgets to communication departments.
Since not many CEOs and senior management have a communication or marketing background, there is a basic knowledge gap that prevents them from fully understanding what the PR specialists, in-house or externally, are suggesting.
Given the high stakes that are involved in the implementation of the suggestions, it is important the C-suite feels that the reports are coming from a reliable and unbiased source.
So, in our experience, CEOs prefer and feel at ease if the suggestions come from an external agency, which is not a part of the internal politics at the company and that has no personal gains to make from the implementation of their suggestions.
Diverse Culture
The consultants you hire bring their own individual culture as well as the culture of the agency they are a part of.
For example, when you work with Curzon, you get access to a diverse team, both ethnically, gender and neurodiverse and with respect to industry background/career path. Our consultant’s previous experience spans accounting, engineering, political, finance, and journalism.
According to Baduel, “Diversity is a core value of Curzon PR and is our professional elixir. Not because it has become fashionable for virtue signallers, but because the diverse team offers a myriad of perspectives which allows robust strategic pathways and critical thinking.”
Research shows that the most-diverse enterprises are also the most innovative.
Our senior consultant Bahareh Khezr agrees when she says, “Best ideas come from diversity.”
In fact, some people including journalist Ruth Umoh of Forbes believe that a diverse organizational culture even helped companies have an easier time during the pandemic.
Breadth of Experience
Since agencies work with clients on capacity building for different kinds of issues from technical and managerial to cultural, it gives them a breadth of experience and a wider perspective.
For example, Curzon has worked on everything from IT and the latest software for remote work to onboarding and restructuring for its clients.
This allows them to spot and solve for seemingly-unrelated issues across your organisation.
Not just that, in fact, a 20+ year study by Philip E. Tetlok found that ironically, experts are less accurate predictors than non-experts in their area of expertise.
Hence, especially for poorly-defined and ambiguous areas (like marketing and communications), breadth of perspective trumps depth of knowledge, writes Vikram Mansharamani, a global trend watcher who advises people how to anticipate future, manage risk, and spot opportunities, in HBR.
Curzon PR is a London-based PR firm working with clients globally.
For new business enquiries please contact Bahareh Khezr, [email protected]
For media enquiries please contact Shaifali Agrawal, [email protected]
For general enquiries please contact Adél Steyn, [email protected]
Curzon PR is a London-based PR firm working with clients globally. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our Business Development Team [email protected]
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