The Royal Navy is the smallest of the three Armed Forces, employing 38,300 personnel. At the beginning of the year, the Royal Navy had begun to focus on getting its messages across and put its case forward for the Government to commit to spending £20 billion on a replacement for Britain’s Trident nuclear submarines as well as two £4 billion 64,000-tonne aircraft carriers.

At the same time, there was substantial media speculation as to what could happen to the Royal Navy post-Strategic Defence Review that is due to take place after the General Election in May 2010.

For example, The Times openly speculated that the Royal Navy may need to be reduced still further in order to achieve cost savings, a reduction in the mine sweeping fleet and plans for a future class of warship to be drastically scaled down and there was discussion about the Royal Marines being being subsumed within the Army.

It was against this backdrop that the Royal Navy approached us to discuss its training requirements.

The Influence Team at the Royal Navy play a pivotal strategic communication function for the entire Royal Navy and is led by a Rear Admiral, supported by an Assistant head, Commodore, Commanders and Lieutenant Commanders that work closely with the MoD Media Ops and PR teams.

We held several meetings with Commander David Shutts OBE in order to identify key strategic communication competencies and skills required to improve the performance of the Influence Team.

Training requirements

In discussions with Commander Shutts,  the communication training programme was to be delivered over two-days at the Ministry of Defence, Whitehall and would be divided between 'hard skills' and 'soft skills'. "We recognised that many in our team wanted to get a deeper understanding of industry best practice for effecting strategic communications; learn techniques that would increase our team's efficiency and learn how we could complement each other more effectively and play to our own skills sets better," explains Commander Shutts.

In particular, there was a need to appreciate better the appropriate measures of effectiveness for strategic influence, better judgment the Royal Navy's "customers" and measuring effectiveness of the work of the Influence Team.

Design of the training Programme

The 'hard skills' element - Day 1

• Introduction to current strategic communications thinking and practice
• The Internal Perspective
• The External Perspective
• Best practice examples from the public sector
• Best practice examples from the private sector
• Gap analysis - perception and reality
• Communications strategy
• Communications best practice
• Powerful and persuasive messaging
• Using creative thinking within strategic communications
• Tracking & evaluation

The 'soft skills' element - Day 2

• Employee communications and the relationships they support
• Verbal and non verbal communication
• Face to face communications
• How to deal with objections

Delivery of the training programme

This was a mixture of analysis/discussion, interactive voting techniques, scenario problem-solving that was appropriate to the Royal Navy as well as a review of communication best practice, including personal presentation and influencing skills.

Separate follow up training sessions on a one-to-one basis with the Rear Admiral and Commodore were also delivered.

Feedback from Delegates

This has been one of the most successful training programmes we have delivered and we have established an on-going training and mentoring programme as a result.

To view the video testimonial from Lieutenant Commander Andrew Griffiths, Royal Navy click here

 

To discuss how we can work with you in empowering your team performance in sales, marketing, communication and presentation call us today on 0207 580 2819 or complete our feedback form

 

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