Remember how the 2008 US presidential election gave birth to a number of topics that filled PR seminars and ‘thought leadership’ content for months, if not years, afterward?

It was hard to get more than three PR people together in a hotel conference room without one claiming to have invented crowd-sourced campaign content, like the Hope poster, or unleashing the power of owned (versus paid or earned) media content, like Sarah Palin’s Facebook posts, or unlocking the doors to massive youth engagement through micro targeting and clever graphic design.

Elections, like the Olympics or major oil spills or Arab Springs, are like Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s: the leftovers far outlast the meal, often with diminishing quality. And yet we PR peeps – never ones to let possible lessons learned go unappreciated – gobble them up like turkey and pie.

So what can we expect from the Mega-Billions 2012 Election Extravaganza?

Two steps forward, one step back.

That’s how it often feels in some communications departments today. You get most of the budget you need, but not all. You’re able to establish a firm ROI on your recent campaign, but someone on the board still wants to know the advertising equivalent. Or you establish reputation as a core pillar of the overall corporate strategy, only to have the CEO pursue it half-heartedly – or less.

This is the third trend of the recent European Communications Monitor (ECM) – the difficulty in fully aligning business strategy with communications processes and capacity.

This is this first of a five part series on the European Communications Monitor (ECM), sponsored by Ketchum.  The ECM is one of the largest surveys of communications professionals in the world, run by the European Public Relations Education and Research Association (EUPRERA), the European Association of Communication Directors (EACD) and Communication DirectorMagazine, drew data from more than 2000 participants in 42 countries.

Few professions embrace fashionable jargon like PR.
We leverage, synergize and optimize like nobody’s business. We look for paradigm shifts and win-win scenarios while socializing the next big idea, occasionally settling for low-hanging fruit or double-clicking on a notion to get some buy-in. After all, at the end of the day, nobody wants to be left filling the plastic cup with yesterday’s news.

So you can imagine my delight in discovering what could very well become the new black in this year’s line-up of trendy business terms: polyphony.

Agency people can be notoriously difficult to lead. We’re hired for our self-confidence, after all, we’re not lacking for a sense of purpose or the ability to influence others.  We’ll chart our own course, thanks very much, and the rest of you can either follow or get out of the way.

And while few of us doubt our right or capacity to lead, each of us will reach a moment at some point in our careers when we need a little inspiration on how to lead. I’ve reached many such moments, in fact, so I’ve begun jotting down lessons gleaned not from my own experience as a leader at the front, but as a follower in the back – real-life demonstrations of good leadership that have stuck with me over the years, setting standards I still find challenging (or downright elusive).