Go and google “traits of successful public relations people” and the world’s favourite search engine will spit out page upon page of results, each written by an apparent sage expert on the art and science of PR.
There are many, many iterations of the list, but they all ultimately (and inevitably) come down to this baby-sized handful of personality traits: good communicator; creative; curious; informed; honest; flexible; multitasker; and thick-skinned.
Bah and humbug. Complete rubbish. These personality traits are as desirable in an orthodontist, call centre agent and prima ballerina as they are in a public relations account manager. In fact, they’re as needed by your average PR practitioner as they are by the chap who puts that little piece of paper that says “checked by CD491p” into your packet of shimmering sand pantyhose.
So, for the edification of those who imagine they know what is demanded of PR people, here are five real-human-being personality traits that enable us PR-ers get through the working day.
1. Time is irrelevant
You need to regard time as an irrelevant, meaningless concept that some (probably Zurich-based) Smart Alec fabricated with the express purpose of messing up your life. There’s never enough time. PR is driven by deadlines, and deadlines have a sneaky habit of ganging up on you and ambushing you from behind the photocopier when you’re not looking.
PR people never have downtime. We never stop thinking. We plot, we dream, we imagine. We take calls from clients while being wined and dined by gorgeously interesting people on full-moon Saturday nights. I have a friend who took a client call while she was in second-stage labour. We are woken at 3am by brilliant ideas that we scribble down in notebooks kept next to our beds. It’s a trick we learned from Keith Richards who did exactly this when the Satisfaction riff woke him from a dream one night in early 1965. We’re just rock stars that way.
2. A rollicking sense of humour
Often it’s only an appreciation of the absurd that gets you through the day. Like when you give a client your very best advice, which is routinely and scornfully dismissed, creating a situation that leads precisely to the disaster you warned against in the first place and that now needs to be repaired, post-haste, ship-shape and instantly. What can a PR person do but guffaw and get on with it? Because often it’s really, really funny. The outrageous almost always is.
3. A keen sense of the ironic
It’s an absolute fact that the universe has a wicked sense of the ironic. The printer, for example, will break down one second before you need to print your screamingly important 27-page document for the make-or-break meeting that’s taking place on the other side of town and that you’re already 10 minutes late for.
And on the day you wear your white dress to work (to make an excellent professional businesswoman impression on potential new client at a 3pm meeting), a bowl of beetroot salad will get up from the other side of the room and take a running jump at you. Or the computer crashes (and burns) seconds before you hit “save” on a document you’ve toiled and sweated over for eight hours, and whose deadline looms in 20 minutes. Go on, ask any PR person you know, and they will confirm that all these things have happened to them.
4. Calling us multitaskers is like calling Caster Semenya a jogger
You come into the office with the day perfectly planned. It all goes swimmingly until about 9am, when the phone rings. In the next 20 minutes, your meticulous planning degenerates into something that resembles a jelly and custard that’s been left in the Upington midsummer sunshine for too long.
Ours is a world of crises, of breaking news and of latest developments. It’s a world of responding quick-quick before deadline, chasing approvals and schmoozing irritable (and often irritating) journalists. We zigzag through our days like lightning in a Highveld thunderstorm and somehow – miraculously – get it all done on time and by deadline. Time management? What time management?
5. You’re a brilliant liar
Now, it’s one thing telling the whole, wholesome truth. You have to. You must. Or you land yourself and your colleagues in a Bell Pottinger situation that spells real horror not only for your agency, but also (in that particular case) for an entire nation. Shudder. However, it must be said that your average PR person tells at least one huge whopper every single day.
For example: “Oh yes, we can easily PR your new battery-operated tin opener”; or “Of course I’ve read the brief”; or “I’ve started the report, and should have it done by close of play today”; or “Yes, I am intimately familiar with the work of Wangari Maathai”; or (my personal favourite) “I love working in an open-plan office”.
