A private programme for communications managers who want to understand the work, make better-informed decisions, ask useful questions and lead their social media team with greater confidence.

Social media is one of your organisation’s most visible and fast-moving communication functions. Yet many communications managers inherit responsibility for it without ever having had the opportunity to step back and understand how the whole function works - or how it could work more effectively.

Your team may understand the platforms better than you do. But as their manager, you are still accountable for the direction, decisions, resources, risks and results.

That can be difficult when you’re unsure what good looks like, how to interpret the reporting, what questions to ask, or when to challenge the team and when to trust its professional judgement.

Without that understanding, teams can become reactive, approvals multiply, and reporting can reward activity rather than meaningful progress.

Understand the function. Lead it with confidence.

The programme combines two areas:

• Understand the function: platforms, algorithms, audiences, content, community management, data and strategy.

• Lead the function: direction, priorities, risk, resources, team support, performance and organisational influence.

We’ll combine structured learning with the real situations facing your team. You’ll have a confidential place to ask questions, test your thinking and explore issues both during the sessions and through light email support between them.

By the end of the programme, you will be better equipped to assess your current approach, set clearer priorities, recognise strong work, interpret performance, support professional judgement and explain the function’s value to others.

For your organisation, that means clearer priorities, more consistent decisions about risk and resources, stronger reporting and a better-supported team.

This programme may be useful if:

• You have recently inherited responsibility for social media.

• Social media forms part of a much wider communications remit.

• Your team understands the platforms better than you do.

• Your team needs clearer direction, support or organisational buy-in.

• You’re unsure whether your strategy, reporting or ways of working are strong enough.

• You need to make better-informed decisions about priorities, resources or risk.

The five sessions

1. Understand the environment

Develop a practical understanding of how social media works now and the challenges this creates for organisations.

• How social media is changing

• Platforms, algorithms and distribution

• What my social media database reveals

• The attention challenge

• The trust challenge

2. Understand the work

See the whole function, including the important work that is often invisible to people outside the team.

• What every social media function needs in place

• The visible and invisible work involved

• How work enters and moves through the team

• What gets in the way of stronger work

• The common curveballs and pressures teams face

3. Set the direction

Establish a clearer role for social media and make deliberate choices about what the team should—and should not—prioritise.

• The role social media should play

• What good social media strategy looks like

• Audiences, outcomes and the dials you’re trying to turn

• Making choices about channels, content and capacity

• Moving from reactive to proactive

4. Judge performance

Build a more useful view of performance and ask better questions of your reporting and data.

• What matters and what matters less

• Lead and lag indicators

• Questions to ask of the data and reporting

• Benchmarking and tracking meaningful progress

• Turning performance data into an organisational asset

5. Lead the function

Create the conditions for people to exercise good judgement, produce stronger work and keep the strategy on track.

• Giving the team useful freedom and guardrails

• Improving approvals and decision-making

• Keeping the strategy on track

• Supporting capability, confidence and wellbeing

• Influencing the wider organisation