Douglas Wright co-founded independent agency, Wrights Communication, in Melbourne more than 35 years ago. We caught up with Douglas to get his insights on what makes a great PR generalist, the role of specialists and subject matter experts, and the development of people in the PR profession.

What defines a PR generalist, and what are their core skills and traits?
Let’s talk about generalists in general. In most professions, that's where you start. In the medical profession, initially you're a generalist. In accounting, you're a generalist.  In the law profession, you're a generalist.

So in the PR or communications profession - and I look at it as a profession, not an industry - we should have the same sort of approach as the other professions, which is where you get a broad grounding in the skills required to undertake your profession.

The most important general skill in communication is listening. That can be taught, or you can be taught to improve that with active listening.

The second general skill is curiosity, but professional curiosity, in that you wouldn't dare tackle a project, an issue or an opportunity without doing your research.

Creativity is also important and is kind of a subset of curiosity. How can I do this better? How can I do this differently?

Another generalist skill is secondary and tertiary knowledge, which is knowing where to go to get information.  You don't necessarily have to know it yourself, but you need to know where to go to get it, or you need to know who to talk to that does know where to go to get it.

How do you go about developing those skills and embedding those skills in your team here at Wrights? Do you have a structured training or education approach, or is it more just on the job learning, mentoring and coaching?
We have a structured approach and there are some very good people out there providing training courses.

I belong to the Public Relations Society of America and the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in the UK.  They have wonderful books and excellent courses, which I encourage the staff to participate in.

We have weekly in-house sessions on developments in communication, where we all are asked to bring forward something we learned in the last week and discuss that.

We have a budget for training, and everybody's expected to attend two professional training courses a year, which helps them in their professional development.

What are both the advantages and disadvantages of being a generalist in the PR profession?
You're working in a lot of different spheres, so you have a broader knowledge base and you have a broader network, because you have to work in different spaces all the time.

That network, even though they're not necessarily connected, can be beneficial if you're tackling a problem that might need a different solution. And because you're working in other areas, that solution occurs to you.

The disadvantages are that a lot of people think that you have to be a specialist to know something, or they don't necessarily think that you know what you're doing. So you have to be comfortable in saying no, I don't, but I've spoken with so and so who does, and I'm conveying that information.

When we're a consultancy, we work with specialists in their industries. We don't have to have the knowledge of their industry; we have to know the general parts of what's happening in the industry and have a concept of what's going on, but they're the subject matter experts.

We have to know how to get that knowledge from them and communicate it, or how to understand an issue and be able to address that issue on their behalf.

A good generalist knows when to call in the specialist. Oh God, I don't know this.  There's no way I'm going find this out. I've got to talk to somebody that does know it.

Looking at corporate and consumer PR, are there different skill sets that are required for each of those, and how do you equip PR generalists to work effectively in both spheres?
It depends whether you're talking corporate in Australia or corporate internationally. If you're working in corporate in the United States, for example, probably the most litigious jurisdiction in the world, then you have to be super cautious.

We work for US companies and we allow 10 days for a media release to be approved, because it's going to take that long to get through their legal system.

Consumer PR is more, shoot from the hip, but in corporate PR, you just can't.

Years ago, your database was clippings in a newspaper office. Now the database is the internet and it's accessible to anybody and everybody. A sin you committed five years ago is still as visible today as it was then.

In our part of the world, corporate's becoming more demanding, too. The ASX now rates companies on their ESG, and so everything you're putting out or communicating - all content - has to be prepared with the knowledge that it's going to be hugely scrutinized.

Do you think that PR professionals entering the industry today should start as generalists before they specialise in something, or is there value in choosing an initial specialism to delve into in the early days?
Everybody starts as a generalist, but the question is where do you start to specialise? Do you specialise at university?

Some people come out of university and you wonder what they spent the last three years doing, and some come out job ready.

I think that at some stage during a three-year degree, at least you should start to specialise, so you've got an indication of what you want to do.

And the differences between consumer PR and corporate PR and government relations get quite big as you get deeper into it - there are different skills required.

How easy is it for someone who has gone down that specialist route, who's gone into a niche partway through their career, to suddenly diversify and become a generalist?
If you've got the basic skills of communication, then those same skills can be applied.

You can specialise in a certain industry and build skills specific to that sector, but you will always take the basic skills of communication with you when you move on. And really what you're dropping off is the subject matter knowledge you’ve gleaned from your time in that sector.