Meeting CIPR President candidate Pete Holt

I’m backing Pete Holt for CIPR President in 2022. He’s a moderniser with fresh thinking on governance and member engagement, and critical areas of practice including internal communications and ESG.

I caught up with Pete Holt, a candidate in the upcoming CIPR election, to find out more about his manifesto and motivation.

1. How can the CIPR’s Board and Council better represent members and the profession?

Our decision-making bodies could look more like our members, our wider profession and the society we operate in.  I’m really pleased to have encouraged colleagues such as Abha Thakor and Naomi Smith to run for Council. Monitoring the CIPR’s makeup would be a healthy start, so we can benchmark progress.

We also need to do more listening and sharing to build trust in the organisation. As a Council and Finance Committee member I’ve been shocked to learn that the CIPR budget contribution to all sectoral and regional groups was less than one per cent of the £4m+ budget in 2018. This inequality has the change and be levelled-up across the organisation.

2. You’re vocal about the need for radical change within the CIPR. What’s needed?

I am an inherent moderate by nature but these last two years on Council have made a radical out of me, to the surprise of no-one more than me myself.

I don’t think that CIPR needs slow and steady change at the margins. We need substantial, urgent and radical reform.  In our strategic direction, in our whole raison d’etre, in our operating culture, and our governance.

3. How has Brexit and COVID-19 impacted the CIPR and what do you plan to do about it?

As an Institute we need to put our finances on a sound footing.  Even before the Coronavirus they stood at less than a basic three-months turnover level. That’s not good practice. The pandemic has shown that good financial management is essential for survival. CIPR budgets for the next few years are going to need to put members first, but they’re going to need to be tough.

4. COVID-19 has forced practitioners to look to channels beyond earned media, if they weren’t before. What more could the CIPR do to support practitioners with strategic planning, PESO and measurement.

Can I use my answer to this question as an opportunity to demonstrate a bit of humility? The CIPR needs to support practitioners with more help in areas like these – but the truth is, I’ll be one of those who will be signing up for that help rather than writing the materials or delivering the training.

The good news is though, I’m not running for election to be all-knowing PR expert in chief – what I offer as a candidate for President is a clear strategic vision, and enough energy to drive forward change.

5. Public relations needs a louder voice to engage with business, public sector and government. What’s the plan?

I think the ultimate goal is certainly easier to state than to achieve: to get ourselves to the point where CIPR membership and beyond that individual chartered status are synonymous with the highest ethical and professional standards where if you want the best, you hire the MCIPRs and the Chartered Practitioners.

To get there, I think we need a twin-track approach – on the one hand, lobbying employers and clients to understand the central, strategic importance of effective communicators to their organisations. COVID-19 gives us the ammunition, so I’d like us to develop a bespoke, targeted set of approaches in making this case.

The second strand of this twin-track approach though is getting out own house in order.  It’s frankly just not good enough that only a minority of our members complete CPD annually. My radical plan is to redirect resource so that members actually get high quality CPD packages thrown in as part of their membership subscription – and from then on, I think there’d be little excuse not to see CPD completion rates sky-rocket.

6. Internal communication and employee engagement have emerged as critical functions in the past six months. How will the CIPR help practitioners capitalise on the opportunity?

I worked in the NHS from 1996 to 2002, in one hospital, for six different chief executives and four different NHS bodies.  I cut my teeth learning change management and employee engagement in a sector addicted to structural change.  So many of the younger generation of practitioners I think will look back on this pandemic as their great learning moment.

I think it is incumbent on us at the professional body to commission the work necessary now to capitalise on all this learning and experience.  Listening to our members who are living through this is central to that, of course, but when those self-same members who are the ones who never really stepped back down, they need support.  This is priority area and is something in which I think a modest investment in capturing the learning and translating it into useful toolkits, templates and lessons learned would be money well-spent.

7. Where do you stand on the PRCA?

I’d like to explore more cooperation with the Institute of Internal Communication, as well as the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Public Relations and Communications Association.  I think the market is overcrowded and that any benefits from competition between us are outweighed by the potential benefits of closer integration and cooperation.

8. ESG is one of the leading PR issues in public and private sector boardrooms and yet neither of the candidates has raised it in their manifesto. Is this a missed opportunity?

I don’t reference ESG – environmental, societal and governance – in my manifesto explicitly, but I address the environment when I address sustainability; I address societal issues in the manifesto when I talk about diversity and disability; and I address governance issues in my radical reform agenda. You’re right, like employee engagement, it’s a huge strategic opportunity emerging from COVID-19.

9. The time commitment to the role of President is significant. Can you commit to the role?

I am fortunate to have done well enough in my career to be able to plan in my year as President, if elected now, to not work full-time, so that I can properly commit to the role.  I don’t think that a President needs to be full-time, and indeed if they did spend all their time on CIPR work, I think they’d confuse what is a non-executive role with that of our permanent Chief Executive, which would be unhealthy.

I have held senior such roles before on both sides of the table – as the Leader of a London Borough council on the non-exec side, and currently as an Assistant Chief Executive of a council on the executive side – and I really do know the difference.

I’m also on course to have finished my MBA before taking office and am extremely confident that I can find the time needed to dedicate to this role.  I care passionately about the profession and the Institute, and I thank my mum for raising me with a public service ethos.

10. Why should members vote for Pete Holt?

If you’re a big fan of the status quo, and if you don’t want to rock the boat, then maybe I’m not the obvious recipient of your vote.

If my analysis, vision, concrete plans and sheer scale of change I am promoting resonate with individual members, and my capacity, skills, knowledge, experience, energy and drive to deliver my vision reassures them that I can push through such radical change, then I hope they will trust me with their vote.

Further information

Pete has shared his manifesto on his blog. He’s also writing throughout the election period about issues raised by members. You can connect with him on Twitter and ask a question @peterholt99.

Voting

Voting in the CIPR Election kicked off last week and runs until Friday, 16 October. The successful candidate will be announced shortly thereafter.