Building a Complete, Effective Communication Strategy as a Regulatory Affairs Professional

Communication skills are critical to the role of a regulatory professional. For many regulatory professionals, the central focus for improving these critical skills is placed on communication with external stakeholders, such as representatives of regulatory bodies and government officials. At its best, this focus allows the regulatory professional to improve their skills within the highest-risk or highest-value interactions. At its worst, this focus sets the regulatory professional up for failure – the support necessary to build effective long-term relationships with external stakeholders can only result from effective communication within one’s own organization.
Further, the apparently low-stakes world of intraorganizational communication, when ignored, can unknowingly foster any of a series of paradigms within a corporation’s organizational behaviors that run counter to the critical goal of the regulatory professional: effective relationships that build structures of sustainable compliance. The proposed presentation examines the latent synergies within communication to provide strategies to simultaneously improve both internal and external communication processes. This includes:

• A set of processes for identifying critical stakeholders and their needs that fully contextualizes internal and external stakeholders, and, when iterated, clarifies their evolving needs over the lifetime of stakeholder relationships
• Analyzing examples of well-intentioned actions by regulatory professionals to create effective communication and their actual outcomes
• Building an effective strategy for predicting outcomes and changes to needs in stakeholder interactions using a 5 Whys analysis

Focus will be placed on identifying effective communication styles based on the nature of the message to be conveyed as well as personal habits that, when applied continuously in both low- and high-stakes environments open the door to synergistic improvements as an individual communicator and promote a culture of effective communication.