- Does a company made of Listening Leaders still need a corporate communications department?
- The crossway for communicators: blue ocean or red ocean?
- What is needed to become a communicator of the blue ocean.
- A new value proposition for communicators: contribute to profitable growth.
If you are neither in corporate communications nor a CEO you can skip this chapter altogether.
If you want to save yourself a week in sunny Orvieto in Umbria where in my summer camp I teach communicative leadership, you may find this chapter an interesting alternative to wasting your time learning, accompanied by great food, good company and lots of interaction in one of the most beautiful and culture-rich landscapes of my home country.
In 2006, with my colleague and friend Claudia Reichmuth, we wrote a piece with the title ‘Away with communicators!’ It was the first time we tried to pin down what we had practised at Allianz.1 The response (or lack of response) it received – with very few exceptions – told us that we were either totally off track or maybe slightly too aggressive in claiming the end of corporate communications.
Today, I’m convinced we simply were too early. The corporate world hadn’t had the time to digest and reflect upon the havoc created by Enron and the mortgage crisis in the United States. The surge of customer-related KPIs like NPS was not yet linked to the overall transformation of a company. We were still munching solely on the remnants of the decades of shareholder value.
What prompted Allianz to engage in the journey of communicative leadership was a board meeting at the turn of the century.
Bad marks on succession planning
The item on the agenda of the executive board was the discussion of succession planning for the most important positions in our company. When it came to my position, the head of group communications, my embarrassment grew and I truly hoped it didn’t transpire. The gentlemen around the table said nice words about me, how I was the right man in the job and all sorts of nice stuff. I smelled something coming up. I was right. The CEO drily said that my leadership team around the globe was not up to the new challenges and that it would be hard to find a successor should I fall in love with a Brazilian salsa dancer and move to Rio. I knew what was behind this message. I wasn’t up to the new challenges either, and this was the face-saving way the top people of Allianz had just told me.
More knowledge of our core businesses was needed, the ability to interact at eye-level with underwriters, claims people, fund managers and all the smart lawyers and brainy actuaries that make up a company running insurance and asset management operations.
If this wasn’t a wake-up call, I don’t know what would have been. I stammered something like I needed to discuss this with my boss one-on-one and then I would come back to the board with a proposal.
I prepared myself thoroughly for the meeting with my CEO. I discussed the issue with my most senior team members and I was confronted with some hefty messages by them. The C-suite may be right in considering us simple communications experts but our job was to sweep away the dirt they left us dealing with. Almost every communications crisis we had to manage could have been avoided with some basic understanding about communication by line managers and staff at large.
I didn’t like the way this was going. It seemed as if they hadn’t heard the message about ‘us’ and wanted to reply with a message about ‘them’. It’s not our fault, they said, it’s the managers’ inability to handle most situations with some common sense. What mattered were legal terms and algorithms and not the story behind it, the people, the customers.
Fortunately, our chief legal counsel had his office in the same building as mine, actually exactly the room below me, one floor down. I went to see him and asked for his advice.
If you’re a communications person, you might fathom our conversation. You expect our top lawyer to stress that our role is to teach the press about the legal intricacies of our contracts, our claim settlement practise and our underwriting.
Far away from the truth. This man is the perfect example of what a good chief legal counsel is. Of course he knows almost everything he needs to know about the liability law in most countries and about how to fight in courts. But he is also a very cultivated father and a manager gifted with loads of common sense.
What he told me was surprising: ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we all need to become better communicators.’ God bless him! That was what we needed to do. Transform communicators into managers and managers into communicators.
I then went to see the global head of human resources. I asked what he might do to help us with training our management in the basics of effective communications. He honestly answered that he hadn’t given a thought to this challenge, but he was about to create a corporate university and that we might well work together to make this a compulsory part of top management training. That was the breakthrough.
We prepared a presentation for our CEO that lay the groundwork for communicative leadership at Allianz. We used a very simple picture to illustrate the endeavour.
At our next meeting, I was bold enough to propose a deal to the company: we would set up a programme called the Certified Communicator. This would be a mix of an assessment and a development measure. All communicators who wanted to apply for a more senior job than the one they held would have to undergo this programme and be endowed with the blue passport. Only this passport would entitle them to get a better job. Nobody was forced to take it, but without it, career advancement would be impossible. At this programme they would be taught all the basics of our core businesses, based on the annual report, on interaction with the C-suite in strategic workshops, on an assessment with role-plays and a comprehensive knowledge test.
I saw my boss smiling. That was what he wanted. I’m not sure whether he wanted the second part.
What I had presented was only the communicator’s part of the deal, however. This effort would only really help the company succeed if the management would respond to my commitment with equal currency. We would do our best to improve the business knowledge and quality of the communicators. In turn, the management of the company had to learn how to communicate effectively. This would allow us to pre-empt crises at an early stage but also to improve our leadership (as shown in Figure 7.1, illustrating the yin yang of communicative leadership).
He listened to me and with the matter-of-fact-attitude of the real leader he simply said, ‘Yes, go for it.’
That’s how we started to train hundreds and hundreds of managers in effective communication and how we assessed dozens and dozens of communications people who won their blue passport. Among them, my successor. To prove the point at the beginning, that I would be able to provide the company with a solid succession plan. And I didn’t leave for a Brazilian salsa dancer, by the way, but to start a new professional career.
Figure 7.1 The yin yang of communicative leadership
This book is mostly about the things I learnt in management development and how to train managers to become Listening Leaders.
This chapter, in turn, is about what is necessary for corporate communications people to become accepted partners for the business.
The old paradigm of corporate communications is that of a mumbling number-cruncher in a pinstripe suit and a multi-million-dollar-salary speaking in Cobol and Java (I said it’s the old paradigm!) and pushing the punch-card under the door to the PR-person’s office, where a cosmopolitan, extroverted former journalist would translate the punch-card into employese, shareholderese, customerese and societese, the languages of four distinct stakeholder groups.
With the revolution of social media and the empowerment of the individual, as well as with the surge of the average citizen as the most trustworthy source in society and the average employee as the most credible source in a corporation a new paradigm is necessary.
That of communicative leadership, where the corporate communications people help set up a stakeholder governance and organise the exercise of listening to the stakeholders and making sure that this input is discussed within the company and finally used to adapt the strategy. A communications function that doesn’t only react well to crises or manages the reputation of the company, but a function that truly contributes to profitable growth.
We discussed this approach in a workshop with some peers from globally operating corporations with the support of the Arthur Page Society as well as challenging it with world-class communications scholars like Toni Muzi Falconi, then New York University who asked me to provide the Allianz case for a book that finally appeared in 2014, with the contribution of the doyen of communication research, Jim Grunig of Maryland.2
Does good corporate communications correlate with profitable growth?
Yes it does. In the project done with Bain and Media Tenor and briefly mentioned in Chapter 2 we looked at best and worst practices in our company.
We picked five subsidiaries that were so-called loyalty leaders. According to the terminology of Bain, the company that discovered the impact of the Net Promoter Score, loyalty leaders are companies with the strongest NPS in their market. In other words, those companies that lead profitable growth in their markets by the highest enthusiasm of their customers, or the top rate of recommendations from one customer to another. Then we picked four loyalty laggards. These are the companies that constantly shrink in their markets, losing customers.
Then we looked at two key performance indicators: the engagement of their employees according to the global Engagement Survey as well as their media awareness and the tonality of the media reporting as monitored by our media analysis institute.
The result was absolutely adamant: the loyalty leaders had both outstanding track-records in media communications and internal communications, the two crown disciplines of corporate communications (see Figure 7.2).
Figure 7.2 Leadership culture survey and employment engagement index indicate that employee communication is also relevant to NPS
Source: adapted from Allianz SE
The scientists among you will ask two questions, I presume: Understood that there is a strong correlation. By the way, was it higher than R3? Yes it was. The second question will be: Accepted that there is a strong correlation, where’s the causality? Is the company growing because of good corporate communications or does a company growing profitably have a CEO who understands the importance of media and internal communications and practises it to a high standard?
Actually for the purpose of this book and the practice behind: I couldn’t care less about the answer. Because what works is the yin yang, both efforts paying into one account. Good leadership and good corporate communications both drive profitable growth.
On agenda-setting media …
Every corporation has to be aware of the importance of the so-called agenda-setting media. They can kill your reputation in a second. It’s those quality media like the Financial Times, The Economist or the BBC in the United Kingdom, but also the major dailies, including the tabloids. In Germany it would be the public TV, Der Spiegel and dailies like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung and the tabloid BILD. And so on for CNN, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Washington Post in the United States, Le Monde, Le Figaro, Public TV in France and you can fill in the boxes for all major countries.
These media set the agenda. Every corporation has to be fully aware that it needs to be sure to have a constant presence in those media, always above the media awareness threshold.
Why, actually? Isn’t it smarter to keep a very low profile in the media, especially these media, known for good investigative journalism and their independence? It may seem so, until you’re faced with a crisis. A corporate crisis will always trigger the interest of the agenda-setting media, and normally a bad situation turns into a crisis because of the reports on that difficult situation by these media.
The only way to survive a corporate crisis covered by agenda-setting media is to constantly be present in these media by your own initiative. Interesting interviews, op-ed pieces, research of public interest by your company, comments and press releases on market relevant issues: make sure that the amount of regular reporting breaks the sound barrier of public awareness. You better track this media presence day by day, month by month through one of the few media analysis companies who can explain to you what the media awareness threshold is in every market. It’s your duty as a PR professional, to make sure that you generate constant coverage. Should the inevitable moment of a corporate crisis come, this amount of reporting will help you to buffer the effect of a crisis. People will read about the crisis but they will also associate your brand with all the good output you had generated before and hopefully continue to generate, giving you some credit for it, credit you can benefit from in a crisis.
There’s an obvious second reason that should encourage you as a PR professional to entertain frequent interactions with reporters from agenda-setting media: you get to know the reporters on your beat. Through them you will be able to understand what readers (or viewers) expect from your products and your company at large.
Agenda-setting media reach all stakeholders of a company. Their impact on purchasing behaviours of customers is smaller than their impact on the overall reputation of the company, at the beginning. It takes a prolonged period of negative reporting not counterbalanced by any reaction to slowly change consumer patterns until they reach a tipping point from which it is then difficult – or impossible – to recover.
Research on the mutual influence of traditional and social media hasn’t really shed light on when power shifts from the one to the other and under which conditions. From practice we know that traditional agenda-setting media now use social media themselves, both to market their outlets and news and to gather information from social media sources. In other words, both matter and both increasingly influence each other, sometimes in a surprisingly simplistic way: a European newspaper decides on its printed front page edition based on the page views of their online edition at deadline. Which brings about the Waterloo of quality journalism. But it is what it is and a corporate communications professional needs to adapt to the chameleon-like mutations of journalism in these years.
The interaction of social media and agenda-setting outlets
Increasingly, blogs and social media platforms are becoming sources equal to a CEO or another C-suite member for agenda-setting media. A company statement is mirrored by a statement of a customer in the blogosphere or a disgruntled employee on the many new platforms where people can anonymously voice their thoughts and information on employers.
The average citizens are empowered by social media and gain a public voice as individuals. Plus, they become the source for agenda-setting media – with more weight than the C-suite or the PR people.
I was sitting at a fireplace in the middle of nowhere in the Masai Mara, in Kenya. I was a guest of my friend Riccardo Orizio, an old-hand of investigative journalism, writer of books on dictators and lost white tribes on our planet, a friend of the late Richard Kapuzcinski, whom he worked with to set up three marvellous lodges in Kenya. We were speaking of how the journalistic profession had changed and I asked him whether political reporting was somehow affected by online reporting.
He told me the story of 19-year-old Thomas Van Linge, an Amsterdam student. The war correspondents covering Syria, Iraq or Libya all know him very well. He is a regular source to CNN, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, even though he has never set foot in those crisis areas. Why on earth should these agenda-setting media rely on him as a source and for what? Thomas van Linge makes ‘some of the world’s best maps of chaotic war zones from the desk of his childhood bedroom in Amsterdam’.3 ‘He Skypes with fighters on the front, corresponds with activists and charities and even gets messages from other cartographers. In all, he claims to use over 1,100 sources for his Syrian maps.’ In easy-to-understand colours you can regularly track the areas controlled by ISIS or the government forces in Syria. You can follow him on his Twitter account @arabthomness.
An average citizen equipped with a computer and a Twitter account has become an important source for the general press.
On customer-relevant media
Next to agenda-setting media it is crucial to become aware of the media which drive customer recommendations. These media only very rarely are agenda-setting media, and if they are, it’s normally the tabloids who have one foot in each camp, the one shaping a company’s reputation and the other adding or subtracting customers.
Most of the customers are influenced by social media and more specialised media outlets. How to reach out to customers is the almost precise science of big data and that’s what good market management or marketing people do. Corporate communications people who don’t work hand in hand with their marketing colleagues are destroying value for the company. Media communicators need to perfectly know which media drive consumer behaviour, whether it’s social or traditional media, specialist magazines or blogs or YouTube channels.
This analysis comes first. Then comes the constant monitoring and interacting with these media. Corporate communicators working in companies using customer KPIs like NPS have to have a clear map of the media that drive the reputational agenda of the general public and of those who drive customer behaviour and they have to serve both.
With social media we step into the new world, altogether. While journalists are used to working with corporate communications and relate to common ethical and professional standards, this is not true with social media, the media of the empowered average citizen. They can only be tackled with the full support of the average citizens within your organisation, all the employees. More on this in the next section on the blue ocean of communications.
The first conclusion of our project was finding a sound correlation between customer recommendations and media work. It is necessary, therefore, to change the media work. It is necessary to separately consider, treat and interact with agenda-setting media (that’s good practice in most companies, anyway), customer-relevant media (this needs to be better aligned with purchasing patterns, marketing and customer KPIs than it has been previously) and social media (that’s new, altogether, because it involves the commitment and action of all leaders and, ultimately, all employees).
So far, we are still more or less in the old world, in the red ocean of communications. Red because of the blood of harsh competition, of sharks eating barracudas and barracudas eating maccarels and so forth. Its the traditional world of corporate communications with its old core discipline media relations, even though applied to the new media, as well, more or less with the same professional toolkit.
The real challenge starts with transforming the whole organisation, becoming the sounding board and enabling partner of the Listening Leaders within the organisation and with and through them with the whole staff of the company.
The blue ocean of communicative leadership
Next to the red ocean of PR there is a new, largely undiscovered blue sea for communications professionals, still uncoloured by the blood of competition, because there is almost none. Very few companies have started to practise communicative leadership and very few communications professionals are equipped with the proper tools for this blue ocean, yet.
While communicative leadership aims to transform a company it also needs a new breed of corporate communicators to succeed.
Today’s and tomorrow’s challenge is to wire all the internal and external connections of a company into a neuronal network that constantly communicates. The role of the communicators is like the role of neurotransmitters in our brains, they have to connect the dots. Well beyond the old ivory tower of corporate communications, confined to a dialogue with top management only acting more or less as their loudspeakers or, in the better cases, as their translators.
Corporate communicators in the new world of the blue ocean basically have four roles:
- Monitor internal and external audience: Map the stakeholders, monitor and analyse and create a stakeholder governance. This will mean new job opportunities for mathematicians, IT specialists and analysts in corporate communications departments.
- Enable management: Join hips and efforts with all the other corporate functions, from HR, marketing, IT, sales, operations, investor and governmental relations, compliance to ESG office and CSR in order to ensure that internal stakeholders are enabled and empowered to practise meaningful information and communication. Communicators will therefore have to learn to teach and educate or seek help from professional educators joining their ranks in corporate communications.
- Ensure good listening: Be the stewards of EMMA, of state-of-the-art corporate listening throughout the organisation, on behalf and with the full support of the C-suite. This means strong empathy will be the crucial recruitment factor for new staff: psychologists can enrich corporate communications teams.
- Drive change: Make sure that the organisation hears what was said and constantly challenges and adapts its strategy accordingly. This calls for strategy specialists, change management experts, people with a management consultancy background and MBAs to join corporate communications.
To achieve this, a much stronger cooperation is needed between corporate communications and the other company functions.
In order to successfully manage the transition to a new balance in stakeholder governance and finally to communicative leadership, language trainings are needed. The corporate communicators need to learn the language of business, of operations, sales, HR, IT, product development and delivery, compliance and so on. And these corporate functions need to learn the language of listening, EMMA.
This is exactly why we have invested so much time at Allianz to invest in corporate education and setting up the Allianz Communication Academy. It offers courses from media-training for the new world of blue ocean to ‘Becoming an Accepted Adviser’ or ‘Being a Trusted Sparring Partner to the C-suite’ to ‘Voice and Body Language’. The good thing about this programme is: These courses are open for participants from any other company, provided the participant speaks English and pays for it.4 That’s where listening is learnt and taught. The better the listening quality of corporate communications is, the more likely it is that they teach managers and staff.
That’s why recruitment of communications professionals will change. From the traditional reserve of journalists, politicians and PR people from not-for-profit organisations, corporate communications departments will need to recruit more behavioural psychologists, educators and trainers, marketing people, big data analysts and mathematicians as well as more people with a law or business education, expertise in strategy and business development.
Furthermore the exchange between the corporate functions has to be strongly increased. Communicators have to spend time working with the other corporate functions, learning their processes and teaching them listening. Communication departments need to host colleagues from other departments to see how the different functions shape the reputation of the organisation.
Never forget that reputation is nothing more (or less) than sustainable behaviour. The purpose of these staff exchanges is therefore to understand how the behaviours of the company impact the stakeholders and whether it transforms them into detractors or promoters of the company.
Some comfort from academia
Academia is often, as it happens, in the lead. Even though it is seldom perceived as such by practitioners. What listening means from a strategic point of view to communicators was addressed by Maria Borner, University of Leipzig, in her master thesis on corporate listening (2015).5 She criticises that in practice corporate communication is often misunderstood as simply one-way messaging. She defines corporate listening as a strategic mode of communication, in which articulated impulses from stakeholders are perceived, interpreted and evaluated in order to support the company’s decision-making process, or, in other words, its strategy. The analytical counterpart is corporate messaging, conveying content. It is a strategic decision whether the communication function focuses on corporate messaging or on corporate listening. She understands corporate listening as a major communication mode, expressed in the structures, strategies, processes and measures of corporate communications and beyond, on all levels of the corporation. In this way listening can create value through enabling operations, adjusting strategy, creating intangibles and ensuring flexibility. It’s worthwhile reading if you look for an academically sound perspective on this issue.
Learning, learning, learning
Communicators furthermore have to undergo learning themselves: on the new media work, on leadership, on motivation, talent development and most other HR practices, on business matters and on strategy.
They are the first that have to undergo the training outlined in Chapter 3 on ‘Enabling’: strategy, customer focus, listening, crisis management and crisis communications, effective communications, effective presentation and integrated reporting.
(Mystery) shopping
Communications professionals of the blue ocean have to have their ear to the ground of the prairie, able to hear the bisons coming. They should use the products of their own employer, unless you sell steam engines. If this is the case, talk to those who buy your engines. Experience your products and services as much as you can. Every year every communications professional should spend a week in the shoes of the company’s customer.
The result for the customer
We have seen the importance of having a strong KPI per stakeholder. We have also seen that a more comprehensive yearly reporting process to the public should be provided, next to the standard annual report with the financial results. There is one stakeholder that we mostly care for, though, the customer. Why? Because an enthusiastic customer is at the beginning of the virtuous circle. An enthusiastic customer will recommend your company and this will drive profitable growth. That’s exactly what investors are interested in. Only committed, enabled, empowered and therefore motivated employees can drive the customer experience to a 10. This will create employment, increase payments to the tax man and provide a reason for being of this good corporate citizen to society at large.
What’s the conclusion? Do you remember the example in Chapter 1 of an airline that would publish its safety compared to that of the competitors, benchmark punctuality, service, prices and offers? Wouldn’t you be surprised to read in plain talk what still doesn’t work in customer delivery, benchmarked to competitors. Wouldn’t this increase the credibility of this company?
Let’s then imagine a yearly ‘Result for the Customer’ report that tells customers (and all other parties interested), how your company performed in customer delivery, product quality and servicing of the customers. Written in plain language, addressing flaws as well as strengths of the company. Telling single customer stories, good and bad experiences that are symptomatic for that year’s performance in respect to the customer. In case of the flaws, the customer would understand where the problem lay and how the company intends to fix it. Wouldn’t that create trust? Especially if based on objective data and KPIs. Compared to competitors. Should you not want to name them (out of respect, out of fear for their bad reactions or for whatever other reason), you could simply give them letters from A–X, naming your own company only and showing where it stands in the market.
Believe me, this will invite customers and media to ask your competitors why they haven’t published these data and how they are treating their customers. You would gain a true advantage and set and shape the agenda. Every year you could show your improvements on the way to become the most successful company in the industry. Don’t be afraid of the first year or bad results. Honesty and transparency will pay off and this transparency will be there internally, too. All employees would know where to focus in order to improve their customer focus substantially. The first company to have published such a result for The Customer already exists, it’s Allianz Deutschland, now for the third year in a row. Be the second one. Or the first to do this, globally. Get ahead of your competitors. Have the endurance and courage to make it a long-term exercise; this only pays off if done consistently over the years, good and bad ones.
Media, the bad guys. Really?
I hear the moaning: media won’t follow us on this journey. They don’t care about our products and customer feedback unless it’s negative. Far from me to defend a whole category, especially since I practised journalism myself and still am a member of the professional journalists association in Italy. But try to do the EMMA exercise with people working for media outlets who have seen the birth of online media and a totally new competitive landscape. This is the biggest revolution in the sector after the widespread use of TV.
If the information is relevant and meaningful, you will find your audience in the media, traditional ones, agenda-setting outlets, blogs and social media. Do as all managers do: map your stakeholders, find out their EMMA and see where their needs converge with your offer. Or create an offer. Stay close to the media and follow their own journey to reinvent themselves and adapt to the change driven by internet.
Constructive news
So, are journalists, tabloids, media manipulative? No, fortunately not, the majority isn’t. And how some media reacted to their loss of trust and credibility in the last decade teaches us a useful lesson for business information: don’t be negative at all costs. Whenever you describe a negative phenomenon, draw a lesson, show where people dealt constructively with a negative situation. Ulrik Haagerup calls it ‘constructive news’. ‘Good reporting is seeing the world with both eyes. Not missing the important stories about ebola in West Africa, hunger, bombings in Gaza and Ukraine and millions on the run from terror in Syria. But also seeing stories which can inspire and engage because it shows the opposite; things that work, people doing something extraordinary to solve important problems. The big picture.’6
What can we learn from this for business information? That while you should never brush the difficult issues under the carpet, when you do, you can also show how these difficulties are being dealt with constructively elsewhere. We cannot only learn from other experiences, a solution somewhere else can ‘inspire and engage’ where we are right now.
Why should you do it? Because it’s right and fair? Yes, of course. But also because it’s successful. Media adopting the constructive news concept of Ulrik fare better in terms of reach and audience than others, starting with the success of Danish TV news, the outlet Ulrik Haagerup is the head of.
Who’s the real boss?
How interconnected stakeholders are and where reputation – good or bad – plants its seeds, is not always a question of media. Communicators should be aware of the impact small behaviours of the organisation can have on big business opportunities. Sometimes lost, because we didn’t thoroughly do our homework.
Martin worked for an electro-engineering company, selling almost everything from power plants to white goods. As part of his training to become global head of corporate communications, he spent some time selling the power plants of his employer. One day he has a very important appointment: he is meeting the CEO of a large utility company considering buying one of Martin’s company’s power plants. Martin is perfectly prepared for the meeting, has learnt everything necessary on the main product features, on safety of the product, on technological edge. He is not an engineer, but his potential customer isn’t either. What happens is beyond his imagination. He starts to illustrate the product features and the state-of-the-art technology. Suddenly the CEO uses Martin’s pause for breath to ask a simple question: ‘How good is your customer service in case of a crisis?’ Martin is well prepared and recites the procedures from the customer crisis manual. He sees a very sceptical look in the eyes of the top manager and potential customer. Time to let him translate body language into speech. Which the CEO does: ‘Look, I just can’t recommend buying your power plants for my company. My wife won’t allow me to.’
Martin is flabbergasted. His wife? He swears mutely, reproaching himself for not having done his homework. It’s crystal clear that the CEO’s wife must be an engineer with the company or a scientist or somebody with strong arguments. That was actually true, but not in the domain Martin suspected. The CEO’s wife was a traditional lady managing the household of the family. The CEO explained: ‘We bought a washing machine from your company. It broke after one week and your customer service is lousy. We talked to them several times, they tried to put the blame on us and how we were allegedly not able to use the washing machine properly, they read us the instructions of the machine over the phone as if we couldn’t read them ourselves. They lectured us. Nobody has shown up yet to fix the damned thing. Do you want me to buy a power plant from you? How can you guarantee that when there is an accident you don’t treat us like you treat my family at home? It’s the same company, isn’t it?’ Average citizens: the guy from the customer service and a housewife had more to say in a multi-million deal than the CEO and the company representative.
Sitting next to the driver seat – but only with a driving licence
It is absolutely unthinkable for a company to grow through communicative leadership without the head of corporate communications sitting at the table of decision making, the executive board or executive committee. She doesn’t need to be a member of this body. Actually, I advocate that this would be wrong, allowing all the others to continue business as usual and put the blame of bad communications on the professional board fellow: EVERY leader has to become a communicator. The corporate communicator has to be a facilitator and manage the structured dialogue with stakeholders through a well thought out stakeholder governance.
The steward of stakeholder dialogue therefore has to sit close to the driver seat. If this is not the case, yet, discuss it with the CEO. If your participation at the executive meetings and the board is rejected, make up your mind: stay in the red ocean of the old world and sell your services with the good old toolbox of corporate communications: crisis communication, media relations, internal communications, social media relations. Full stop. Forget blue oceans, your increase in market value by helping to deliver profitable growth through your function and all the nice stuff you’ve read so far. Just accept being a humble translator of the announcements of the company.
The other choice is: quit. My strong belief is, companies who don’t read the writing on the wall of empowered citizens and their trustworthiness as promoters of profitable growth, are doomed, sooner or later. They will not be able to keep and renew their license to operate. By quitting, you might be the first rat (sorry for this) to leave the sinking ship.
Buy yourself Ultimate Question 2.0 and look up the companies who work with NPS and who got the core message of customer enthusiasm. You’ll find a list of excellent employers who would probably jump at the chance of a competent communicator of the blue ocean: Allianz, Apple, Lego, Philips, Progressive and many others. Leave the stubborn employers who don’t get the message of good profits behind. Join the winners.
Participation of the chief communications officer in the top governance body’s meeting is the litmus test of communicative leadership.
Be careful, though: if you as a communication professional are not up to the challenge, being next to the driver won’t help you, it may damage you. The board or executive committee is not the omniscient body. They have to take decisions. But the grounds on which they make these decisions should be owned by the communication professional at the table: the communicator should know better than the C-suite how the average citizen and all the stakeholders perceive the company.
She should be on top of the financials of the company, know the product factory from inside and have experienced the purchase and sale of the company products.
She should then have all the intelligence available to support decision making.
Just sitting at the table, taking notes and smiling politely will make your boss consider a Siberian re-education camp for you. The deal is: the Chief Communication Officer has to contribute to decision making by delivering the voice of the stakeholders and thereby is granted to be a part of modern King Arthur’s Camelot, the boardroom.
As we concluded in the piece Claudia and I wrote in 2006, this means a new self-consciousness by the professional communicators, who are not immune from some common top management diseases like vanity. Many like to be the shrewd Machiavelli guiding the helpless number crunchers through the wicked mazes of the media and take over the dialogue with the employees through internal communications.
It’s the same conclusion the Arthur Page Society (APS) came to. The APS is an interest group of chief communication officers and researchers, which I’m a member of. The conclusion of their study ‘A Building Belief’ in 2012 was that the king discipline of the new chief communication officer would be what they called ‘Advocacy at Scale’: ‘Turning changed behavior into active advocacy [of the stakeholders] on behalf of the now-shared agenda.’7
Communicators in the blue ocean of communicative leadership enable all managers and finally all employees to entertain the dialogue with stakeholders. They don’t take themselves seriously, they take communication seriously.