You Can’t Muscle Your Way into the Boardroom. You Have To Matter.

18 December 2025 Reading Time: 3 minutes

Sarah L. Manley Robertson, SCMP®, Prosci®, ABC:

I bit Nathan Smith.

He wouldn’t let me sit at his table.

I was five. The stakes were high: we were told that if we didn’t take a seat immediately, we couldn’t go on the field trip. I really wanted to see the live performance of Aladdin (long before Disney had anything to do with it).

So, I did what any small, determined child without a developed prefrontal cortex might do.

My punishment for this offence? A ride at the front of the bus, away from my friends, beside the kid who was always in trouble. (The kid who would eventually become a goal-scoring NHL enforcer, but that’s a story for another day.)

I really wanted that seat.

You Don’t Have to Teach Me Twice!

When I got my first corporate role, I knew my goal: to lead the function and earn a place at the executive table.

As I moved from managing tactics to owning projects, I eventually found myself in an executive comms role — embedded in the commercial organization. If I wanted the top job someday, I had to succeed there first.

I didn’t have a business degree or a background in sales. But suddenly I was surrounded by people who did — people accountable for numbers, customer relationships, and market performance. If I wanted access to their tables, I had to earn it.

What I learned very quickly: credibility doesn’t come from polished prose or flawless logistics. It comes from understanding the realities that shape someone else’s decisions — their pressure points, their risks, their KPIs.

They cared about:

• cost pressures
• customer expectations
• market dynamics
• what it takes to make the sale

They were never going to listen because I was confident in my message.

They were going to listen only if I could help deliver the business.

That’s the shift our profession still faces.

Too many communicators are “biting Nathan” instead of building trust and demonstrating operational & business acumen.

The Seat Isn’t Just About Trust. It’s About Value.

We know how trust is built — through curiosity, clarity, consistency, and competence.
But trust only gets you in the door.

The C-Suite is looking for contribution to the outcomes they’re accountable for:

• financial performance
• productivity and implementation
• customer outcomes
• organizational wellbeing
• risk management

If you can’t enter informed operational debates — or ask hard questions about shortfalls, trade-offs, and opportunities — you will always be adjacent to the work, not embedded in it.

The seat is reserved for functions and people who help deliver the business.

The Imperative: Being Operationally Indispensable

Corporate Communications is an operational alignment function essential to how complex organizations think, coordinate, and act at speed.  To operate at that level, communicators must evolve in three ways:

1. From Messaging Experts to Builders of Momentum

The real power of our work isn’t in what we say — it’s in what we enable people to do.
Our job is to:

• cut the noise
• clarify the “why” and “what now”
• reinforce the behaviours that move strategy forward

Great communicators create movement, not messages.

2. From “Telling the Story” to “Understanding the Work”

Influence comes from understanding where work slows down, where decisions bottleneck, how revenue and risk show up.

Understanding the dynamics in the market and around the table is what solidifies your place at it.

3. From Trusted Advisor to Strategic Operator

Being valued is about being relevant to the operations of the organization. That requires communicators who can:

• see operational risks early
• anticipate how decisions and changes will land
• spot gaps between what the market demands and how people behave

This visibility is achieved by working IN the business, not beside it.

These three shifts redefine your approach. But redefining isn’t enough — you still have to prove you can operate at this level.

Keeping the Seat: The Post-Trust Formula

Understanding the role is one thing. Operating at that level — consistently and visibly — is what proves you’re essential.

1. Know the Business Model Better Than Your Peers

If you don’t understand how the company makes/loses money, gets regulated, carries operational risk, or delivers value — you cannot operate at the required level.

2. Diagnose Business Problems, Not Communication Problems

Start with friction, bottlenecks, behaviours, risks, and clarity gaps — not messaging.
Executives prioritize people who fix what costs money or creates risk.

3. Measure Business Outcomes, Not Attention

Executives don’t care who opened the email.
They care whether people can act on strategy.
So measure:

• behaviour adoption
• alignment
• accountability

These are the lead indicators of achieving the organization’s scorecard.

The Seat Isn’t Taken. It’s Earned.

Biting Nathan didn’t get me anywhere.
The same is true in our work. 

You don’t get the seat by force, insistence, or volume.
You earn it by becoming the person who makes the work easier, the decisions clearer, and the path forward less complicated — so the business can move.

That — supported by a little earned trust — is what keeps you at the table.

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Sarah L. Manley Robertson is President and Founder of Prospect Strategies, Limited, and is a Strategic Columnist.

Written by: Editor