A Tale as Old as Time

Sarah Poulter:

Tale as old as time….

When we see that phrase, many of us will immediately start humming the tune from Beauty and the Beast. It’s an instinctual reflex born from years of singing that song or watching that movie (willingly or otherwise if you have small humans).

In internal communications, we have our own special version of a tale as old as time. The bandwagons we like jumping on to discuss the seat at the table we so deserve, the fact no CEOs take us seriously or the fact we’re brought in late to decision making and told to send out an email no questions allowed.

It’s exhausting, and it’s been going on for years. And as yet, I see no end in sight.

Echo chambers and glass ceilings

A month or so ago, I attended a webinar that attempted to solve the future for the positioning of Internal Communications, in particular the challenge that comes from AI. TLDR: The answer was let’s align to HR and position ourselves as an HR discipline and own or contribute to Employee experience. Job done.

Last week, I saw a piece of thought leadership that stated that internal comms should be more marketing. Campaigning, segmenting, tailoring. That’s how we will succeed in the future, and it’s so blindingly obvious that the author seemed surprised it hadn’t been done already.

The IOIC, whilst doing genuinely important work for our profession, still defines excellence largely through a communication lens rather than a business outcomes one. Even at the most senior level, the framework measures capability through activities; channel infrastructure, content quality and  stakeholder influencing, rather than through whether the strategy actually landed.

Whilst Level 4 rightly includes contributing to organisational strategy and acting as the conscience of the organisation, the presence of ‘develop and monitor implementation of a high-level communication calendar’ as a senior leadership activity tells you something about where the ceiling sits. If you’re a proper Head of, someone in your team should be running that process. Not you. The ceiling of the framework describes someone who is excellent at internal communications, but not someone who is indispensable to organisational performance. Without a level ‘5’, are we selling ourselves short?

And finally, post after post after post on LinkedIn talks about how we need to be better at influencing senior leaders so we can become strategic advisors. Yet from personal experience I have seen internal communications go from being ‘in the room’ and listened to, to out of the door carrying their pot plant when a new CEO comes in who believe internal comms organises the Christmas party and distributes branded merch to increase advocacy, whilst employee engagement happens because of one night a month of free beers down the local pub.

What actually is the point of all this?

So what is the answer? And in many cases, what actually is the question? We don’t know who we are, let alone who we should aim to be in the age of AI.

To first answer the question of what are we here to do, the answer cannot and should not be to look around to other functions and try to emulate them.

I have often led IC functions that sit within HR functions. And worked with some pretty cool HR people (you know who you are). But on the whole, the agenda of most HR functions skews the internal comms strategy away from delivering business value and moves it more firmly onto the fluffier end of the ‘making people feel good about coming to work’ scale.

It prioritises wellbeing and engagement over driving alignment with the business strategy. And when strategic IC practitioners challenge the say/do gap between leadership powerpoint slides and actual behaviours, that’s when IC becomes vulnerable. Or tactical ‘yes’ people get brought in instead.

Aspiring to be more ‘Marketing’ also doesn’t come without its issues. Treating IC as a series of campaigns reduces the whole discipline to one of its parts. Campaigns have their place, but amplifying content when the work environment employees actually experience doesn’t resemble the jazz hands version of life you are promoting is more disengaging than empowering. And spending money on branded biscuits for the launch of the latest marketing campaign when people have had their pay frozen for two years due to poor overall business performance is simply a daft idea. More soggy biscuit than Paul Hollywood handshake.

When it comes to CEOs’ views of strategic communications, I would love to start a campaign for a strategic communications module/foundational underpinning of its importance in MBAs and other CEO education tracks. I have observed CEOs at the start of their journeys, or those who have led small businesses (where ‘internal comms’ has by dint of business size organised pizzas, parties and beer) stick with that wrong expectation of communications when they move up their own career ladders. And in doing so, chip away at the strategic value of communications because they simply don’t know what they don’t know.

The moment of reckoning

Which brings us to what our future should be, and why AI has absolutely raised the stakes. ChatGPT can supposedly whip up a full comms plan in five minutes…. Not a good one, granted, but the mere concept leaves us even more vulnerable. Because being absorbed into HR, or marketing, or not being taken seriously by CEOs means a profession that adds unseen but tremendous value to a business’ bottom line risks disappearing altogether. Or being reduced down to the parts people understand, and not the glue that makes the difference.

When you boil down what is left in most jobs once AI has cut a swathe through the busy work, you get to one very simple and very human skill. Contextual judgement. Decision making every day that needs to have the right inputs to deliver the right outcomes. If you’re faced with a green wire, a blue wire and a white wire and you have 10 seconds left before the bomb explodes, you need to know which one to cut and why.

Our job should be to make sure that the person defusing the bomb knows which wire to cut. Not to make sure they are thinking about it in an ergonomically designed chair with a cup of nicely brewed tea waiting for them. And when the person who needs to defuse the bomb is a CEO, we need to make sure they are absolutely aware of all of the second and third order effects of the decision they are about to make.

Not every building is Nakatomi Plaza with Hans Gruber storming a Christmas party but every business relies on all of its people knowing which decisions and priorities result in growth versus which don’t. And to know which work matters, and not do the work that adds nothing but makes them look busy. In an age where the machines can remove a lot of the noise on a to do list, surely the priority for us should be on sharpening and supporting the contextual judgement based work that only humans can do? AI won’t drive growth without us shaping how.

If as a profession we focus on making people feel good about being at work, then we’ll be an HR discipline within a decade.  If we focus on campaigns and amplification of content, Marcomms gets another string to its bow.

But if we actually start to be able to properly define how only we have the unique positioning, insight and capabilities to translate business strategy into execution, creating clarity so employees can make the right decisions to drive growth, then we will finally be able to stand in our own power.

Internal communications is the one function with the licence to care about everything and everyone. How the strategy lands. How the purpose is lived. How the values are experienced. How customers are treated. And how decisions are made. We are the ones who can see the ripple effects when a butterfly sneezes in Texas, and it is about time we stop looking to others for the answers and started advocating for strategic communications for what it actually is. Raise our own ceiling, because we provide the ultimate contextual judgement that no business can live without.

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Sarah Poulter works with CEOs and executive teams to close the gap between strategic intent and organisational execution in businesses where things are moving quickly and the usual interventions aren’t working.  Her track record includes the £5.4bn take-private of Hargreaves Lansdown and Intact Financial Corporation’s £7.2bn acquisition of RSA Insurance.