Being a Strategic Partner – and why it’s harder than it looks

Second in a three part series with Angee Linsey, Lisa MacMillan and Louise Thompson:

Ask most senior communications leaders whether they see themselves as strategic partners to their organizations, and the answer will almost certainly be yes. Ask their executive colleagues the same question, and you get a rather different picture.

The data Louise Thompson cites is sobering: only 17% of senior executives have high confidence that their communications function is well-prepared for the current environment. That’s not a perception problem that can be fixed with better messaging. It’s a leadership gap — and closing it requires something more uncomfortable than advocacy. It requires honest self-examination.

Thompson is direct about this. The obstacles to strategic credibility aren’t always outdated hierarchies or leaders who don’t value communications. Sometimes, she argues, the problem lies closer to home. Communications professionals who speak in campaign metrics rather than business outcomes, who respond to decisions rather than shaping them, who measure success in outputs rather than impact — they reinforce the very perception they’re trying to overcome.

Angee Linsey arrives at the same destination from the career side of the road. Her most persistent derailer for mid-career communicators is the habit of mistaking doing for leading. Being known as the person who delivers — reliably, thoroughly, quickly — sounds like a compliment. But at director level and above, it can become a ceiling. The question leadership is asking isn’t whether you can execute. It’s whether you understand what the execution is actually for.

Both Linsey and Thompson converge on the same core challenge: the shift from functional expert to organizational leader requires a change in identity, not just behavior. Thompson describes it as moving from tactical operator to strategic partner — and notes that the shift is as much internal as it is visible. For much of her own career as a Director of Communications, she had the title but not the influence. The turning point came when she stopped equating leadership with authority and started treating it as an opportunity to shape outcomes.

That reorientation has practical expressions. Thompson points to three: connecting every communications initiative to organizational priorities through what she calls the “golden thread,” using data that speaks the language of the boardroom rather than the communications function, and actively challenging the self-limiting beliefs that keep talented leaders operating below their own potential. Linsey echoes this with her own provocation: the most effective communicators are those who show up in cross-functional conversations, ask the uncomfortable questions, and resist the safety of narrow specialization.

There’s also the visibility question — which both Thompson and Linsey treat with care. Linsey is clear that visibility is not vanity; it’s survival. Waiting for good work to be noticed is a strategy that rarely pays off at senior level. Thompson goes further, identifying the echo chamber problem: comms professionals spend considerable energy talking to each other about their strategic value, while underinvesting in the relationships — with chairs, non-executives, finance and operations leaders — that would actually build it.

The warning signs that this is going wrong are recognizable once you know to look for them. Linsey maps them precisely: being invited to implement decisions you weren’t part of making, updates being cut short, wins acknowledged with silence rather than recognition. These are not random slights. They are signals that confidence is eroding, and the window for course correction is narrower than it appears.

Thompson’s advice for those who find themselves in this position is to resist the impulse to defend the track record. Instead: name the tension, reframe the role, and rebuild through transparency and consistency. Trust, she argues, isn’t restored with promises. It’s restored through a demonstrated shift in the quality of your presence and the relevance of your contribution.

None of this is comfortable work. But both columnists share a conviction that it’s available to anyone willing to hold the mirror up without flinching — and act on what they see.

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For part one in the series, “Is the Comms Jobs Market Frozen, or are You?”, click here.

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Angee Linsey, Lisa MacMillan, and Louise Thompson are Strategic Columnists.