Saturday, May 17, 2025
Saturday, May 17, 2025
By Mike Klein and Janet Hitchen:
The second half of our Navigating Disruption podcast season brought together communication leaders with diverse perspectives and experiences to explore how our profession is confronting unprecedented challenges. From AI-powered personalization to the shifting expectations of business leaders, our conversations revealed critical insights about what it takes to thrive as a communication professional in today’s environment.
Amanda Todd, Senior Director of Communication at Expel, broke the traditional ceiling by successfully moving from internal communication to leading corporate communication. As Mike noted, “It’s really rare for a senior communication professional to be someone who’s come up through the business, particularly a big global industrial business.”
When asked about this career progression, Amanda challenged its rarity: “Gosh, why is it so rare? It really shouldn’t be so rare.”
Susan Jackson of BASF represents another powerful example of a non-traditional path to communication leadership. With a chemical engineering degree and a career spanning operations, product management, and sales, Susan offers a rare perspective: “I was a non-traditional communication person because my background, I have a degree in chemical engineering.” This technical foundation proved invaluable when she stepped into communication: “That’s an internal comms problem to solve. We didn’t have any conduit between North America and Germany. So we fixed it.” When Mike asked what attracted her to internal communication specifically, Susan emphasized the employee connection: “You have to bring your employees along with you… You want to know that you’re working for people who are doing the right thing. You want to understand how your actions are making an impact.”
For Amanda, the jump makes perfect sense: “If you can’t make fans out of the people that work at your company, then you’re never going to be able to tell much of a convincing story externally to people who don’t even have any skin in the game.”
Her secret? Getting close to strategy and business fundamentals. “When you’re in internal communication, you’re in the thick of everything – culture, leadership, employee needs. You’re directly interacting with leadership. You get really close to the stories that matter the most.”
Each of our guests emphasized the importance of proactively identifying and addressing organizational gaps. As Mike put it when discussing Shan’s approach with executives, “It’s a bold move. It’s also a risky move. If you screw something up at a management conference, everybody in the organization knows.”
Amanda Todd shared a transformative perspective she received early in her career:
“Entrepreneurs are nothing but problem solvers. What they do is they look for gaps… In my mind, I thought, I can do that in a way that architects my career.”
This approach has consistently delivered results: “A lot of my career has been take the gap, find it, find the hole, step up into that gap. And that has worked for me in almost every role I have ever had from a communication perspective.”
Shan Chatoo, Global IC Director at SThree, exemplified this mindset when building relationships with executives: “What will happen is we’ll get to a day where you’ll say, I establish rules for my different segments, my different audiences. And I want to deliver this at a, I don’t know, seventh grade reading level… And it will do that, but I think it will sit in a queue waiting for you to approve it.”
The role of AI dominated our conversations with tech entrepreneur Tarek Kamil offering a compelling vision of how it will transform our work. Mike captured the essence of this transformation: “What makes my heart sing is that it automates production, but not strategy. It automates the process without automating the thought.”
Janet highlighted practical concerns about AI implementation: “Is AI there yet? Is AI able to create different versions of the same thing without hallucinating? Can I, as a leader of an organisation or even just as the head of internal comms or communication, trust it to do that?” Her focus on practical applications resonated across our conversations.
Personalization emerged as AI’s most immediate value. As Tarek explained: “What if you let AI tailor the message on your behalf to different audiences based on whatever rules you’ve established?”
However, our guests warned against removing human oversight. Mike raised an important question about personalization versus traditional channels: “This is still a top-down distribution channel. To what extent are we also going to look at how communication flows laterally?” As Janet noted during our conversation with Tarek: “You can’t just automatically publish a different version without having some kind of control.”
Tarek Kamil emphasized that AI should automate production, not strategy: “If you are constantly drowning, you can’t then take the next step to say this video actually produced this benefit to the company. So you’ll never become strategic. AI can enable that.”
A persistent theme across all episodes was the critical importance of connecting communication work to business outcomes. Mike challenged the conventional approach: “Even if what we offer is net positive from a financial perspective, even if the impact can be a kind of a rounding error… Why should we even bother talking about return on investment? Why not talk about risk?”
Janet emphasized the need to look beyond communication-specific metrics: “I think it’s around KPIs and measurements… employee engagement survey should not be what an internal communication team is measured on. You should not be measured on the fact that you’ve gone from 82 to 85. It’s completely arbitrary.” She advocated for focusing on business outcomes: “If your campaign is great, how are you tying that back to the business? This is the biggest thing for how not to be made redundant.”
Susan shared how her role at BASF spans both sustainability and communication, requiring clear business impact: “I like to tell people that I’m a non-traditional communication person because my background, I have a degree in chemical engineering… I can do both things, right? I understand the technology. I know what the business is up to. And apparently, I can communicate it properly. So it’s a win-win for you.”
Amanda Todd echoed this sentiment: “We spend too much time telling everyone else’s stories and we often forget to tell our own.”
Shan Chatoo addressed the limitations of traditional metrics: “I’ve not looked at anything to do with the clicks or links… All the metrics that actually really work and really are the most important are the ones that are owned by marketing, commercial teams, HR, finance.”
As Tarek Kamil explained: “If you went to the CEO and said, ‘We posted this video and it got 500 views,’ they don’t know what that means to the business. You need to show the video was about some new safety procedure. And then you would say it reduced incidents by 13%. Each incident saves $10,000. That is an ROI.”
With AI’s growing influence, our guests emphasized the importance of transparency and ethical boundaries. Mike pointed out an important tension: “3% of people drive 90% of conversations in the organization… A lot of the effort that organizations spend in communication is inundating that 90%. The issue is how do you add this element without spooking out the population?”
Janet offered a compelling perspective on transparency and trust: “It’s making me think about some of the stuff that Amy Edmondson has done on psychological safety. There is something about being honest about who you are… If people understand that, then they’ve gone into the whole thing with their eyes wide open. They can feel psychologically safe because they know where the guardrails are.”
Susan emphasized the human element in communication about sustainability: “You have to bring your employees along with you. We’re people. Wherever we’re working, you want to know that you’re working for people who are doing the right thing.” Her approach balances transparency with practical guidance: “Education is key for our employees and for people who are not our employees. Because what does it mean to us?”
When discussing employee concerns about AI monitoring, Tarek noted: “People as consumers understand that technology is watching their behavior and using it to get smarter to deliver an experience which they ultimately love.” The key is clear communication and transparency about how data is being used.
Our conversations revealed a profession grappling with significant change. Shan Chatoo was blunt about the state of readiness: “I don’t think we are [ready for what’s ahead]… We need to take 30, 60 steps back and we need to reconnect with what’s going on in the world.”
Janet highlighted the need for more strategic thinking: “I’ve seen a lot of people going for the accreditations. A lot of people are saying, how can I actually prove that I know what I’m doing?” She reflected on the evolution of the profession: “We were in the same position that HR was about 20 years ago. ‘What do you have for being an HR person? I don’t, I just happen to like people.’ I think that’s what’s happening right now for internal communicators.”
Susan shared her approach to developing as a communication professional without formal training: “I’m not one to say that I know everything. So I’m always also talking to people who are professionals in the communication field, talking to different people and learning what I didn’t know, honing the craft, getting connected with professional organizations just to make sure that I knew what was up and what the trends were.”
Amanda Todd highlighted the importance of preparedness: “Having a good flow chart of how you handle geopolitical tensions. What do you speak out about and what don’t you? What is close to your mission, vision, and values? What matters to your employees? Having an understanding of what makes sense for you to speak about is important.”
Discussing the shift to more directive leadership, Mike posed a challenging question: “Do you see the trend towards leaders going back into a really directive top-down mode of doing things? Telling people what to do, ordering returns back to the office… Do you see that as an ongoing trend and do you see that trend, if you see it, as something that’s gonna make it more difficult or easier for us to get the resources we need to do our work?”
Janet brought data to the conversation: “Nick Bloom, a Stanford professor and top voice on hybrid working, had an article in HBR about A-B testing of hybrid work. Hybrid and fully in-office showed no differences in productivity, performance, review, promotion, learning or innovation. And hybrid had a higher satisfaction rate and 35% lower attrition rate.” She further highlighted research showing the value of flexible working: “They found that flexible working was worth something like five billion* to the UK economy.”(*corrected)
Susan addressed the practical reality of hybrid work in manufacturing environments: “Our manufacturing footprint is larger than our white collar footprint. And so that is always a constant topic of discussion. How are we reaching the people in the plants? And are we doing enough to reach them the right way?” Her approach prioritizes clarity across diverse environments: “We have people in Canada, US, and Mexico, everybody’s not going to come together… it’s going to be different ways, different things, but consistent messaging.”
As we move forward, communication professionals who demonstrate clear business impact, embrace appropriate technology, and maintain strong ethical boundaries will be best positioned to navigate the disruption ahead. As Shan advised: “We need to stop talking about comms trends. Comms trends are interesting, yeah, great, wow, but actually what’s going on in the world – that is what you really should be concerned about.”
Mike Klein and Janet Hitchen are co-hosts of the Navigating Disruption podcast, focusing on helping communication professionals, leaders and organizations navigate through challenging times. Prepared with generous assistance from Claude, our AI editor.
Written by: Editor
© 2025 Stratpair Ltd., trading as Strategic. Registered in Ireland: 747736
