Monday, May 12, 2025
Monday, May 12, 2025
By Janet Hitchen and Mike Klein:
Over the past months, our Navigating Disruption podcast has brought us into fascinating conversations with some of the brightest minds in organizational communication. Reflecting on our discussions with Jason Anthoine, Christopher Wade, Natasha Plowman, and the Lithuanian consultancy duo Vija Valentukonytė and Giedre Simanauskaite, we’ve identified several critical themes that are reshaping how effective communication professionals approach their craft.
As we’ve heard repeatedly from our guests, internal communication must transcend its traditional role as what Jason Anthoine called “the PowerPoint factory” to drive meaningful business outcomes. Chris Wade’s observation that our profession is only “about 15% there” in terms of reaching its potential resonated strongly with both of us.
“What I’m seeing is kind of a broader cultural issue at the moment,” Mike noted during our conversation with Chris Wade, “which is kind of a reversion to or a more louder version of alpha male management.” This cultural backsliding, particularly evident in return-to-office mandates, creates both challenges and opportunities for communication professionals.
Jason Anthoine framed the imperative for our work most succinctly: “Leaders only care about three things: driving revenue, controlling costs, and managing risk.” The opportunity before us is to demonstrate how effective communication directly impacts those priorities rather than treating communication as an end in itself.
A consistent theme across our conversations has been the striking disparity between how organizations understand their customers versus their employees. As Janet observed in our discussion with Jason Anthoine, “Everything gets channeled externally because you get loads of opportunity to do. And the opportunities aren’t there, and we’re fighting for the opportunities for internal comms, knowing how important it can be.”
We were particularly struck by Jason’s formulation that “brand equals experience squared” – the combination of customer and employee experience. While companies invest heavily in customer data and insights, they know remarkably little about their employees. This creates a significant strategic opening for internal communication professionals who can bridge this gap.
The Lithuanian partners, Vija and Giedre, reinforced this perspective from their Eastern European vantage point. Their work creating the first Lithuanian internal communication handbook highlighted how organizations need locally relevant approaches rather than simply importing Western practices. As Janet commented during our conversation, their effort to feature case studies from non-English speaking countries “would never have had a spotlight shine on them, which is I think really important to try and figure out what we can learn from different places.”
Our conversation with Vija and Giedre particularly highlighted how effective communication must navigate cultural differences. Mike raised the observation that “accountants in Denmark get along a lot better with accountants in Holland than they respectively get along with their comms people,” highlighting how professional cultures often transcend national boundaries.
Janet recalled her experience working with a Japanese communications professional: “He would spend a long time at the beginning kind of taking stuff and rewriting it because it was coming back from a flat translation as just not fit for purpose.” This highlighted the importance of transcreation – not just translating words but adapting meaning and cultural context.
The challenge of cultural adaptation extends to measurement as well. Janet shared an example of how cultural norms affect metrics: “We had several of our countries who culturally will never give above an eight” on employee satisfaction surveys, skewing comparative analysis when the global headquarters expected scores of 9 or 10 to indicate success.
Another fascinating insight from our conversations has been the importance of identifying and working with informal influencers within organizations. As Mike noted, these networks often operate independently of formal hierarchies: “If you’ve got 600 influencers in an organization of 10,000, you want to have your leaders talking to and listening to these people more often.”
Jason Anthoine quantified this insight, noting that while leaders make up about 12% of an organization and directly influence about 50% of employees, informal influencers constitute just 3% of the workforce but can reach 90% of employees. “Everybody in their organization knows who they are,” Jason explained. “Sometimes those influencers themselves know who they are. Nobody else knows who they are.”
Janet reinforced this from her own experience: “The amount of people who, yes, they got some information from their manager, but would say, ‘Well, I know Fred, and Fred always listens really well… so I always ask Fred.'” Understanding these informal networks is crucial for effective message dissemination.
We found ourselves nodding in agreement when Jason Anthoine described employee engagement measurement as “an industry” rather than a science. “If you ask each vendor how they define employee engagement, you’re going to get different answers,” he observed. “No one agrees on what employee engagement even is.”
Mike made the important point that “the most dangerous kind of employee engagement scores are the ones that are most inflated” because they give “leaders a license not to change.” Janet added that engagement scores are influenced by countless factors beyond communication: “I could have a bad train journey to work, be given my engagement survey, and give it awful because I’ve actually just got off a really dreadful train journey.”
Natasha Plowman similarly warned about the comms echo chamber: “We talk with, we kind of listen to the people with the loudest voices, and actually it’s what people aren’t saying… that we’re not listening to enough.” This insight underscores the need to look beyond standard metrics to understand the true employee experience.
Perhaps the most powerful theme across our conversations was Jason’s characterization of “communication as the courage department.” This means not just delivering difficult messages but having the confidence to claim credit for communication’s business impact.
“A lot of times those decisions get made without fully understanding what is the equal and opposite reaction that is going to happen,” Jason noted regarding return-to-office mandates. Communication professionals have the responsibility to highlight these potential consequences.
Natasha Plowman similarly emphasized “normalizing bad news as early as possible.” She observed that communication professionals often get trapped in “making this look good” rather than helping organizations confront difficult realities.
Chris Wade described the most effective implementation he’d seen, where communication professionals partnered with operational leaders to design and deliver engagement programs that were then rigorously correlated with business performance. This approach generated executive buy-in because it connected communication directly to financial outcomes.
Our conversations have reinforced our belief that internal communication is at an inflection point. As navigating disruption becomes the new normal for organizations, communication professionals have an unprecedented opportunity to position themselves as strategic partners who help translate uncertainty into actionable understanding.
The practitioners who will thrive are those who, in Jason’s colorful phrase, “attach their ass to the money” by demonstrating how communication directly impacts business priorities. They’re the ones who approach employee understanding with the same rigor that marketers apply to customers. And they’re the ones with the courage to tell leaders what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear.
As we continue our podcast journey, we remain committed to illuminating these emerging practices and helping communication professionals navigate the disruption that lies ahead – not just for their organizations, but for our profession itself.
The next four episodes are being released in March. We can’t wait for you to listen in when we speak with Amanda Todd, Shan Chatoo, Susan Jackson and Tarek Kamil.
You can catch all episodes of the Navigating Disruption Podcast on your favourite place to get your podcasts:
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-navigating-disruption-podcast/id1762411494
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4JaFt6qn3Dka1nHUjTLVlx?si=T6KBrwXzSh-kA4Lk7P4ryw
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4dQ3QZNA6-MwDjxXUHcxfpPavgKd2cD
Prepared with considerable assistance from our AI copy-editor, Claude.
Written by: Editor
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