The distance between professional recognition and the value we provide.
By Keith Burton | Leadership Is Personal
There’s an old British story about bus drivers who passed stops without picking up the people waiting there. When challenged, the local authority reportedly explained: “It is impossible for drivers to keep to their timetables if they have to stop for passengers.”
The story may be apocryphal. It was repeated in Parliament in 1985, citing an earlier account in Marketing magazine. But the organizational failing it describes is familiar: the measure of performance had displaced the purpose of the work.
I see something of our own profession in that story. After decades in public relations, I worry that we are confusing the attention we receive with the value we provide.
Awards. Rankings. Lists of influential leaders. Trade coverage celebrating our appointments and accomplishments.
I’ve welcomed recognition myself. Good work deserves acknowledgment. But the leaders and clients we serve have a more demanding question: what did we help them accomplish?
An award cannot answer that. Neither can a title.
What happens when our value is tested?
This year, I’ve watched a succession of chief communications officers leave senior roles. The circumstances differ. Retirement and orderly succession belong in a different category from performance concerns, cost reductions and reorganizations.
Those departures do not, by themselves, establish that the function is losing ground. What happens afterward can tell us more.
Is the role filled with a leader of comparable standing? Does its scope expand or contract? Is the function divided among other executives? Is the position eliminated—and, if so, what does leadership believe it can do without?
These are questions about the profession’s standing that deserve sustained attention.
We have spent years making the case for a seat at the table. Once there, we must contribute to the decisions being made.
Can we explain where the business makes money and what threatens its ability to do so? Do we understand the operating pressures behind a decision? Can we bring information into the room that changes leadership’s understanding? Have we earned enough trust to challenge an assumption before it becomes a costly mistake? Can we help an organization move forward when financial peril or adverse conditions threaten its future?
These responsibilities also require a CEO willing to invite and hear difficult counsel. A communications leader cannot exercise influence that leadership consistently denies.
But we should examine our own contribution with the same seriousness we bring to defending the function.
That contribution includes helping leadership understand how decisions affect the people on whom the organization depends. Employees, customers and communities experience consequences that may be hard to see from the executive floor. Their knowledge can expose a flawed assumption or an operating problem before leadership recognizes it.
Serving leadership well requires bringing those experiences into its deliberations, including when they complicate the decision leadership would prefer to make.
The work behind the announcement
Two recent workplace stories illustrate where that contribution can matter.
The Chicago Tribune described workers choosing specialized coworking spaces that offer childcare or community around shared interests, even as conventional offices struggle with vacancies. It also raised questions about productivity and the mentorship workers may miss outside their employers’ offices.
For leadership, the challenge is to understand what makes gathering worthwhile, what the business requires, and what helps employees do their work well.
Communications should help leadership examine those questions alongside HR and operations. If our involvement begins with explaining a completed return-to-office decision, much of the opportunity for counsel has already passed.
Consider a proposed office mandate justified by the need for collaboration. Listening to employees might reveal that people already come in, only to spend the day on video calls because their colleagues attend on different days. Bringing that finding to leadership, alongside a proposal for coordinated team schedules, could change the decision. It would give the organization a better chance of achieving the collaboration it says it wants.
That is the kind of contribution we should be able to describe.
Throughout the pandemic and the years that followed, I’ve heard leaders express frustration with hybrid work. Yet some HR leaders and CCOs with whom I’ve worked have been reluctant to challenge those arrangements or help leadership make the case for a full return to the office. In my experience, concern about resistance from younger employees has sometimes constrained that counsel.
Employee concerns deserve a hearing. So do leadership’s concerns about performance, collaboration and the development of less experienced colleagues. Our responsibility is to examine both closely enough to distinguish a preference from a business requirement.
If leaders believe five days in the office are necessary, we should help them establish why. What work is suffering? What evidence connects the problem to where people work? What would returning accomplish, and what would have to change inside the office for that benefit to materialize? We should be equally willing to challenge a poorly supported mandate and to support a necessary decision that employees may resist.
Fast Company offered another example of the need to test workplace arrangements against experience. Safeguard Global reconsidered a four-day-workweek pilot after finding that some employees worked longer days or quietly worked Fridays, while others following the shorter schedule felt they were falling behind. The company moved toward flexible schedules and measures tied to outcomes.
We do not know what part communications played. But revising an experiment when experience exposes its weaknesses is a responsibility communications should help leadership fulfill.
A shorter week means little to someone whose workload still requires Friday. A return-to-office policy needs to address the work that leadership believes is suffering. Either arrangement can lose credibility when the experience of working under it contradicts its stated purpose.
Our contribution should include recognizing those gaps, bringing them to leadership and helping address them. That may require challenging a popular policy, supporting an unpopular change, or advising a leader to reconsider a decision already favored. Favorable coverage cannot resolve an operating problem.
That work requires proximity to the business and to the people doing its work. It requires listening beyond the executive floor without mistaking the loudest voices for the whole organization.
Effective counsel requires more than being right. It requires understanding why a leader favors a particular course, identifying consequences that may have been overlooked, and offering an alternative the organization can carry out. A warning becomes more useful when it helps leadership decide what to do next.
Under financial pressure, that may mean helping leaders understand which commitments they can sustain, which they must change, and how those choices will affect the relationships the business needs to recover. Earning trust includes being prepared to recommend a difficult course—and explaining the judgment behind it.
What are our communities preparing us to do?
If this is the work on which our standing depends, we should examine how well our professional institutions prepare us for it.
In conversations with experienced CCOs, I hear concerns about whether their professional communities still provide the candid, substantive peer exchange they joined to find. Some question whether expanding membership has been accompanied by enough attention to the experience members receive.
The test should begin with that experience. Can members discuss consequential decisions with peers who understand the responsibilities involved? Do they encounter perspectives that challenge their assumptions? Do they leave better equipped to advise their organizations?
Membership size alone cannot answer those questions. An unfamiliar company or a new face is not evidence of declining standards. Smaller organizations can present demanding leadership challenges. New members can deepen a community’s understanding.
Growth does, however, require deliberate choices about admission standards, programming and the conditions for candid exchange. If an organization’s purpose is to advance the work of a CCO, its structure and leadership should support that purpose.
A community can become larger while becoming less useful. It can also grow and become better. Recruitment totals alone tell us neither.
The same concern runs through our awards, our coverage of senior appointments and our professional communities: we need to examine whether the things we celebrate help us improve the work.
Our trade organizations and media could contribute by following what happens after a senior departure, examining what CEOs expect from communications, and exploring how practitioners develop the judgment their responsibilities require.
Accounts of difficult decisions would be especially valuable: what a leader initially believed, what the communicator brought forward, what changed, and what the organization learned. Such accounts could help younger practitioners understand the demands of the role and give experienced leaders something substantive to test against their own practice.
We should be as deliberate about developing that capability as we are about recognizing professional accomplishment.
What would remain?
Much of the best counsel I’ve witnessed was quiet.
A private conversation that changed a leader’s mind. A warning heard before a decision was made. An employee concern taken seriously. A commitment someone insisted the organization honor.
Sometimes the value lies in a problem that never becomes public. Sometimes it lies in helping leadership face a problem it would rather avoid.
I care about this because I have seen what this profession can contribute. I have benefited from its institutions, its friendships and its recognition. That gives me a responsibility to ask difficult questions about its future—and about my own work.
Questions for the week: If the awards, rankings and trade coverage disappeared tomorrow, what would the people we serve say we contributed?
The people waiting at the bus stop were the reason for the service.
Our professional standing depends on remembering who is waiting for us.
What is one decision your counsel helped improve—and what made it possible for you to influence the outcome?