Beyond peak comms
After earning their coveted seat at the table, comms leaders must again prove their worth in the post-Covid era.
It’s not easy being an in-house communications head. Confronted by a pandemic that brings many countries to their knees, you bring crucial insight and leadership to a range of issues that are instantly elevated up the boardroom agenda. From employee wellness to remote working to business continuity, crisis management to policy oversight — internal communications is suddenly electrified and ESG institutionalised as corporates come to terms with a very different stakeholder economy.
In a way, you have been preparing for this for all your professional life. Your agility becomes a critical advantage when inertia threatens the corporate response to a deepening global health crisis. Empathy is unexpectedly in vogue as you help to showcase CEO humanity on endless Zoom calls. You become the connective tissue between the boardroom and the broader workforce. The CCO role has never been more highly valued — recognised as essential to organisational resilience and corporate behaviour.
No one wants to dwell on the Covid years, but they cannot be forgotten if we are to truly reckon with the journey that corporate communications leaders have been on in the past decade. After consistent calls for a coveted ‘seat at the table’, the pandemic creates innumerable opportunities for CCOs to demonstrate their value, encouraging the notion that — this time — the dividend from this elevation will be rather more permanent than the transient gains of earlier crises.
