Why Communications Must Be in the Room First

Moving From Support Function to Strategic Driver

There’s a pattern played out in organizations of every size and sector for far too long. A major decision is being made - a restructuring, product launch, partnership, policy change - something significant that engages a range of teams. The group responsible for the decision finalizes the core details. Finance models the numbers. Legal reviews the risk. And then, sometime close to implementation, someone asks: “Should we loop in communications?” Or worse, just before launch an email is sent asking for a press release.

This is one of the most ineffective and expensive habits in business. Not having communications at the strategic planning stage sets you up to miss significant opportunities and increase risk. Proactively creating the most effective narratives and exposure for media, industry leaders, investors, and the public strengthens and broadens reputation, competitive differentiation, and shareholder trust. Communications can proactively identify and prevent issues beyond what legal, marketing, or product may see or know. Reacting to – rather than averting – crises is pricey not just in clean-up budget and time, but in credibility and reputation damage that may take quarters or years to build back.

Communications is not a finishing step. It is not a service that helps other functions announce what they’ve already decided. At its best, it is a strategic driver that shapes decisions, not just describes them - one that belongs at the table from the beginning, not summoned at the end.

The organizations that engage communication upfront versus at end - breaking that old, out of date pattern - are measurably better at managing change, protecting reputation, building trust, and driving sustainable business results.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

The most visible examples of communications failure are almost always cases where the function was either absent from strategic planning or overruled when it raised concerns.

Boeing’s MAX 9 crisis - which saw the company’s stock drop 25% in 2024 - was not purely an engineering failure. It was a stakeholder trust failure, one shaped by years of decisions made without adequate regard for how they would be understood, communicated, and defended publicly. Tesla’s approximately 30% stock decline the same year, tied to both product issues and the increasingly polarizing public profile of its CEO, is another case study in what happens when reputation management is reactive rather than proactive.

These are extreme examples, but the underlying dynamic is not rare. It happens each time an organization restructures without a coms plan - then wonders why staff morale collapses as the story gets shaped externally via speculation. Or when a company cedes the narrative about its own category to competitors, analysts, or media who fill the vacuum - not because it lacked a story worth telling, but because no one proactively built the credibility and relationships to share it. Or when true differentiation lives only in sales decks and client conversations, invisible to media, analysts, and public audiences that can help further your corporate goals.

What Strategic Communications Actually Looks Like

Strategic communications is not communications that happens to be about something important. It is communications that is embedded in how strategic decisions get made, present in the room when options are being evaluated, not after the choice has already been made.

A communications executive operating strategically versus tactically doesn’t ask “How do we announce this?” Instead, they work to determine “How each of our key stakeholders will respond to this - and what does that mean for how we structure the decision itself?” They don’t think “What’s the press release?” They analyze: “What is the corporate narrative we’re building over the next 12 months, and does this specific move advance or impact it?”

This is the difference between a communications function that manages outputs and one that shapes outcomes. The former is a cost centre. The latter is a competitive advantage.

Why the Reactive Model Persists

Despite the evidence, the old, reactive model persists in many organizations for a few interconnected reasons. Communications has historically been measured on activities - press releases issued, coverage secured, events managed - rather than on business outcomes. That measurement gap makes it easy to treat the function as execution support rather than strategic counsel.

There is also often a capability gap. Strategic communications requires a depth of business acumen, financial literacy, and stakeholder intelligence that not all teams possess. Organizations too often default to hiring more junior generalists, limiting the strategic expertise available from the outset. Others expect communications staff to perform strategy through to execution, stretching resources too thin to have the capacity to be at the table early while simultaneously managing day-to-day deliverables. Both patterns produce the same result: a function that is structurally prevented from operating at the level the organization needs for it to drive the greatest outcomes.

However, once a communications executive is in place, executive teams need to trust their strategies and recommendations. That trust is earned in two stages: first through upfront engagement, requiring genuine awareness and confidence in the function's capabilities. This starts with the CEO. The old ‘everyone communicates so it’s not a skill’ has been a joke made by one too many Chief Executives. No one asks a CFO to justify why financial expertise belongs in the room. The more strategic organizations stopped asking communications to justify it too.

The second critical piece is communications experts must continually speak the language of business outcomes, connecting communications investment to measurable results. Demonstrated delivery – with the right tools and tracking – can transform any skeptic to advocate. Although some argue strategic communications (brand expansion, thought leadership, internal/external alignment, stakeholder engagement) can be difficult to track, the metrics are always there. Without this, communications executives can too easily be dismissed.

41% of Chief Communications Officers now report directly to the CEO - up from 37% in 2015. The direction is clear, but the pace of change suggests many are still catching up. (Korn Ferry)

Three Shifts That Define the Strategic Upgrade

Organizations that successfully elevate communications from support to strategy tend to make three specific shifts:

• From announcement to architecture: Communications stops being the function that announces what other teams have decided and starts being the function that helps build the narrative infrastructure that all decisions will eventually rest on. This includes brand positioning, thought leadership platforms, stakeholder mapping, and reputation strategy - all of which take time to build and are nearly impossible to create under pressure.

• From reactive to anticipatory: Strategic communications operates ahead of events, not behind them. It identifies emerging issues before they become crises, builds relationships with media and stakeholders before they’re needed, and develops the narrative frameworks that will allow the organization to respond credibly when things are uncertain.

• From spokesperson to advisor: The most effective communications leaders spend more time shaping what the organization does than describing what it has done. They are integrated into strategic planning, investor relations, government affairs, and human resources - not as communicators of those functions’ work, but as contributors to the decisions being made within them.
  

The Bottom Line

Communications brought in late can limit damage. Communications embedded early can prevent it, and more importantly, can build the trust, credibility, and narrative clarity that organizations need to grow, attract capital, recruit talent, navigate policy environments, and sustain their reputation over time.

The question is not whether your organization can afford to treat communications as a strategic function. It is whether it can afford not to.