When Communication
Becomes Part of Corporate Strategy

David Chenu

- David, could you come over please? We need to issue a new press release.

- That’s it, the 2027 strategy has been written. We’ll send it to you so you can lay it out.

- Has the cocktail reception been organised for next week’s employee event?

You get the point: if these questions or requests are part of your daily routine, the Communication function is still largely regarded as an execution function.

A communications department becomes strategic when it gets involved before certain decisions have been fully made, not simply when the time comes to package and communicate them.

I have practised this profession from quite different positions: in an agency, by creating a communication function, by managing large teams, as a member of an executive committee, and today as an adviser.

With hindsight, I have drawn two conclusions from that experience.

First, I do not believe that the strategic nature of communication can be measured by its title, its reporting line or even its presence on the executive committee. The criterion that seems much more revealing to me is simpler: when is the communications professional called in, and what are they asked to do?

Second, a communications department should not be one thing or the other.

A communication strategy comes to life through implementation and execution. In my view, a Communications Director must understand and know the operational side. ‘Operational’ is neither a dirty word nor an insult. Strategy, tactics and resource strategy are closely intertwined.

I like to use Napoleon as an example. His military strategy was based in particular on the speed at which his troops could move. And among his very concrete concerns were his soldiers’ shoes. Without shoes in good condition, no rapid march; without rapid movement, the tactics no longer work and the strategy ultimately fails.

That is quite close to my view of communication: if the resources are not appropriate, the tactics cannot be executed and your strategy fails. The three are intimately connected and have to be thought through together; otherwise, in my view, it simply does not work.

To return to your question, what does it mean to participate in corporate strategy?

If the communications professional steps in after everything has already been decided in order to prepare talking points, a press release or a communication plan, they remain essentially in an execution role.

The function takes on another dimension when it becomes involved early enough to offer its perspective on the consequences of a decision: how will employees understand it? What about customers? What gaps could it create between what the company claims and the experience it actually delivers? What will the impact be on the brand, reputation and trust? And sometimes: can this decision actually be told publicly in the form currently envisaged?

Nothing is owed. It is also up to the Communications Director to build that legitimacy and turn the department into an advisory function. It cannot simply be decreed.

In companies where ‘communication maturity’ is low, the Communications Director will have to prove, demonstrate, reassure and find their place with senior management, the executive committee, the management community and sometimes the entire workforce. That is one dimension of our profession.

I experienced this, among other places, at Humanis. During the merger with Malakoff Médéric in particular, communication could not be limited to explaining after the fact what had already been decided. We had to work on the future brand, support employees, reassure stakeholders around the Humanis brand and manage public statements at a time when results were also under pressure. That forces you to look simultaneously at the decision, its audiences and its consequences.

Ultimately, being strategic means being far enough upstream to contribute to decision-making, while remaining sufficiently grounded in reality to understand how those decisions can be understood, implemented and experienced.

David Chenu

To be precise.

Since 2015, Humanis had had a restricted executive committee and an ‘extended’ executive committee of 15 members, of which I was one, until the merger in 2019.

The context was complicated; I will only share here my perspective as Communications Director and the way we managed that period. This is the communicator’s point of view.

Humanis entered crisis communication mode in the final four months of 2017. I learned that the results were not going to meet expectations. I immediately understood that the issue was serious and that it was going to last a long time.

In such a situation, a Communications Director’s mandate can rest on four dimensions:

- Bring the team together and strengthen it; they are on the front line with you. If you do not pull together, you will get nowhere without them. At that time, I had a team of six managers and 50 employees;

- manage external communication with all stakeholders: journalists, political figures, customers, partners…

- manage internal communication with all Group employees;

- be involved early enough in decisions likely to have consequences for the three dimensions above.

Put simply, if the Communications Director ‘enters the room’ when it is already time to communicate and explain certain decisions, they are entering too late.

We need to be able to anticipate how a decision will be received, understood, sometimes distorted, and above all how it will stand up against reality.

I am obviously not saying that the Communications Director should take part in every decision the company makes. Absolutely not; that is not the job. But in a major transformation, whenever an arbitration is going to affect employees, customers, the brand or reputation, the communications perspective must be able to come into play upstream.

At Humanis, for example, this allowed us, together with the internal communication teams and the business units, to prepare an entire action plan in advance, #Rebonds2018, to support employees and sustain commercial activity throughout 2018. The results crisis and the prospect of the merger with Malakoff Médéric were not merely communication issues. They concerned the company itself: its future, its brand, its employees, its customers and its partners. We had simultaneously to support employees, reassure people around the Humanis brand and begin building the future Group brand.

The role of communication is therefore to widen the lens.

This is a dimension of the profession I strongly believe in: thinking in cascades.

A decision taken by one body can have repercussions elsewhere. A rational choice viewed from a financial, legal or organisational perspective can cause confusion among employees, worry customers or weaken a brand promise. A journalist may ask a question nobody had thought of by extrapolating from certain information. A manager will then have to explain it to their team; a partner will wonder what it changes for them. It is this domino effect that we need to try to anticipate.

The Communications Director is not there to decide in place of those whose responsibility it is to decide; that is an important distinction. Nor do they have a right of veto simply because a decision would be difficult to communicate. A decision that is difficult to explain is not necessarily a bad decision.

But if it is impossible to explain without concealing part of the reality, without creating a gulf between the message and the facts, then we have an issue. It is the Communications Director’s role to say so. For me, it is also a matter of ethics.

And if I believe a decision will be very difficult to defend publicly? I have to make that clear. It is part of my job. With arguments, facts and, why not, alternatives, explaining the risks and their consequences.

Communication can make a decision understandable. It cannot make credible something that the facts contradict.

Then there is a fairly simple rule of governance: the Communications Director advises, warns and challenges; the executive decides. Once the decision has been made, the Communications Director’s role is to find the fairest way to explain it. Not to disguise it.

In any case, with information circulating instantaneously and the boundary between internal and external communication becoming porous, it is both unrealistic and dangerous to imagine that communication can sustainably bridge a gap between what a company says and what it does.

That is why I often return to this idea of alignment: what the company decides, what it says and what it makes people experience will never overlap perfectly. But the wider the gap becomes, the more fragile communication becomes, until it turns into a problem of trust — or even distrust — towards the company.

David Chenu

To summarise, I experienced this question in a very concrete way at Aviva France during the subprime crisis.

On the life insurance side, which I was responsible for, the crisis led us to undertake two major communication projects.

The first was about reassurance, presence and proximity with all our stakeholders: customers, partners, distribution networks, employees…

And the second was a more structural repositioning of the brand, with an approach based on proof, benefits and key moments in customers’ lives, rather than communication historically focused on results and financial performance.

First idea: in a sensitive period, proof becomes more important than promise.

Aviva UK was facing the same problems. That was when the difficulties between the global approach and local reality began to appear.

To understand Aviva in the UK, it is a little like AXA in France: a very strong, established level of awareness. In France, it was the opposite, with a deficit in both awareness and image.

In the months that followed, the Group launched a worldwide reassurance campaign, leaving relatively little room for manoeuvre to individual countries despite our many discussions. Several choices did not seem suited to the French market: visuals that were culturally difficult to understand, insufficient visibility for the brand, little presence of our actual businesses…

The results, as we had feared, were not good; fortunately, they were offset by the proximity, presence and support work carried out by the businesses and teams in France.

When brands are not at the same stage of maturity in their respective markets, harmonising guidelines internationally becomes more complex.

That certainly does not mean everyone should do whatever they want in their own corner. A brand needs a common foundation. It is essential: identity, positioning, values, key principles of expression, commitments…

Second idea: in very different markets, consistency no longer means uniformity.

You have to find the right compromise between the common foundation and local effectiveness. We can still use the old saying popularised by IBM: ‘Think global, act local.’ In spirit, it has not aged at all.

A brand does not operate in a theoretical environment. Cultures differ, as do customer behaviours and expectations. Distribution methods, regulation, competition and even the maturity of the market itself can vary from one country to another.

A subsidiary must therefore also feed these realities back to the Group. In my view, that is where the quality of governance comes into play.

Two pitfalls have to be avoided. On one side, excessive centralisation that ends up producing communication that may be harmonised but is perhaps locally ineffective.

On the other, a weak consensus in which, by trying to satisfy everyone, you gradually destroy what makes a brand distinctive and valuable.

The Group must protect the core — I often hear the phrase ‘guardian of the temple’ — while the local market must be able to guarantee relevance.

So how far can a subsidiary depart from the Group narrative? It can, and sometimes must, adapt the way that narrative comes to life: the messages, proof points, angles, formats and pace of communication. It must be able to challenge the Group when it believes an orientation will be ineffective or ill-suited to its market.

But it cannot invent a local reality different from that of the Group, nor free itself from rules of conduct or moral values, for example. Put differently: you can adapt the way you tell the story, but not the facts you are telling.

An ‘intelligent’ brand, in my view, is not one that says exactly the same thing everywhere in exactly the same way. It is a brand that knows what is immutable and non-negotiable, and what must be able to adapt in order to remain relevant in each of its markets.

David Chenu

To be precise, IMA has historically been what could be called a white-label brand — in other words, a brand that acts on behalf of its shareholders and customers, most of the time under their names.

More broadly, to return to your question about brands that want to move to a new level of visibility with a stronger, more confidently expressed identity:

First idea, and often a misconception: a white-label brand should not be, and in fact is not, an invisible or transparent brand. A brand exists in tension with an entire ecosystem and, even if it does not appear in front of end customers, it still has to exist for its employees, partners, opinion leaders and prospects, and simply as an employer brand.

This strategy of making a historically B2B brand, or a brand that sits behind another brand, visible to end customers exists in different forms at Tetra Pak, Intel Inside, Gore-Tex and Shimano.

The same families of objectives are generally involved:

- winning or reassuring B2B customers,

- attracting new talent,

- strengthening employees’ sense of belonging,

- and, where relevant, changing the balance of power with certain customers.

Once that context is established, can a company become this externally visible brand with a strong promise before it has aligned its culture and internal behaviours?

My spontaneous answer would be: no! In theory, yes, but it is a trap.

Here we are dealing with two closely related issues: symmetry of attention and what is known as the brand gap — the gap between the promise displayed and the reality experienced.

A brand can give in to the temptation of cosmetic external communication with a promise disconnected from lived and operational reality. In the medium term, the consequences are disastrous: internal rejection, with disengagement and loss of trust; rejection by B2B partners, with a loss of credibility and, again, trust.

Put differently, a brand, its promise and its commitments are not a mask or a communication device. They must genuinely emerge from the company’s culture and corporate project.

There must be alignment between three dimensions:

- brand promise: what we say;

- brand culture: what we live internally;

- brand experience: what we deliver externally.

The right sequence, if I can put it that way, or the right tipping point, unfolds in three stages.

First comes internal infusion: the company brings its teams on board around the brand work and identifies the cultural changes required — training, behaviours, management… This is the key phase of appropriation, or brand delivery.

Then comes the tipping point you refer to in your question: operational alignment, when the company becomes capable of delivering on the promise it is about to make.

And finally comes the reveal, with the rollout of external communication. This is where communication comes in.

In this theoretical model, communication no longer gets ahead of what the company wants to become; it makes it known and seeks to prove it through a body of concrete evidence.

Of course, all of this is theory and, in the reality of corporate life, the phases often overlap. It is not a perfectly linear chronology; it is a matter of threshold: at what point is a sufficient part of the company capable of making the promise tangible?

The image to keep in mind is simple: you can stretch the elastic between the brand and its promise on one side, and the company and its reality on the other. But at some point the tension becomes so great that it snaps.

David Chenu

I believe strongly in the power of narrative, and I have worked on this subject for a long time.

But before telling a story, there is a prerequisite that is sometimes forgotten: a decision has to have been made.

I once summed up that conviction quite directly in a workshop on storytelling:

‘You can only tell well what you have actually decided.’

When a company has not defined and built what it wants to be, where it wants to go, what it wants to transform or what it is committing to, asking communication to construct a narrative amounts to asking it to conceal the absence of a decision.

Storytelling then becomes an attractive optical illusion.

Once the foundation, the destination and the trajectory exist, narrative has a genuine role to play in a transformation.

When I talk about narrative, I mean both substance and form. Storytelling is what you want people to understand, feel and remember, but it is also the art of telling: the point of view, the angles and focal points you choose; the words, syntax, images, examples, universe, tone and the way the story is structured. The two are intimately connected.

You can, moreover, be perfectly accurate on substance and completely wrong in the way you tell it. Presenting a difficult transformation in an excessively enthusiastic register can create more distrust than buy-in. Employees do not judge only what they are told. They also judge the way they are told it, in relation to what they themselves are experiencing.

The form must help make the substance understandable, not distort it.

Stories have always helped us structure a reality that is complex or poorly understood, give it meaning, unite a community or society around an idea or project and help us project ourselves towards a perspective.

And generally, these stories follow the same simple, effective and easy-to-understand structure: a character / an idea (the hero), a difficulty / a villain, a journey, a reversal, a conclusion.

Emotion does not replace the narrative; it serves it. And it works when it is anchored in something coherent and credible.

Narrative is a tool for collective structuring, not a communication device.

In a corporate transformation, of course, we are not in a fairy tale. Employees experience a succession of decisions, organisational changes, new projects and uncertainties. The narrative helps connect those elements: why the company is changing, where it wants to go, what will change, what will not change and what path it proposes.

But with one fundamental difference: the story a company tells is being lived in real time by the very people to whom it is being told.

And a transformation cannot be told solely from the point of view of those who decided it.

A merger may be a strategic opportunity from the perspective of an executive committee. For an employee, it may also mean a change of role, a new manager, a move or simply a great deal of uncertainty. Both realities exist at the same time. Communication also has to bring both of them into the narrative.

The question to ask is quite simple: is the story we are telling credible when it is heard by the people living through the transformation?

You can perfectly well tell them: this is where we want to go. This is why. This is what we have decided. This is what has already begun. And this is what still remains to be done.

You can tell the story of a trajectory. You must not turn an ambition into an accomplished reality.

If I tell employees that the company is becoming more collaborative while all decisions continue to come down vertically; that people are at the heart of the project while management practices tell the opposite story; or that the customer has become our priority while nothing changes in the customer experience, they see it immediately.

And today, they can also make that known immediately.

Storytelling and emotion are therefore not the problem. They become a problem when they replace transparency, the reality of the company, consistency between words and actions and, above all, proof.

I experienced this requirement in several transformations. At Humanis, for example, during the period we discussed earlier, it would have been completely counterproductive to tell employees that everything was fine. We had to acknowledge the situation, explain what had been decided and initiated, provide a direction and support teams along the path ahead. The mobilisation work carried out through #Rebonds2018 was part of that logic.

So what should communication refuse to tell?

What it knows to be false, of course. But also anything so far removed from lived reality that the narrative would become completely artificial.

And I would now add the form itself: communication should also refuse a staging that distorts the perception of reality. You can produce a message that is factually accurate yet profoundly misleading through the words, images or tone you choose.

That certainly does not mean waiting until everything is perfect. A transformation is precisely a movement between a starting point and an ambition. There will be gaps, difficulties, sometimes delays and mistakes. They can be acknowledged. I even think they should be.

At such moments, communication is there to reassure, explain, unite and provide evidence that the company is moving forward. It gives a shared meaning to the trajectory so that the destination can be understood.

It can put a transformation into a narrative. It must not put reality in brackets.

David Chenu

—

I am quite committed to measuring results. Perhaps because I have always believed that a communications department should be able to explain what it is doing and why.

And on this subject, you have to start very early.

What I am about to say is fairly obvious, but when, together with teams and agencies, you design an action, a campaign or a programme, you have to define from the outset what you are trying to move, and therefore which indicators you will follow, how you will measure them and, above all, when and over what period.

Take an awareness campaign. If, at the end, someone asks me for an ROI measured in the number of contracts generated, then, to put it simply, we misunderstood each other at the start.

The campaign was designed to increase awareness, gain visibility, provide reassurance or work on certain brand image attributes. Those are therefore the indicators whose evolution we will monitor.

Of course, such a campaign is generally reinforced, either in parallel or subsequently, by activating commercial levers through media and/or non-media channels. And with drive-to-web commercial communication, we can follow the journey much further: visits, interactions, behaviours and all the way through to requests for quotes.

I have often defended this approach. A communications department has to be willing to look fairly far down the funnel when its actions have a commercial objective.

After the request for a quote, other factors come strongly into play: the offer, the price, the customer journey, the quality of the sales relationship… Of course, the signed contract remains very useful to examine collectively, but the interpretation of performance becomes much more shared between the company’s different functions.

That is also why systematically asking about ROI can sometimes lead to poor interpretations. ‘What did this operation bring us?’ Fine. But first, we need to have agreed on what we expected from it.

KPIs are designed upstream of the action. They are not selected afterwards in order to prove that it worked.

The choice of KPIs can even profoundly change the way people work.

At Humanis, for example, we shifted the management of our social networks from an acquisition logic to an engagement logic.

For a long time, community size was one of the indicators that attracted a great deal of attention on social media. The aim was to grow the number of followers, sometimes rather artificially.

Gradually, we focused more on what the community was actually doing: interactions, comments, shares and its ability to respond to content.

Personally, I prefer a smaller but active and engaged community to a huge one that reacts little or not at all.

And when you change the indicator, you also change the way people work. A team managed on follower growth will naturally try to recruit followers. If you ask it to work on engagement, it will focus more on content, the subjects that genuinely interest its audiences and the way they react to and interact with the brand.

In that case, KPIs really are a management tool, and quite a subtle one.

On an advertising campaign, for example, looking at a gain in one awareness point without looking at the conditions under which it was measured can lead to poor conclusions.

The timing of the measurement matters. The spacing between waves matters. The amount of time between a campaign wave and a measurement matters. Advertising pressure matters. The starting level of awareness matters.

Two brands with roughly equivalent awareness each run an awareness campaign. One runs in June, the other in September. Both carry out their post-test at the end of September. Comparing their new awareness points as if they had been measured under the same conditions would be unreliable and risky.

I have sometimes found that we have become extremely good at measuring. Monthly or quarterly reputation reports, image studies, campaign post-tests, digital KPIs… We measure, analyse and present the results. And a few months later, we start again: measure, analyse, present and… repeat.

What gives meaning to those KPIs and their monitoring are the action plans implemented between two measurement waves in order to correct what needs correcting.

If a reputation indicator falls, if an image attribute does not improve, what measures have we taken? What have we changed in our messages, our content, our channels — in short, our resource strategy?

Then we measure again and see whether the corrections are having an effect. When the same indicators remain insufficient despite several tactical adjustments, we need to be able to question more structural choices, right up to the strategy itself.

It is this loop between measurement, action and correction that is useful. Otherwise, we create dashboards that may be precise but remain passive because they are not used as a lever for improvement.

That said, I do not believe we should try to attach a measurement that becomes some kind of ‘gospel truth’ to every effect of communication.

Trust, willingness to recommend a brand (NPS), influence, buy-in or emotional attachment to a brand can be measured to some extent. We have studies, barometers, digital data, social listening and qualitative feedback. We can cross-reference information and observe trends.

As with any study, however, we have to remain humble and cautious about what the figures tell us. Taken out of their precise context, they can be made to say many things and can generate imprecise interpretations or comparisons. This is all the more true because many external factors can quickly influence perceptions today: a news event, a decision, a public statement, information about an industry… Some reputation data can behave almost like stock-market indicators: they react immediately to their environment.

A company’s reputation is also built through the quality of its products, its customer experience, the decisions made by its leaders, the behaviour of its employees, its news and any crisis it may be going through. Communication acts on this whole, sometimes strongly, but it acts alongside other factors.

Behind the figures, therefore, you always need to examine contexts, periods and methodologies more deeply; here again, AI helps and will help a great deal.

And that applies to many forms of measurement.

Then there is everything we help to prevent or manage better: a crisis anticipated, a decision better understood, a concern defused, a relationship maintained with a journalist, customer or partner… And that is far harder to measure, and we are quite incapable of assigning a precise ROI to it.

So I believe in measurement. Provided we know what we are measuring, why we are measuring it, when we are measuring it and, above all, what we are prepared to change as a result of what it teaches us.

An indicator that we watch deteriorate quarter after quarter without changing anything becomes, above all, a very good way of documenting the problem.

David Chenu

In my own practice, I can see what AI can bring to our profession, but also the risks it can create for the way we work.

We are all maturing quickly on this subject. Communications professionals have understood that we need to abandon the misconception that AI is simply a content producer.

Of course, it can help us write faster — I will come back to that later, because it is not quite so simple — adapt messages, produce visuals or prepare presentations.

That is considerable.

But in practice, for us, and certainly for me, it is also a tool for analysis, research, structuring and, above all, confronting ideas.

Giving it a line of reasoning, asking it to identify weaknesses, challenge a recommendation, compare several scenarios or help me structure a complex report: all of that makes AI a valuable sparring partner.

An interlocutor against which I can test my ideas, explore hypotheses and investigate avenues I had not considered.

If I were to place AI in an organisational chart, I would say it is a peer, a direct report or an external adviser. But certainly not your boss.

AI becomes particularly useful when it helps us think better or think differently, but absolutely not when it thinks in our place.

That brings us back to your question about managerial risk.

Imagine a communications department now capable of producing three times as much content, multiplying publications, adapting a campaign instantly across fifteen channels and personalising its messages on a large scale.

But to say what? With what objectives? For what results?

If the company has not done enough work upstream on its strategy, positioning, priorities or message consistency, it risks producing more communication without necessarily producing more value.

AI can be an excellent tool for amplifying communication — but first you need to know what you want to amplify.

There is another concrete consequence of AI entering companies: the way communication work is perceived by our internal clients is changing.

Today, almost anyone can ask an AI to write an article, create a visual, prepare a presentation or build a communication plan. Some may therefore conclude that production has become a push-button affair.

‘Just ask ChatGPT — it does it for you in five minutes!’

We are likely to hear that more and more often.

To be fair, the productivity gains are real and sometimes spectacular, particularly for repetitive tasks, certain content adaptations or preparatory work. It would be absurd to deny that and try artificially to protect working methods that have become less efficient.

But just because a piece of content can be produced in five minutes does not mean it can be thought through, validated and made relevant in five minutes.

That is where the Communications Director’s role becomes important. They have to support this evolution, explain what is genuinely changing in production processes, but also put safeguards in place. And sometimes remind internal stakeholders that a communication request cannot be reduced to manufacturing a deliverable.

This connects with another risk I pay close attention to: the standardisation of both substance and form.

I often think of Maupassant, particularly his beautiful preface to Pierre et Jean, in which he defended the discipline of seeking the exact word rather than settling for approximation or easy language. With AI, that discipline seems even more important to me.

Look at what is already happening on social media. Some AI-generated content is recognisable from its expressions, constructions and calibrated hooks. Everything is neat and well organised. But from one text to another, you find the same syntactic hum or the same algorithmic background music.

Two companies may have different histories, cultures, ambitions and even starting ideas. But if they use the same tools, the same methods, the same narrative structures and the same execution principles, they risk creating communications that look alike.

It is a formidable paradox: starting from two different ideas and arriving at almost identical results.

And the risk goes beyond form. By repeatedly accepting well-constructed suggestions, we may gradually adopt the same reasoning, the same references and the same analytical angles. Our growing mastery of these tools should help us avoid those pitfalls.

A brand needs singularity in order to express its personality and create strong preference.

So which skills become more important for a Communications Director?

First, I would put analytical ability and judgement. Knowing how to define the right problem, question a recommendation, measure the impact of a choice or a position — what I call the domino effect of a decision — and arbitrate. AI can propose ten solutions in a few seconds. You still need to understand the company’s issues well enough to choose the one that is genuinely relevant — or to choose none of them.

Then come knowledge of the field, curiosity, creativity and an understanding of human relationships. Understanding a culture, perceiving tensions, listening to employees, supporting managers, defending an original idea, preserving singularity: these are essential dimensions of the profession.

And finally, management. A Communications Director has to organise the use of these tools, ensure continuous training for teams and define the rules — confidentiality, rights, data protection… One issue that is discussed far too little is the need to make teams aware of the environmental impact of these uses. They also need to organise, for example within the team, information verification and editorial consistency.

Above all, they must protect the team’s ability to think, propose, create and defend its ideas. Preserve their free will, their confidence in their own ability to think for themselves and, if necessary, contradict the machine.

Ultimately, the easier a tool makes production, the more demanding we should become about what we decide to produce.

AI saves time on certain tasks. It is up to us to decide whether we want to use that time to produce even more or, instead, reallocate time to thinking so that, in the end, we communicate better.

David Chenu

Over time, I have become rather cautious with the word ‘power’. I am not sure a Communications Director primarily needs power. What they do need is trust, influence, access to information at the right time and freedom to speak.

And for me, there is something very human behind that.

The relationship between a Communications Director and a senior executive — CEO, president, deputy CEO, secretary general, chief of staff… — is also a matter of personal encounter. You can install processes, define responsibilities and set a reporting line. All of that matters. But it does not automatically create the relationship of trust or the best conditions in which to perform the function.

That trust is built through the way people work together, in difficult moments, through the Communications Director’s ability to bring a useful perspective, sometimes to say things the executive may not necessarily want to hear, and also to accept that, after giving their opinion, the final decision does not always belong to them.

I recently told a small story on LinkedIn that sums up what I mean.

A few years ago, I was presenting a campaign to a restricted executive committee. My CEO said to me: ‘Honestly? I don’t like it, but if you think it will work… go ahead.’

At the time, I was a little taken aback. Then I understood that he was willing to set aside his personal taste and trust my recommendation. In return, of course, that trust committed me — strongly. I had to be able to explain why I was defending that campaign and take responsibility for it with my team.

What I mainly took from that experience was the moment when the relationship between a CEO and a Communications Director moves to another level. The trust you are given also increases the responsibility you carry.

That trust must also make disagreement possible.

A Communications Director who systematically agrees with what their executive thinks is not necessarily doing them a service. They must be able to warn, challenge, offer another interpretation, flag a risk or point out the possible consequences of a decision. With arguments, of course, not as a posture.

This connects with what I said earlier about the need to be ‘in the room’ when certain decisions are being prepared. Communication brings a particular reading of the company: it crosses the brand, reputation, employees, customers, media, partners and sometimes public authorities. It often sees several consequences of the same decision and can help put them into perspective.

And this is becoming all the more important because the Communications Director’s scope of responsibility has expanded considerably.

Reputation, employer brand, transformations, crises, the executive voice… none of these subjects belongs entirely to us. Reputation is also built through the customer experience, the quality of products and services and the company’s decisions. An employer brand depends heavily on what employees actually experience. A transformation plays out in the business units and in management.

The Communications Director therefore works increasingly on subjects where a large proportion of the levers sit elsewhere in the company.

That forces them to move beyond their own territory, understand the businesses and the business model, work with HR, marketing, sales, operations and legal teams, and bring together — early enough — people who may be looking at the same project through their own separate objectives. It is also this ability to connect silos and start from the project itself that I associate with the strategic role of communication.

My recent experience as an adviser has also allowed me to look at the issue differently.

From the outside, you benefit from a form of distance. You arrive with a precise mandate, you can ask certain questions quite directly and sometimes put your finger on issues that the organisation no longer sees because it has lived with them for so long. Less time is spent on internal politics. But you also know the organisation less intimately, and things can escape you much more quickly.

From the inside, you have an intimate knowledge of the company. You know its history, teams, habits, tensions and relationships between people. You also know that a decision that looks perfectly rational on paper can generate very different reactions once it meets reality on the ground.

I have worked on both sides. They are two quite different forms of influence.

When it comes to governance, I am rather cautious about absolute rules.

I regularly hear that a Communications Director must necessarily report to the CEO. My experience makes me less categorical. I have reported directly to a CEO while sometimes finding it difficult to access certain information or decisions. Elsewhere, I reported to a Secretary General under excellent working conditions, without that harming either my proximity to or the fluidity of my relationship with the CEO.

There is probably no single right place for the Communications Director that applies to every company. Their organisation, culture, activity, corporate project and the personality of their leaders completely change the situation.

I am not a ‘Russian general’ counting the medals and decorations on his chest. A seat on the executive committee merely for the status of having one does not interest me much.

I am far more demanding about room for manoeuvre, freedom to speak, trust and proximity with senior executives, access to the right information at the right time, and the ability to take part in decisions when my perspective is useful.

This governance question also says a great deal about a company. Where communication reports, its scope, its access to decision-making bodies or its fragmentation across several departments all indicate how the organisation regards the function and how mature its leaders are in relation to communication.

Personally, I am attached to three things.

First, a communication function that is sufficiently compact and coherent not to be scattered across several departments that ultimately work in silos.

Second, its ability to access decisions and take part early enough in discussions when those decisions have consequences for its different audiences.

And finally, the trust placed in it by senior executives.

When those three conditions are met, the organisational chart becomes almost secondary.

And there is also a responsibility that we, as communicators, have to take on. We cannot spend our time demanding a strategic role while waiting for the organisation to hand it to us.

We have to understand the company beyond communication: its economic and human issues. Anticipate the effects of a decision. Connect subjects that are sometimes treated separately. Know how to challenge. Work with other functions. Gradually demonstrate our usefulness upstream.

Nothing is owed and nothing simply falls into our laps. We also have to know how to build our place.

And in building it, I ultimately return to my starting point: I believe much less in the Communications Director’s power than in their influence. Influence that, for me, rests on the trust you are given, the relevance of what you contribute and the autonomy you have.