Frédéric Fougerat — “Communication Is Not a Democracy”

Frédéric Fougerat

Career paths, particularly for male and female communications directors, can take very different forms. Some people remain with the same organization for 20 years and see 2, 4 or 6 leaders come and go. Personally, I worked for 6 major groups over 20 years, 5 of them with the same leader, with a 10-month break in between.

Moving from group to group in your president’s entourage is, above all, comfortable for a leader, especially one who likes working with their own inner circle. The communications director can be part of that close-knit team, because the role is relatively intimate and interpersonal. It is your communications director who picks you up when you wake up to take you to an early-morning radio interview, and it is with that person that you return home in the evening after a dinner or a final television appearance.

That is the person who builds your image, tries to correct some of your weaknesses and controls all or part of what you say. They also hold personal or intimate information that must be protected. For it to work, there has to be a strong intellectual and professional understanding, as well as (in our case) complementary strengths. We were very different in many ways, but we knew how to turn those differences into a strength, of course with mutual respect.

Even if one of us always respected the other more.

On the surface, this may create a sense of stability, particularly in relation to one’s boss, but it has to be put into context.

In reality, changing groups and industries 6 times in 20 years is a form of instability, a constant fresh start, with risks every time you discover a new industry: temporary employment and human resources (Vedior/Randstad), oil (Geoservices/Schlumberger), research and innovation (Altran, now Capgemini), catering (Elior), and real-estate services (Foncia, now Emeria). But I always had one consistent vision of communications: my own.

Because I had the good fortune to work with a great business leader who truly delegates to his teams. It is then up to each person to have the skills and professional authority required to succeed in their own area.

Frédéric Fougerat

Elegance seems to me to be the only possible way to behave when you have responsibilities. When you are being watched as a role model. When you are expected to set an example.

I do not have statistics showing whether leaders who demonstrate elegance toward their teams are the most effective. But over the long term, I am convinced they are.

Brutal, toxic, narcissistically abusive, micromanaging leaders can, in the short term, deliver results through pressure, manipulation and the terror they inflict on their teams. But that cannot last, because it breaks, demotivates and damages teams, and indirectly the companies themselves.

For me, elegance in management is not optional. Nor is it a weakness. It is entirely compatible with high standards. But first you need to demand as much of yourself as you do of others. You need to know how to calibrate your expectations. And you also need to give your teams resources commensurate with those expectations. That too is a form of elegance.

Frédéric Fougerat

The boundary between transparency and confidentiality can be approached in much the same terms in crisis communications as in management.

We should view this as a question of honesty or ethics, and of responsibility.

For me, transparency is something people are owed. It is a guarantee of trust in a personal relationship just as in a professional one. The limit lies in the “why”: should you say everything simply because there is no reason to hide it? Should you say everything even if it risks hurting someone, sometimes unnecessarily? Tell everything at the risk of alarming teams with hypothetical bad news that may be coming? Sometimes it is better to act as a shield, to protect and preserve. Be transparent: yes.

Provided that doing so is useful or essential.

In crisis communications, I always point out that “lying is not an option, even if you do not have to say everything.” This is not about playing with words. It is my way of explaining that transparency must serve a purpose. Conversely, lying is a risk that must be avoided.

Any crisis will be made worse if a lie is discovered in a communication, because it will fuel the crisis, deepen suspicion and prolong negative media coverage… And in our time, taking that risk is no longer an option.

As for confidentiality, I tend to approach it from the standpoint of personal and professional trust. It means knowing how to keep a secret because the information is not yours to share. For example, when I was vice-president of the Altran group, I had to make sure never to disclose, even to promote them, projects we were developing for certain clients, because confidentiality clauses had to be respected.

Confidentiality also means knowing how to hold on to information entrusted to you when it is not yours to disclose.

Two examples: before leaving Altran for Elior, both publicly listed groups at the time (with a regulatory framework governing communications), I could not disclose the forthcoming change in governance, even though I knew about it well in advance—not because I was involved in it myself, but because I was responsible for preparing the announcements and communication to the markets. I did not even mention it at home.

In a different situation, the woman heading a public executive body, for whom I was chief of staff, asked me on several occasions not to share confidential information that had come to my attention, because she doubted her own ability to keep a secret.

Frédéric Fougerat

To approach the subject properly, we need to remember that artificial intelligence is a tool. It is only a tool, not a substitute brain.

AI does not produce communication strategies at all. It can only propose hypothetical strategies by mathematically aligning the information it has available. That is very powerful and fast, but it is not intelligent.

Artificial intelligence can be impressive because it writes, summarizes, reformulates and produces at tremendous speed, sometimes better than certain humans. But behind that power, a fundamental limitation remains. AI generates, but it does not know why it generates. AI knows how to produce. But it cannot think about meaning.

AI does not understand the intention behind communication. It can suggest one, but that will be a gamble. The probability of it being correct will depend entirely on our ability to prompt it, on how we have fed it with our real intelligence. So it requires serious work beforehand.

AI cannot replace a communications professional in understanding a context, reading between the lines, grasping and decoding what is left unsaid, sensing emotions, anticipating reactions, making choices and committing to them. Or, if it gives the impression that it can, that is once again because a human has provided it with all the information, understanding and nuances it needs to consider.

That also requires the person writing the prompts to have genuine skills, and possibly extensive general knowledge, to help AI generate. Not to generate meaning, because artificial intelligence has no intuition, no convictions and no emotional intelligence. But to generate an acceptable deliverable.

AI can assist, accelerate, optimize and enhance… But it will never replace one of the things that gives communications professionals their value: their ability to understand human beings.

So the challenge is obviously not to resist AI, but to know what to do with it. And above all, why.

Frédéric Fougerat

The communications director is both the guardian of the institutional narrative (and more besides) and the protector of the organization’s reputation, even if one person cannot do everything alone.

The role of a communications director can be defined by 4 verbs: enhance and promote, preserve and protect. Their initial role is indeed to present a brand, an individual or an organization in the best possible light. They shine a light where it will do the most good: they enhance. Then they help a brand, person or organization become known and recognized. That is the promotional side, building or strengthening awareness.

But in a world that increasingly operates in crisis mode, communications directors must also ensure that their brand is as consistent as possible in order to preserve it.

This involves, among other things, ensuring a coherent narrative that does not contradict actual practices and ways of operating—the main sources of controversy, attacks and reputational backlash… Finally, in a sensitive situation, the communications director must protect the organization through advance crisis planning and through the ability and experience to manage crisis communications when they become necessary.

As for the leader, they can themselves pose a danger to their organization. They are often the ones who fuel a crisis with spontaneous statements that have not been prepared or carefully calibrated. That is why I keep pointing out that the best thing a leader can do for their communications function is to trust it, respect it and ensure that the company’s other departments respect it too. Of course, this presupposes that a professional communications team has been assembled.

Which is obviously not the case when people are recruited or appointed to communications to please someone, to do someone a favor, or even to find a convenient place for them… Ultimately, you always get the communications function you deserve.

Frédéric Fougerat

To me, managing the image of a major group and managing that of an individual are similar exercises. In both cases, they need to be treated as brands, with all the work that implies. That is more of an Anglo-Saxon than a Latin approach, incidentally. We are too inclined to reduce a brand to a name, a logo or a drawing.

In fact, a brand is a system of reference points that expresses an organization’s identity, promise and personality, but also its history and the people who embody it… in order to generate recognition and preference among its audiences.

Now, the merging of individual and institutional reputations is as much an opportunity as a threat to organizations. It depends both on the leader’s personality and on the communications director’s professional authority. If the number-one person in an organization does not want to, or does not like to, be in the spotlight and speak publicly, then they should not be put on the front line unless it is essential.

For example, written interviews should be preferred to radio or television appearances. Everything can be worked on, but going against someone’s nature in communications is rarely beneficial.

Conversely, a leader who is—or believes they are—a good public speaker, who enjoys speaking and being in the spotlight, also needs to be restrained. Overconfidence is a danger, as is uncontrolled speech.

This is another area where the communications professional’s role is essential. It requires a strong relationship of trust and genuine intellectual rapport, so that a leader can accept that they need to step aside in favor of a more effective communicator; that they must stick to a prepared narrative without deviating or improvising; or that their opportunity to speak will be reserved for a more favorable moment… That calls for empathy, psychology, diplomacy… and always a healthy dose of professional authority.

Frédéric Fougerat

Leaders make many mistakes in communication, a great many indeed. It would be difficult to compile a complete list. Let us focus on three major mistakes:

The first is certainly failing to trust their own communications teams. Why hire and pay professionals if you are going to take over their jobs at the first opportunity? A leader must set the direction, provide the vision and define the company’s strategy. Not its communications strategy, still less its communications plan, and certainly not the drafting of content in its various formats!

The second mistake is confidence, or overconfidence, in their own ability to communicate. In a crisis, this can be particularly disastrous. There is no effective communication without work: defining a strategy, anticipating risks, building a narrative… Natural abilities are not enough.

The third mistake is submitting communications decisions to participatory—or family—democracy. A communications decision is approved because you trust your communications director, not by asking for collective opinions at the end of an executive committee meeting or consulting your family over breakfast. Confusing an opinion with professional expertise is not professional.

Approving a communications strategy is not a matter of emotion or personal taste. It is a matter of vision, work, expertise, understanding a context, challenges and stakeholders…

Neither your chief financial officer, your legal director nor your children—even if they spend 8 hours a day on TikTok—know your organization’s communications objectives (and the resources allocated to them), have the experience of past failures from which lessons can be learned, possess expertise in relationships with journalists… or have experience using moderation guidelines to ensure a consistent narrative across the media and all content and rating platforms… all at once.

It is for all these reasons, among others, that it is always worth remembering that “communications is a profession”!

Frédéric Fougerat

In 40 years in the profession, I have witnessed far more transformations than digital technology, social networks and AI.

I began working without computers or desktop publishing; without mobile phones, at a time when the so-called fixed or landline telephone had only one function: making calls; with a limited number of media outlets, just 5 national radio stations and 3 television channels; without rolling news coverage, which meant television news at 1 p.m. and 8 p.m., and sometimes a late-night edition, whereas there are now 48, one every thirty minutes; without influencers, or rather with influential figures limited to scientists, intellectuals and journalists… all of whom had to go through mass media to express themselves.

No one was yet their own media outlet, as technology now allows.

Communication has always been a profession in constant evolution.

Artificial intelligence is the latest innovation to transform the profession. But it is not the last transformation our profession has undergone in its history. There will be others, many others… More and more powerful and astonishing. But they will always need real intelligence to be used properly, briefed and then analyzed.

AI can create an illusion in certain circumstances or for tasks with modest requirements. It can replace some execution tasks, but not advice. It can put forward hypotheses by synthesizing the data at its disposal. That never constitutes genuine reflection, intention or the pursuit of emotion. However, we must be clear-eyed: while AI will not replace communications professionals, communications professionals who use AI will replace those who do not.

Of course AI will transform, and perhaps disrupt, communications professions. Above all, it will certainly help make them even more professional, reinforcing the advisory role while diminishing the execution role. Thanks to AI, communications will increasingly be integrated as a strategic function that produces intelligence (genuine intelligence), and less and less as a support department that produces deliverables.

To achieve that, leaders too will need to become more demanding and make a choice for their communications function between illusion and professionalism. The consequences will not be the same!