Dear CEO,
If you ask a seasoned communicator, “What do leaders get wrong about Communications?” the surprising answer might be “virtually everything.”
That’s because unlike other C-suite functions Communications is wildly underrated and woefully misunderstood. Absent of absolute comprehension companies tend to curate internal mythologies around the role. For the practitioner, it’s like weighting down an F1 racecar and expecting to win.
Rarely if ever do the tactical service-oriented suppositions match Communication’s complexity, strategic orientation, resilience or business relevance.
These underlying tensions are most likely to reach maximum boiling point when disruption erupts.
Frogs Boil Slowly.
Folklorically speaking, frogs represent change and adaptability.
Within the fable about the amphibian failing to sense the water’s rising temperatures until it’s too late is the notion that disruption occurs slowly and long before it commands ‘all-hands’ attention.
Over time small changes expose organizational inertia, ineffective strategies, misaligned roles and obsolete structures that have out served their usefulness. They also uncover the kind of systemic weaknesses that result in viral headlines, reputational hits, states of crisis, and/or revenue loss.
Warning shifts heeded early afford leadership the time to build internal resilience, align for the onset of change and prepare for the inevitability of transformation as a hedge against disruption. `
But that’s not what typically happens.
Bad Don’t Get Gooder with Time.
Management Expert, Peter Drucker famously asserted that “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”
Too often critical errors are made in the gap between leadership’s need to ‘do something, fast’ and the decision to override Communications’ counsel in favor of solutions-by-committee that are doomed to fail because they’re based on internally curated suppositions, not proven principles.
In the fog of war, leaders tend to pin their hopes on stop-gap tactics from yesterday’s logic playbook like ‘friendly’ media interviews. What they don’t foresee are the downstream consequences.
Pros know that ‘audibles’ called late in the game waste time and resources, undermine strategies already in progress, and make circumstances more dire by failing to stop the crisis game clock.
‘Hail Mary’ plays may trigger an adrenaline rush; but they don’t move the chains.
[The success rate is an abysmally low 1to 2%.]
Let Them Cook!
What leaders miss is the fact that Communications is a science, not ‘in the huddle guesswork.’
The practice is procedural, process driven, proactive, strategic, skill and experience based, highly nuanced, ever evolving, integrated and reliant on insights, systematic research, empirical data, and validated principles that allow communicators to understand, predict, and influence results.
Communications can appear deceptively simple with seasoned practitioners at the helm furthering the myth that a ‘good idea’ will carry the day. However, without the expertise to peer beneath the surface, companies exacerbate their own situations when wrenching matters out of expert hands.
[And guess who gets to remediate the unintended consequences?]
Ray Charles popularized the saying, “Make it do what it do,” meaning to “maximize resources, adapt to circumstances, and drive to optimal outcomes,” which is exactly what communicators do.
Yet, these pros are chafing at the bit for a modicum of the credibility, respect, freedom, or resources to practice at the highest levels unabated as is accorded to other C-suite functions.
So, what do Communicators want?
In Gen Z parlance, “Let them cook!”
Let them lead in disruption.
Let them design and implement the strategies to uphold brand, business, and reputation.
Let them do what they do unencumbered by internally inspired mythological constraints.
Sincerely,
Your Chief Frustration Officer
PS: Three takeaways that communicators want you to know:
last updated 5/14/26
