INTRODUCTION

A TIME OF CHANGE & OPPORTUNITY

The last 25 years have seen an extraordinary transformation in corporate affairs. The discipline that once struggled so desperately for a voice and an identity now enjoys influence, stature and reach that would have been unimaginable to its practitioners even a single generation ago.

That maturation has been a complex story of subtle, growing pressures and sudden developmental leaps. From the early internet of the 1990s, through the social media revolution of the late 2000s, successive digital transformations played an obviously significant role. As the whole world suddenly acquired a voice, the corporate reputation was stripped of its security walls and the very notion of ‘communication’ changed forever. The professional context would never be the same again.

But impressive and rapid professionalisation inside the industry is what fortified it to take on these challenges, and which is paying extra dividends today. Long gone are the old-school days of brandy-and-cigars PR; of tactical internal communications teams focused on twee, community-building magazines; or of sustainability teams toiling simply to add nice compliance window-dressing to the company’s activities.

By the time we arrived at the mid-2010s, a world of voluble consumer activism and populist instability, we were looking at an utterly transformed profession, recalibrated wholesale towards outcomes rather than output. It had never been more in demand. It had credibility and purpose. And it was recognised across the business world as a disciplined function that had a meaningful impact on culture and company identity.

The profession’s coming of age

It seemed like the end of the story. But not so. For, in the last couple of years, another giant leap forward has become very apparent, something of an entirely different order to the developments of the past. This is not just another wave of professionalisation but a complete blank-slate rethink; the inevitable culmination of those years of developments, growth spurts and external pressures, now leading to a complete redesign of the corporate affairs function and a rethink of the very discipline of communications. It feels like we are entering the profession’s final realisation, its true coming of age.

Its emblem is not so much enhanced stature but enhanced expectation. The debate that caused so much anguish for leading practitioners for so many years – how to prove the impact of great communications on company performance – is no longer even a serious topic. That argument has been won. CEOs and shareholders the world over don’t just understand it instinctively these days, they are already two steps ahead, demanding to know what you’re doing about it.

It is evident, too, in the way corporations now view communications – not merely as a function but as a core business process. Brand positioning, reputation and stakeholder management today beat like a pulse through the boardroom agenda. Communications competencies have become genuine pre-requisites for executive leadership across all fields. And, for many multinationals today, sustainability is the driving force of the company’s entire global strategy and the number-one concern of its major investors.

Add in the effects of a very people-centred crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic – pushing corporate affairs directors directly into the spotlight – and the discipline has gone from being a highly professional unit, finally getting due respect for its expertise, to becoming something else entirely: a core function of the executive.

The challenge for the profession

But in this moment of actualisation, enormous structural and capability questions arise.The central part of the corporate affairs remit is now clear: It’s the reputation. And executive teams now implicitly recognise reputation as something that needs professional executive management, not only due to its central importance to every commercial goal, but its eye-watering complexity – affected by everything, and with everything affecting everything else; a billion actions, small and large, continually fissioning and creating reputational reactions everywhere.

The challenge? Across multinationals, the corporate affairs director has become the one charged with keeping this nuclear reaction of causes and effects under control – harnessing its positive energy and preventing its potential disasters.

The opportunity:They are being given often unprecedented resources and reach to achieve that goal – including, crucially, the ability to take on wider remits where required, even absorb satellite functions and departments into their spheres of control.

But how? For a corporate affairs leader to formally ‘own’ every function and process affecting the company’s reputation would create a vast, all-encompassing and unwieldly department, virtually indistinguishable from the whole org chart. Even simply building in strategic alliances and dotted reporting lines, steering groups or oversight processes would represent a gargantuan workload for one individual, for there is nothing – from operations to finance to marketing to sales – that does not affect how the company shows up in the world.Yet not changing reporting lines and team ownership would leave ‘management’ of the corporate reputation an illusion.

Our research

As well as drawing on our own day to day discussions with large corporates looking to hire such talent, we interviewed a range of senior corporate affairs leaders across a variety of industries, all of whom had taken a slightly different view of the challenge. Each had expanded their own accountabilities in their own unique way, from taking on the company strategy portfolio, to building in oversight of HR, to taking on chief-of-staff responsibilities, to moving into customer research, to taking on brand and marketing – and sometimes all of the above.This report outlines what these senior professionals have done in some of the world’s largest businesses, what their rationale was, and what they learned along the way.

In many cases, the new, expanded remits they created were a logical extension of their own personal career journeys – former investor relations leaders, for example, who, when stepping up to corporate affairs leadership, had naturally absorbed strategy and financial road-mapping responsibilities into their portfolio.

In other cases, it was a reflection of the sector or company culture: B2B organisations for whom brand and marketing had become so indistinguishable from communications that combining the two into a single function was a natural and obvious step. Or companies undergoing internal resets of the employee experience and employer brand, whose corporate affairs leaders had formed mergers with their HR departments.

Each interviewee shared the benefits of the moves they had made (almost universally: alignment; strategic coherence; cost and process efficiency; better line of sight) as well as the challenges (conflicting responsibilities and, most commonly, bandwidth and time management issues). And structure, of course, is only one part of it.The growth of the function brings significant people-management challenges for any good leader too.

These will be just some of the key discussions for our profession as we move forward from here, and we hope the report helps the reader prepare for the necessary changes in their own situation.

Taking two steps forward

But some in the profession have gone even further, reasoning that this moment demands a complete reimagining of the function as a whole – to symbolise and signal the significance of the change, and to have it recognised properly both internally and externally.They are throwing out the old ‘corporate affairs’ brand and creating an entirely new department with an entirely new title.

Others still have taken a quite different strategic move in this new environment: a move out of the function entirely. Seeking both to capitalise on the enhanced stature of corporate affairs – offering, for the first real time, a window of opportunity to make lateral executive moves – and also to acknowledge that the future of corporate affairs leadership lies in broad-ranging business acumen, they have taken the leap into wider leadership to become heads of strategy or customer relations, MDs, even CEOs.

These stories of alternative futures are included at the end of this report, as additional food for thought.

“Corporate affairs leaders are the spiders in the web. Other than the CEO, they have the most complete view across the whole enterprise, which means they can be some of the best end-to-end thinkers in leadership.That’s a huge advantage and not to be undervalued when you’re pushing for a wider role, because the opportunities most businesses are trying to tackle right now cannot be unlocked through any silo. No department, even one as important as sales, can get it done on their own. [In addition] what boards are looking for when they promote and hire executives now includes a lot more of those classically ‘soft’ corporate affairs skills. [So] your skills are becoming more relevant than they ever have been in the history of modern business.

“[But] you will only have a couple of opportune moments in your career to demonstrate you’re more than the label you’re carrying at that moment. Don’t be naïve about what those opportunities are and do not let them pass you by. Only you know what you really want. Only you know what you’re really capable of. And no one cares more about your career than you do. So you have to have your own north star, because only you have all the information you need to advocate for that place that you dream about for yourself.”

Stacey Tank, Chief Transformation and Corporate Affairs Officer, Heineken (& Former Business Unit Leader, Home Depot)

Which way will the cards fall?

All of our interviewees present compelling arguments for taking on additional responsibilities, building specific partnerships, or taking more dramatic steps to refashion the function or their own executive skillset.There is no right answer here – each company and corporate affairs director will be different.The next few years will undoubtedly see the emergence of a range of different answers to the present challenges of matching corporate affairs’ structure to the enhanced expectations of the role.

The key is not the model, of course, it’s the delivery. And here, a warning sign must hang over everything.The new, exalted status of the profession has been so long desired, the importance of communications to business performance so long argued, that it can lead to a sort of giddy assumption – at this clear inflexion point in the profession’s history – that corporate affairs has triumphed; that it will now have its deserved recognition and scope, and only sunlit uplands lay ahead.

It may not necessarily be so.The added responsibilities and scope reflect added expectation and new demands.The function is now at the sharpest end of leadership. And while, recently, the central role taken by corporate affairs in the response to the pandemic burnished the reputations of many high flyers in the profession, it equally exposed those who, in that most glaring of spotlights, were found wanting.

And though the additional responsibilities being afforded corporate affairs today may seem like an increase in power, they could also spell power being taken away:The new generation of corporate affairs leader has to be a Swiss Army knife executive, as insightful about customers as they are about employees and governments; as adept at balance sheets as broadcasting; as clear about the equity markets as equality and diversity; as talented at competitor analysis as campaigning.

That is a tall order for some in the profession. Multinationals have come to the conclusion that corporate affairs is absolutely central to the organisation’s functioning – but there is always a chance that they will therefore parachute in executives from other functions to run it. Indeed, there is some evidence that this has happened in places.

So we urge you to take this research not just as interesting insight, but as the inspiration to seize the moment and plant your own flag in the ground. It really is an unprecedented time in the field – and that means unprecedented opportunities to grow personally and advance professionally. Don’t miss it.

No business area has risen up more forcefully into the corporate affairs leader’s eyeline in recent times than Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG).

For many years, through incarnations like “corporate social responsibility” and “sustainability,” it was commonly seen at executive level as a compliance necessity rather than core to the business itself; a positive, community-building endeavour of which to be proud, certainly – but, in the final analysis, mostly a function of annual reporting.

That is now very definitely yesterday’s worldview. In the last few years, consumers have begun to take a brand’s sustainability profile deadly seriously. So, in response, have shareholders and, by extension, executive teams. In the US, the proportion of S&P 500 firms reporting on their ESG performance grew from less than 20% to 90% during the last decade¹. Our experience in executive search is that senior job applicants increasingly see it as a deal-breaker when choosing a new employer too. More importantly, boardrooms have begun to get a real, wordless instinct for how its importance is manifested – for the idea that sustainability drives reputation and brand, which in turn translates to the bottom line. Few are the consumer-facing multinationals today, therefore, that do not have ESG as a central component of their forward strategy.

It has also compelled many, in recent times, to support their corporate affairs directors taking on sustainability as an intrinsic component of the brand-reputation- communications matrix.

¹Source: Governance & Accountability Institute, Inc., Annual 2020 Flash Report

“For a long while, we still saw the value of sustainability as being mostly about protecting licence to operate. Of course it was about community, providing better livelihood outcomes and environmental stewardship, and as a vital part of local government engagement. But we didn’t perceive real value in our sustainability positioning from a consumer perspective. We didn’t think, frankly, that consumers cared, even though we had a good story to tell.

“But over the past 2-3 years, there’s been a gear shift – a rapid acceleration in consumer expectations around sustainability. For us at De Beers, that’s highly significant because luxury items like diamonds have always been about what you want to signal to the world about yourself through the brands you buy. So from a starting point of ‘just do comms,’ my role shifted to a reputation-protecting, do-no-harm, guard-our licence-to-operate perspective, then shifted again to really building a position for De Beers’ role within the world and how consumers can feel about buying, wearing and giving our products.

“In part, it’s the very success of that ‘purpose’ platform that has led us to understand that it’s not a side endeavour but the underpinning of the entire business. So our sustainability strategy is called ‘Building Forever’ and now sits right at the core of our business.”

As the recognition of ESG’s indivisibility from the consumer brand and its commercial success has landed, many have realised that the home previously carved out for their sustainability unit – often in its own department reporting to the CEO or Board, or as part of legal or operations, perhaps – is completely wrong. Entwined with the company’s positioning, it needs to be not just added to corporate affairs, but central to its delivery.

“I say I’m in the relationship business because, in this role, the most important thing to consider are the company’s relationships with its stakeholder audiences. If you consider how stakeholders assess a company, part of it is the prosaic stuff: Is it financially successful? Does it have good products or services? But increasingly, they’re appraising the character of the company:What does it stand for? What does it care about? What’s its point of view on the big social questions of the day?

“In the early days of my career, you could have swerved all those questions, but not anymore – the age of corporate moral agnosticism is well and truly over. And when you arrive at that conclusion, then what better home for thinking about where we show up in the world than corporate affairs? It’s ultimately about how the company shows up in civic society and I think it’s an absolutely logical home for that work and that thinking.”

“I joined Capita three years ago in a standard internal/external corporate affairs role but, after a year, I took on ‘Responsible Business’ (which is what we call our sustainability function).The argument was: If you truly want a strategic, ‘responsible business,’ that means putting resources into a lot of horizon scanning and thinking about stakeholder expectations, now and in the future.You need to be considering where you want to be leading the field, which issues in society matter most to your business, and what your stance will be on them as a business. And I think that sits more naturally in corporate affairs than almost anywhere else, not just because it has that responsibility to look ahead, thinking about the reputational milestones in getting where you need to be. But also because it has a role as quite a neutral voice:We can nudge, challenge and support across the organisation fairly blamelessly because we don’t have ‘skin in the game’ in the same way HR does, for example, so that gives us the power to start shifting perceptions as well as defining them.”

Even so, in the balancing act of just how much of the vast reputational remit corporate affairs should endeavour to manage – from branding to corporate strategy to employee relations – the fit always has to be right, otherwise the department’s scope becomes unmanageable. And while, in today’s consumer world, sustainability overall might be a core reputational issue and therefore an obvious function of corporate positioning, that doesn’t mean that a business’s on-the-ground sustainability issues are best managed by a reputation-focused discipline.

But if it is indeed a natural fit, and though the logic may be sound, our interviewees warned that the subtle practicalities of transitioning ESG into corporate affairs’ remit is not always simple.The team culture can be very different; the skillset and knowledge base too. By nature, this is often a passionate, campaigning team, motivated by the good being done rather than esoteric notions of commercial strategy, and some distance from the technical expertise of corporate communications.

However, with the right mindset, a clear division of accountabilities and an open mind on management – letting the experts deliver on their expertise – our interviewees felt this was as much a benefit as a challenge.

“You have people who work in sustainability who are very strong on content knowledge – they know climate change; they can talk to you about Scope 3 emissions and the details of the Paris Agreement. But they’re not necessarily the best advocates, communicators or storytellers. Meanwhile, in corporate affairs you have really smart people who know how to manage channels and messages to reach different audiences, but who often lack deep subject-matter knowledge. It’s very rare to find people who have both in one. So the leadership trick is to make each group aware of the value in the other, and find a way to equip them to play off each other.

“But you also then get two ‘bangs for your buck’, because your comms people find their way into the topic and learn the content on-the-job in a really deep way.That could be really important down the line. It doesn’t mean they’ll transition into sustainability, but it does create the journey to allow them to do that. So now you’ve got people who’ve come from a corporate affairs background doing their Cambridge Sustainability Leaders Programme, for example, because they know that’s what will equip them to do this job better in the future.”

At a subtler level, one must also consider how the move looks – both to the ESG team itself and to the wider employee base.This is a team that often has a missionary zeal, with an internal culture of being proud to sit apart from the company’s ‘corporate stuff ’.Yet here you will be, moving it into a department named ‘corporate communications’ or, arguably worse, ‘corporate affairs’ (a name which, to outsiders, can carry a whiff of vague, legalistic cover: “the place where the corporate entity gets its ‘affairs’ in order”). Similar potential for misunderstanding applies to putting your sustainability team in a brand and marketing department. So there may be reassurances to deliver.

“We thought long and hard about whether it was even a good idea to put our ‘sustainable impact’ unit under brand because of the connotations it potentially creates – that the sustainability effort is ‘all about marketing’ and not about making real positive outcomes on the ground.

“So as we’ve done it, we’ve been really intentional about creating a new understanding within the business – that, when we’re talking about brand, it does include the work of the marketing team, but that brand is not just a synonym for ‘marketing’.The understanding we’ve been trying very carefully to land is that brand is about how De Beers shows up in the world; how we show up for our communities; for our government partners; for our employees; and for our clients. We need all these things – our corporate affairs, sustainability and marketing strategy to affect that outcome.”

David Prager, Chief Brand Officer, De Beers Group

2.

MARKETING & BRAND

Those with long track records in corporate affairs will remember the vogue for “integrated marketing communications” that ran through the corporate world in the 1990s and early 2000s.

At the time, multinationals were facing a conundrum: PR and media relations were professionalising away from their traditional, old gladhanding cultures, as they grappled with a new, complex 24/7 media world; internal communications, meanwhile, was independently refashioning itself as a results-oriented discipline focused on engagement.

A sense was emerging that these back-room communications teams were swelling in capability and potential impact – but, to fulfil expectations, needed better assimilation.

The fix was to view them as just other forms of promotion and therefore to house communications in the marketing department. “Message alignment” was the mantra.

But the “integrated marcomms” model never really took root.The two disciplines were, in fact, on opposite growth trajectories, intersecting briefly at that moment before continuing on.The maturation of communications was actively taking it away from mass production and message management, towards translating the company strategy into face-to-face, two-way engagement with stakeholders. Marketing in contrast was in the process of leaning into abstraction, in the grip of a new corporate obsession – “brand” – and moving to objectify the corporate identity and values through crafted media and positioning.

Some 20 years on, we may have come full circle – albeit with the tables turned in the process: Brand has become synonymous with the much broader concept of reputation, which has in turn become the core remit of corporate affairs; ergo, brand is now a concomitant part of communications’ defined responsibilities, not the other way around. And in the social era, marketing has become a subtler, more activation-led beast, while PR and media relations have been forced to become more heavily involved in production again, due to the demands of digital (where consumable media is everything).The same divisions do not really apply anymore, but the same desire to align all communications remains.

Some of our corporate affairs leaders, therefore, were now taking brand – or the entirety of marketing – into the ambit of their responsibilities.

Of course, to some extent, the wisdom of this sort of synthesis is very much dependent on the organisation – most notably, its sector and the ‘customers’ to whom it is marketing. In FMCG, for example, where brand and marketing may be large and complex functions looking at perhaps thousands of consumer products, with a direct customer base that might number in the hundreds of millions, its work may feel light years away from the bread and butter of corporate affairs. In service organisations, much less so. Interestingly, the interviewees who had brought marketing into their functions were in B2B service organisations – and they all noted explicitly that it was a particular match-fit in these types of businesses:

“In a B2B company, it works so well to have them together because the leverage you get across the two disciplines in that setting is really natural. Otherwise, communications can often get uncoupled from the requirement to sell, and marketing can get uncoupled from telling the broader story of the company.

“Our business at Inmarsat is complex and requires a lot of explaining to a limited number of customers.That type of ‘marketing’ requires you to be sharp on messaging, as per traditional marketing, but also an understanding of the business – not just the product side but the financials, the strategy, the direction, the vision.That generally plays more into the corporate communications skillset, because they tend to think more strategically about messaging overall. So with communications’ input, you can then wrap the product and its marketing into a much clearer and broader corporate story. Likewise, sitting with marketing prevents communications getting too carried away with visioning and abstract ideas that, ultimately, don’t hit customers in the gut or instinctively match up in their minds to anything tangible. It brings communications much closer to the goal of selling more product – learning how to construct messaging not in a vacuum but with a hard end goal as the target of their persuasion.

“So yes, bringing them together is more efficient on the cost side. But the bigger benefit is that it’s more efficient in terms of positioning in the market, because where marketing stops and communications starts is becoming increasingly fuzzy, especially in B2B. So in that setting, I think it’s a great model.”

This view – that taking on marketing produces a real sea change in communications effectiveness – was echoed by the experiences of others, although realising such wins comes with a hefty burden: It means being disciplined and organised enough to add a whole new, intricate chunk to your communications planning.

Perhaps the most common argument we heard for bringing brand and marketing into the corporate affairs fold, however, was the rising importance of ESG. For consumers today, the brand and the sustainability profile go hand in hand in defining the company’s reputation. From that perspective, corporate affairs can no longer be held apart from any branding efforts.

“Before I came here, the different communications and brand disciplines were scattered everywhere.There were bits in legal and HR and the company secretariat – not necessarily by design, but in part as a consequence of corporate restructurings over the years.

“But a very deliberate component of our CEO’s agenda when she arrived was something she calls ‘powering up the brand’. In essence, the level of ambition she has for the company is reflected in the ambition she has for our brand and what we’re renowned for. So this function ‘Brand and corporate affairs’ was created and, when I was considered for it, I said that these would be the teams I’d design into it – things like, financial comms, social media, employee comms, media relations, sustainability, and public affairs. Because these disciplines and the people who work in them are in the relationships business – that’s the common theme.

“At its core – whether it’s regulatory bodies, government, employees, the public or media – we have disproportionate responsibility for managing those relationships on behalf of this corporation. It’s not a sole responsibility, because the CEO and other colleagues will engage with those stakeholders too. But we’re the ones orchestrating it; we’re the ones strategically thinking about those relationships and how, as a business, we engage in them and enhance them.That’s why having this breadth of function makes perfect sense to me.”

Stephen Doherty, Chief Brand and Corporate Affairs Officer, Aviva

It’s not a combination that comes without challenges of course, such as historically very different approaches to the job, and ways of thinking about identity. But those are also opportunities to expand not just the remit of corporate affairs, but its worldview, said some.

“Where I think corporate affairs leaders need to make a shift – and take specifically from the marketing approach if they don’t have that background — is to ask themselves two questions.

“First, if you’re building a purposeful brand for your business, how do you move from the rational to the emotional? Not just being motivated by,“How can I make our corporate story make logical sense?” Not”“How can we argue our position and explain it in a watertight way?” But rather: “How can we make people feel it – in a way that doesn’t even need explaining?

“And second: How do you build consumer benefit into your communications – how to build a ‘brand promise’? These are not necessarily things you would have been doing if you’ve come from the comms side, and it takes skill and learning to develop.”

David Prager, Chief Brand Officer, De Beers Group

Because of that, Prager has the following advice for other corporate affairs leaders, regardless of whether they enter into formally adopting brand and marketing into their remit or simply working more closely with those teams.

“Spend time with a consumer brand strategist – helping you to move from the rational to the emotional. Because when you’re a corporate affairs head, your job is to sow a rational story to rational people in a rational setting, with data and evidence and facts. That’s still sometimes my role (as I still have corporate affairs responsibilities) but as a chief brand officer, sometimes my role is to take the seeds of that same story and sow it in an entirely different way to engage consumers and drive sales. Honestly, that opens up your skillset so much more.”

David Prager, Chief Brand Officer, De Beers Group

3.

INVESTOR RELATIONS

The world of investor relations (IR) has rarely assimilated comfortably with the other communications disciplines, evidenced by its often being housed in an entirely different part of the business.

Part of this is practical:The calendar of IR is unique, focused around reporting events specific to the universe of finance, and which are rarely clear-the-diary moments for employees or the wider public.The nature of the investor relationship is highly personal, with challenges and even crises that might never be on the radar of other audiences. And its syntax – from the style of engagement to the language used – is highly financially technical. Shareholders want detailed analytics and market projections; news on divestments and strategic partnerships; market movements and the granular detail of the balance sheet. It’s often a world away from other corporate communications.

More importantly, there has always been a key difference in communication outcomes: Most corporate communications is geared towards inspiring and motivating.Too much of that would be inappropriate with shareholders, literal ‘stake holders’ with cash on the line. Fiduciary responsibilities necessitate a directness and frankness, and a complexity and depth, that can sit oddly with the tone observed in the rest of the communications universe.

It’s therefore been unusual for investor relations to be seen as core to corporate affairs – but also, for the same reasons, rare for corporate affairs leaders to make career moves into investor relations.

“In most FTSE 100 companies, the silos still exist between IR and corporate affairs and I understand why – IR has some very specific required technical abilities.The competencies you need to engage with the capital markets are different for sure, and if you haven’t had exposure to them, it’s difficult to understand how it all works. So it’s rare to find someone who has experience in both investor relations and broader corporate communications.”

Yet it scarcely needs stating that it is still a communications discipline and the conversations being had with investors are not a sealed box.They are a concomitant part of the company’s positioning, identity and narrative of purpose.

Among the smaller FTSE 250 companies, for example, you will often find IR sitting much closer to the other communications disciplines. In part, perhaps, because the communications team is sized to accommodate it. In part because smaller organisations don’t suffer the same levels of bloat, process inefficiency or long, ragged histories of change that necessitate such a regular communications focus on internal streamlining efforts a world away from the financials. But also perhaps because, in smaller public companies, fiercely ambitious to grow, market capitalisation and shareholder returns are more nakedly the key story of the company’s strategy, as presented to employees and the public.

But as corporate affairs builds itself out as the full-grade, multi-dimensional Mission Control for reputation management, it could be time to rethink these firewalls in larger organisations too.

When corporate communications was little more than a motivational show-and- tell of the company’s future vision, and IR a below-the-waterline analysis of its continuous present, an argument could be made that the two had fundamentally different aims, and that they were no more ‘alike’ than finance and sales.The ultimate target was different, as were the core skills and value points: Investor relations were the mechanics, expert at everything under the bonnet. Comms focused on the bodywork; the spit and polish.

But the new era of corporate affairs has brought it much closer to the mechanics of the operation and it’s becoming increasingly unclear how corporate affairs can manage reputation if investor relations remains its own universe: Incoming feedback (on what the markets are saying and feeling) is core to accurate analysis of the brand’s standing. Likewise, in the modern era, investors are as likely to be as concerned with ‘soft’ issues like sustainability, culture and employee wellbeing as they are the ‘solid’ financials, so investor relations needs to be involved in the directions those efforts are taking.

“Our CEO was really at the forefront of this. He had always felt the message should be consistent across investors and colleagues, especially around sustainability; a golden thread to all parts of the narrative. And he was far-sighted enough a decade ago to realise that sustainability was soon going to become much more important for both audiences. (It’s now obvious, whereas 10 years ago leaders didn’t necessarily see that convergence.)

“So we’ve now arrived at that future: I have a sustainability team, a comms team and an IR team, but we’re interconnected the whole time and naturally that means there’s consistency in what we’re saying and how we’re saying it.”

“I think, nowadays, consistency matters more than ever before for companies, because we’re all being held responsible for a much wider sphere of activity. If you think about it from a CEO’s point of you view, they’re responsible for everything in the company – it doesn’t matter whether it’s strategy or risk or operations or brand, or how we communicate with investors or how we communicate with employees. So you’re trying to achieve a single voice for the company through everything, and bringing IR and communications together just helps with that consistency.”

This is all well and good; few would be unaware of the benefits of bringing IR closer into the communications fold.The question is: How to do it? It can be a bewildering world, and its practitioners are rarely experts in broader communications.This is usually a management capability taken up by bankers and analysts for the purposes of reporting and account management; much more rarely a financial capability taken on by communications experts.

“Generally speaking, the people who rise up in the IR world have formal financial qualifications or have potentially worked as bankers or analysts. So it may be easier for that person to take on responsibility for an allied profession that doesn’t require formal qualifications, than vice versa.

“The key point, of course, is financial and business literacy, which has long been the key development need for corporate affairs anyway – the ability to sit in the room and fulfil the role of not just expert communications or engagement professional but also expert business executive, fluent in the language of business and contributing as a multi-dimensional leader.”

Stephen Doherty, Chief Brand and Corporate Affairs Officer, Aviva

Indeed, such motivation may be increasingly necessary. For there is a warning sign here for communications experts, something we see increasingly at Broome Yasar in our executive search work. Where a departmental fusion is being applied, it seems it is much more likely that the head of IR gets made head of corporate affairs than that a corporate affairs leader takes up a chief IR officer role.

As the structural drawstrings tighten around the creation of a single corporate affairs team, therefore, it’s worth asking: Will you have the necessary skillset to be able to take on IR responsibilities, should that be required? Because the journey is getting harder with each passing year, which means that it’s never been more important to act – with haste.

“For communications leaders to take on IR today is a much tougher journey because of the way the role of IR has evolved. Compared to 15 years ago, it’s a completely different type of person being recruited as IRO nowadays.There’s more focus on technical ability, and you only need to look at the types of conversations IRs have with investors to understand why that is required. Investors are getting more sophisticated, so the conversations are getting more sophisticated. I wouldn’t say it can’t be done but there’s a hill to climb and I’d recommend comms people spend more time with their IR teams if that’s an area they want to get into.Think about secondments or rotations where you can initially start supporting the IR team.You can pick it up but you do need a good understanding of P&L, cashflow, balance sheets and financials to really get your capabilities noticed by the business.”

Other interviewees were often keen to point out the same – that it doesn’t require formal schooling when the education will be right in front of you if you carve out the time, make the right contacts, and make yourself useful.

“You need to develop a strong feel for what the company is trying to achieve from a commercial perspective.That’s the requirement and it’s not at all impossible to acquire CFOs and CEOs do it all the time, and I have seen people who’ve never worked in IR master that very successfully.You also, of course, need a firm understanding of the stakeholder group, but that’s like any communications role, so well within reach.What I do see in a lot of communications professionals is a slight distance from the company’s market strategy, especially its commercial aims. One of the reasons is that they often might not have access to key materials – budget reviews and strategy reviews; the things that come from being very proximate to the senior leadership team. But that’s the gap, in my experience – it’s the executive strategic knowledge rather than the technical knowledge but it’s something you can acquire if you have the desire to go out and get it.”

Nadia Ridout-Jamieson, Chief Communications Officer (inc Investor Relations), Experian

“My advice:What are the gifts you’re bringing? Work with the IRO and set yourself the primary goal of bringing them something – some help, some perspectives that make their job easier, some way of helping them see a path through the fog.Then, through that, build up a relationship with them – and set aside the time – to enable you to see the mechanics.Then be rigorous about pushing yourself: How many investor meetings are you listening to? Do you understand the capital markets? Finally, set yourself a goal: Could you tell the story of the company whilst being grilled by a hedge fund? Ask yourself those questions and you will, over time, be able to develop the right foundations.”

David Shriver, Director of Communications (which includes Investor Relations), Ocado Group

“Spend some time with people in the market – brokers, advisers. Spend some time on the trading floor. Have curiosity about the basics, drive it and get some exposure to it, so you’re not green.

“Then there are specific things you will need to learn that are very natural for someone with an IR background: So get yourself pulled into company secretary business. Get involved in strategy. Learn M&A.

“And then finally remember that you don’t need to ‘have it all’ immediately, as long you surround yourself with the right people along the way. So if you do ultimately secure that wider comms and IR role, get yourself a very good Number Two on the IR side of things – someone who perhaps doesn’t have the broader knowledge you bring, but has more defined market understanding.”

Richard Menzies-Gow, Director of Investor Relations, Corporate Communications & Brand, Informa

Finally, consider whether you do want it – or whether it’s even feasible to take into a single role, given the bandwidth issues.The schedule of investor relations makes it difficult to tuck into the running order of everything else in corporate affairs. In a very large multinational, it would be nearly impossible.There is a danger of taking on two full time executive jobs at once, unless you recruit – and devolve responsibility – wisely.

“It’s very hectic and balancing time constraints is difficult.With IR, there’s just a volume of meetings and conversations you’ve got to get through. And now ESG is so much in the picture as well, it means there’s a lot going on.

“So you’ve got to have self-starting, highly capable and experienced people in the team. I have great sustainability leaders and comms leaders who take the load – take the lead, in fact – and ‘do the doing.’ So all I have to do is manage them, stepping in when they need me for key decisions or to influence someone.That’s essential.”

Richard Menzies-Gow, Director of Investor Relations, Corporate Communications & Brand, Informa

Some, though, feel that you will eventually have no choice:This is the direction of travel, perhaps even inevitable. So it is wise to start preparing for it now.

4.

HUMAN RESOURCES

It is still more of a rarity, but certain organisations have found a very different kind of approach to the challenges of this new era of communications: creating a stronger synthesis between corporate affairs and HR.

Since the mid-2000s and the birth of employee engagement, it is something that has often been mooted as a target for greater strategic efficiency, but rarely fully realised at corporate level – still seen as a speculative idea without a natural working model. However, we found that those who were now moving in this direction did not see it as unusual or unworkable at all. For them, it was the obvious next stage in the ideological maturation of corporate communications, an evolution typified, they felt, by a recognition that the discipline’s future lay ever less in campaigning, ever more in unpicking the multiple, complex human factors influencing the company’s reputation.

Interestingly, these interviewees had often not opted for a formal fusion between the two departments. Some had maintained the dominant comms focus of their corporate affairs teams but had simply built stronger dotted-line relationships with HR. Some had standardised day-to-day working methods to bring the two functions into much closer process and strategy alignment.

Others, though, had taken the full plunge, like Josh Murray at UK construction giant Laing O’Rourke. He has full responsibility for both corporate affairs and HR, albeit maintaining them as separate functions with himself as the point of orchestration – absorbing their separate inputs and acting as cross-pollinator between the two. What has surprised him most is how naturally aligned they already are:

“I still run corporate affairs and HR as two distinct streams, but I see the synergies as absolutely apparent. The more I’ve worked in this model, the more I’m finding I’m dealing with the same issues on both sides.”

Those synergies, he said, went beyond the obvious ones (e.g., employee engagement, change communications) towards far broader elements of the new corporate affairs remit. What made it vital to plug into the HR brief, he said – indeed, what made it work – was the strong interplay today between communications and brand identity; more specifically, the chain of impact from employee communication to employer branding to corporate reputation.

“Fundamentally, it’s all about reputation in corporate affairs – and reputation is the inflexion point with HR too. With the right reputation, you can hire the best people and retain the best people. Then, you look after them and they perform really well and, in turn, they then further build your reputation (which, as a corporate affairs leader, is your bread and butter). And if you can get that cycle to work, I find I’m often having the same kind of conversations regardless of whether I’m talking to my comms people or my HR people. That, in itself, makes the case for these two functions to work much more hand-in-hand now – otherwise what kinds of inefficiencies and duplications are you getting?”

Josh Murray Group Director of People & Corporate Affairs (and Office of the CEO), Laing O’Rourke

Of course, while employee engagement and reputation might be universals, the day-to-day business of HR is not familiar territory for most corporate affairs leaders. How hard are the formalities of the transition, if one takes on serious responsibilities for the function?

“It takes a year to get to grips with it, as with any new post: the new language to get used to; the stuff that’s BAU and just ‘expected to happen’ but which is new to you and comes on at such a pace, from graduate recruitment processes to discussions with the unions.

“But the toughest thing is getting your head around it at the right pace without slowing down the experts. The key is having a team around you that you can trust – and entrust. They understand that your contribution is not coming from 20 years’ HR experience but that you are coming with significant experience in the business and what it’s trying to achieve with the long-term strategy. And when they see that you can connect them and their work to the bigger picture, that can bring teams together and be very powerful.”

Josh Murray Group Director of People & Corporate Affairs (and Office of the CEO), Laing O’Rourke

And he recommends spending time working out the right balance between the visionary and the functional – between the ‘small-c’ conservative half of HR, concerned with maintaining status quo and keeping processes running smoothly, and the other half of HR concerned with shaking things up and building the future of the workplace.

“The people function is an incredibly broad area; I’m learning still every day which are the right areas to influence. And when you deal with the future of work and people’s career opportunities, growth and development, welfare and wellbeing, HR can be incredibly intoxicating. The new D&I vision we’re going after, for example, is an incredibly exciting space.

“However, HR also has a lot that has to get done in the background to keep the ship on course. So the tough part of the role – but the key to the portfolio – is keeping them both in the right balance. You have to make sure you have a steady hand on the BAU and that the hygiene stuff is done effectively and doesn’t slip, because it can’t be allowed to slip – it’s people’s jobs and wellbeing at stake. But you have to have a way of doing that while keeping the aspirational, future-development stuff in focus at the same time, because that’s where the progress and opportunity is.”

Josh Murray Group Director of People & Corporate Affairs (and Office of the CEO), Laing O’Rourke

Intriguingly, amongst our interviewees, those like Murray who had built inroads into HR often landed on the exact same point as each other – that, in their view, the most important conceptual element in their approach to corporate affairs leadership was not the connection to HR, per se. It was what that symbolised: their belief that the quintessential leadership demand of the era was to be an ‘all-rounder.’ One spoke of how the modern executive, of any departmental stripe, has to be a “connected leader” because, “as the world is getting more connected, so too are corporate functions, and what companies are therefore looking for are leaders who can connect point A to point B across the organisation to make everything work.” Viewed from that perspective, it was simply obvious to them to connect strongly into HR – the most natural enablers of internal communication effectiveness.

Murray, whose career has, in many ways, been defined by his adaptability and ability to play across different boundaries (see sidebox), gave us exactly the same rationale:

“We’re being presented with this change at the moment where the leadership skills that are going to be highly valued sit outside some of the more technical aspects of each discipline. Companies are instead looking for people who can be influential in driving industry change, strategy, stakeholder perceptions, and so on. So it’s going to be up to the corporate affairs leader to augment their skills across many different areas to deliver value.”

Josh Murray Group Director of People & Corporate Affairs (and Office of the CEO), Laing O’Rourke

In that context, it mattered less to Murray and others whether the role involved working with HR or another completely different function – that would all depend on the organisational situation. What mattered was connecting strongly with whichever teams, leaders or functions enabled you to benefit the organisation’s standing. For Murray, the adoption of the ‘people’ remit was the end result of that journey of enquiry, not its starting point.

“That would be my advice: Don’t limit yourself to thinking about ‘comms.’ Think in terms of what, in your day-to-day remit, provides the real business value. Because most of the big issues that drive corporate affairs leaders, the things that are the real adrenaline pumpers, are those where you have to play across functional borders anyway.

“That’s the way to be thinking about if you’re considering a broader role: What can I bring to the business that sits across portfolio areas? Once you’re in that mindset, it doesn’t matter what the role or department is, you can apply yourself to it, and surround yourself with the people who can deliver on it. And you’re suddenly not so concerned about the blurring of functional lines anymore because you get such a broad view, so if you were to move on to general business leadership, you’ve got the understanding of how those interactions can happen. It’s definitely opened me up to thinking I could definitely take on other scenarios because I’ve seen the other side of the fence.”

Josh Murray Group Director of People & Corporate Affairs (and Office of the CEO), Laing O’Rourke

It is fascinating that this view of ‘connected leadership’ and ‘playing across boundaries’ was the one proselytised most by those interviewees working closely with HR; by those most willing to jettison the biases that have traditionally made communicators resist HR as if allergic to it – for its perceived functional approach, regulatory worldview, rule orientation and treadmill of process. What leaders like Murray saw instead was that, in the modern era, working hand-in-hand with HR responsibilities was indivisible from the expanded expectations of the new corporate affairs leader.

Have these ‘connected’ executives pioneered the model for tomorrow’s corporate affairs directors – people who head up a function that ‘plays across boundaries’ much more freely; that will have technical communications teams within its structure, but dotted lines into many more parts of the business?

And by seeing a connection into HR as the obvious first step for corporate affairs in that drive for connectivity, are they also laying down a challenge to industry orthodoxy? In many ways, it is ‘easy’ for corporate affairs to take on areas like sustainability or branding, because the subject matter and approach dovetail nicely. The bigger stretch – but perhaps bigger wins – are to be found in building bridges into functions like HR that operate in many of the same arenas but with a very different style and perspective. Surely dampening that collision of approaches is a greater win for your organisation than further streamlining links to those areas to which corporate affairs is already much more instinctively aligned?

5.

STRATEGY

We often talk about the need to avoid tactical approaches and deliver “strategic communications.” But it’s a whole different proposition to move into actually driving the corporate strategy of an organisation. Yet that’s exactly what two of our interviewees have done from a corporate affairs or communications background.

Of course, ‘strategy’ functions can vary greatly – from big-picture, blue-sky-thinking, visioning departments; to analysts gathering up the ingredients from which the CEO and ExCo can construct a strategy; to practical operationalists, charged with laying out the track for the strategy’s smooth rollout; to something much more actuarial, monitoring and reporting execution of an in-train strategy. Sometimes, they are all of that. Sometimes, they are more or less the CEO’s chief of staff.

At UK retailer Currys plc, Assad Malic absorbed into his corporate affairs brief a very specific type of group strategy accountability, centred on business growth and market analysis.

“The strategy role I took on is a very expansive remit and one I haven’t seen in many other businesses in terms of its breadth, both across the business and into the future. It really centres on bringing the outside world into our present-day thinking and forward planning. So it’s mostly external looking – M&A and competitor/peer analysis, and assessing which areas of the business show the potential to make gains in the market. So it’s more the analytical than the delivery side. It’s working out where we can improve and how we best manage stakeholders to get there. But all of those needs, to some extent, revolve around communication, so the fit is very natural.”

At Compass Group, Clare Hunt took a different path, moving on from her position as director of communications to become director of strategy and M&A. Hers was a strategy role that combined shorter term operational excellence with longer term horizon scanning and M&A. (Since then, she has moved on again to become CEO of a Compass business line. See Section III for more details.)

“My role changed over time, initially helping the incoming CEO define and communicate his strategy around people, purpose and performance.The focus then shifted to building out operational excellence under the performance pillar, as well as longer term thinking and analysis and M&A. Given Compass’ decentralised structure, the operational excellence part was about creating frameworks for regional and country teams in key areas such as pricing and procurement. Beyond that, I spent a lot of time exploring what was going on outside of our organisation.This part of the role naturally flowed into acquisition and disposal activity, which is constantly in train for a large group such as Compass.”

But combining the strategy brief and the corporate affairs brief into one single role, as Malic has, is a major responsibility – and a major workload.The benefits are obvious, of course, if it’s feasible: Everything is part of the same piece. However, Malic also warns that it comes with clear challenges in a large organisation.

“If you hold the keys to strategy as well as communications and investor relations, it just allows you to produce a really consistent message to all audiences – not just one that’s very crisp and very clear, but that’s universally intelligible to all stakeholders in the same way, because it’s all lined up from the same source.That’s been the great thing:There isn’t any ambiguity anymore.

“The big challenge is time allocation, particularly thinking time. Deep thinking is the only way I know how to do the job, it’s intrinsic to success – particularly on strategy, where I need to spend time thinking big picture, top level. Last year was particularly tough with the pandemic because there were so many things going on, it was incredibly hard to keep track and still carve out that space to consider what we were doing and where we were going.

“But, for me, that’s why the key to any big, combined role is always having the right structures in place in terms of the team around you. Hire the best people you possibly can — and if they’re so good that it means they’re ambitious to go after your job, that’s fine.That means they’re the right people.”

Assad Malic, Group Strategy and Corporate Affairs Director, Currys

Those time and workload constraints are perhaps one reason why this sort of combination is still a rarity – Malic was the only senior corporate affairs director we met who had been able to do it.

Whether you combine the roles completely, or absorb (or divide and swap) remits in new ways, there are still things to recognise about what the strategy role might involve for someone with a communications skillset, and how one might convince an executive team to sign off on it.

Noticeably, both Hunt and Malic were offered the strategy brief via very similar pathways. Each had a financial background, and from there had eventually broadened out into heading up corporate affairs or corporate communications in-house. In both cases, it was the manner of their approach to that communications role – the long- term thinking; the multi-functional worldview; the experienced executive counsel – that had convinced their ExCos to actively push them to take on strategy.

“I’d initially joined what was then Dixons Carphone as corporate affairs director, with a primary focus on investor relations, some external communications and a bit of social impact. But then, during my first few months, a new CEO came in who had a solid retail background but very little experience of public companies. So we worked closely together in those opening months – to shape the messaging; to decide how we were going to talk to the markets; and to determine what the communications plan was going to be. And all of that, quite naturally, fed into the strategy and vision he was beginning to develop.

“And as we delivered on the messaging and looked at the feedback from investors, media and other stakeholders, he started to trust me more in making decisions. A year later, he felt that giving me the strategy brief was both a natural fit but also a natural evolution of what corporate affairs does.”

Assad Malic, Group Strategy and Corporate Affairs Director, Currys

“It came about as a natural extension of my working relationship with the CEO and the other senior leaders at the time. I’d always approached my communications role with the mindset of connecting the dots and thinking about unintended consequences – deliberately taking a different, sometimes ‘longer out’ perspective.

“That showcased my capabilities but it also set the model, in many ways, for how I could best add value to the leadership team. So when the conversations began about what was next for me that would benefit the business most, it was a more natural progression into a strategy role than you might think.”

Clare Hunt, Former Director of Strategy and M&A Compass Group

Yet many readers will recognise themselves in these descriptions:You perhaps regularly offer strategic advice to the executive team, apply long-term goals, and avoid simply being a narrowly communications-focused voice around the table – yet a strategy remit might still not feel imminent.

The individual details are obviously what matter. As Malic’s testimony shows, the business situation has to be ripe for it, but personal opportunity plays its part too. “I was fortunate enough that I had to spend a lot of time with the new CEO because he was incoming and needed assistance,” he says, “and I was fortunate that he needed advice on packaging his strategy for wide consumption, which helped me build up a good reputation with him around strategic thinking.” But that doesn’t mean that personal endeavour can’t make your luck for you.

“To make a move like mine, you need support from both sides – the business needs to be open to it, of course, and the individual has to be the right candidate for it. Throughout my communications career and from my time in investment banking, I’d always had a heavy slant towards business, finance and strategy so it wasn’t such a big step as it might be for others. I had a grounding in the commercial aspects of business and I understood those elements.

“But the individual also needs to want to pursue it – and that is something you genuinely have to ask yourself, and answer honestly. A lot of communications professionals love communications and aren’t looking to branch too far out from it – and that’s great. But if you are interested in broadening out, strategy is a good career builder because it gives you
visibility into the business and builds core capabilities around judgement and prioritisation. It’s one of those areas, like communications, that serves you well in a CEO role.”

Clare Hunt, Former Director of Strategy and M&A Compass Group

If you are committed to taking on the brief, therefore, is there a general route map that can be traced out from our interviewees’ experiences? Such is the business- wide scope of a strategy role, and its need for detailed analysis across the corporate landscape, all of the aforementioned considerations – the business situation; the CEO’s need for it; your desire for it; the type of strategy position it is – seem to meet at the same crucial point: your unique experience.

It is perhaps one of the biggest lessons of our research. All the models in this report have their benefits and drawbacks, and depend on multiple factors – the business direction, the sector, the commercial environment, among many others. But in most cases, the decision to take on responsibility for a particular extra function had often come down to the corporate affairs leader’s own existing experience. Not just because they had the CV for it but because, crucially, by direct extension, it had enabled them to visibly showcase their own personal concept of the discipline during their tenure.

Malic, for example, from an investor relations background, had naturally gravitated towards creating a market- and strategy-focused style of corporate affairs.

Ultimately, that paid off, not just as he was able to deliver it successfully, but because it created clear, experiential understanding for his CEO of what his unique concept of corporate affairs entailed – analytical; market-facing; commercially driven.That meant that the argument for the areas he needed to absorb into it, when that time came, was intuitively understood.

Within the profession, we are so accustomed to the different formulations of the function that it can be easy to forget how confusing our flexible portfolio is to those outside – and therefore challenging, even if they’re allies, to understand why you need to take on specific extra accountabilities. But one lesson of our interviews is that executive teams are generally content to sign off on the alliances, collaborations or departmental mergers you need, once your successes have shown them not just that your model of corporate affairs can work, but what it is exactly. It was noticeable how many of our interviewees’ had gained expanded remits after a period when they had demonstrated it informally – building working partnerships; absorbing elements of other departments’ strategies; sitting on non-comms steering committees; and so on.

So the key to landing the strategy brief, perhaps, is first to be sure that that is indeed the best match-fit with your own personal definition of the corporate affairs role. And if it is but you don’t have the necessary experience yet? Then you need to build that experience – in visible ways – while on the job.

“Someone once gave me a piece of advice which I have since given to others:You can be the best in the company at, say, communications, but what are you going to be second best at? What’s going to be your second level of expertise? And how you start to provide added value to executive conversations can be a good starting point for thinking about that. So develop your knowledge of issues on the peripheries.The easiest ones are perhaps the sustainability agenda and brand but, in the modern era, corporate affairs is working on lots of different strategic areas just as part of the day job. If you can identify from that which are the component parts of the future role you want, you have the bit you need to start building out.

“And one practical suggestion: Even if you don’t have everything in your remit today, suggest whether you, as the corporate affairs person, could set up and chair a steering committee responsible for all the external facing parts of the business, to make sure everything is coordinated and aligned.That can be a good first step to show that corporate affairs has that role of bringing all these different pieces of the jigsaw in the corporate strategy’s delivery together. And if that works well, the rest may follow.”

Katja Hall, Chief Corporate Affairs and Marketing Officer, Capita

And here, too, the very flexibility of the corporate affairs brief is your ally:You are better placed than most senior leaders to get whatever experience you need on the job, precisely because corporate affairs has always been a very flexible brief.

“For those who are looking to explore the boundaries of what the role offers today, you are in a fantastic position. Corporate affairs is one of the few roles that gives you a licence to sit down with anyone in the business. Indeed, not only gives you a licence to – but requires you to. If you take up that licence, you will build a perspective of the business that is totally unique to you, and certainly different to the CEO’s because people aren’t going to tell the CEO what they really think.That gives you the opportunity to make a very significant contribution – something to offer that nobody else can. Use it. Build your knowledge and skills. Create a base of insight that nobody else can offer.”

David Shriver, Director of Communications (which includes Investor Relations), Ocado Group

Nor, where a strategy role specifically is concerned, should you feel that your communications experience is anything other than an asset.Yes, there are specific skillsets required – but a key one is the one you’ve developed in corporate affairs.

“The role I’m doing now is very technical, so already having IR skills helps to apply that thinking to comms and strategy. But there are always going to be gaps and everyone has limitations. For example, I was never a subject-matter expert in environmental issues, so it was important to get someone in who was. And it was the same in strategy: I’m not an expert in M&A, so if we’re thinking about building an M&A pipeline, we’ll need to get those capabilities in.

“That’s the real key: First, it’s about really understanding what the roadmap of the business looks like so that, second, you can build a team with a subject-matter expertise that fits into that structure – and, third, then empowering them to make decisions.”

Assad Malic, Group Strategy and Corporate Affairs Director, Currys

6.

CHIEF OF STAFF

An interesting trend in recent times has been to see the synergies between the roles of corporate affairs director and chief of staff. Is there a potential for fusion here? Certainly, as the corporate affairs’ remit expands, it seems a very natural, logical and appealing extension of the role to combine it with being chief of staff.

By the nature of what they do, corporate affairs leaders often find themselves in the room when the big decisions are being taken, they’re consigliere to the CEO and chairman and it feels like just a hop, skip and a jump to add chief of staff to the responsibilities.

These were the exact reasons one of our interviewees, Oliver Wall at Bank of Ireland, had already taken that leap.

“An awful lot of what you do both in a corporate affairs and chief-of-staff role are the unique conversations at either end of the spectrum.There’s the very subtle piece – the open, advisory, ‘bouncing ideas’ role that other leaders are too invested in their own functional delivery to offer as completely. And, conversely, there’s the very blunt conversations with the CEO that other individual business leaders often can’t really have in the same way. In that regard, the two positions really start to become, in many ways, the same role.”

They were similarities recognised by another interviewee, Jeremy Beadles at Heineken, who has made the full move – shifting on entirely from five years as head of regional corporate affairs in Asia to a chief of staff role for Heineken’s CEO at global HQ.

“Part of the chief-of-staff role is certainly a natural extension of corporate affairs – you’re still doing some external affairs, still identifying the key stakeholders the company needs on board, still working out how to engage them, still building the profile and reputation of the CEO, and still doing a lot of communications both internally and externally to shape the executive positioning of the business.”

He pointed out, too, that there is a natural competency and experience transfer that makes adopting the chief-of-staff role from a corporate affairs background very smooth.

“There are obvious skills you take from your communications arsenal into a chief of staff job: Being a writer, presenting messages, engaging stakeholders, knowing how to brief a CEO and get to the right key points, quickly. But also the judgment of reputational risk:You sensing issues before they arrive, because your senses are already attuned to risk.

“In corporate affairs, you get trained to develop and deliver corporate positions, and that’s really crucial. In a chief of staff role, you’re a sounding board – not just to the chief exec but broader across the executive team and beyond.You help people think through issues whether or not they’re in your defined area of expertise, you get good at looking for different points of view and bringing in different perspectives.

“In a chief of staff role, you’re deployed on lots of projects across the whole business. Fortunately, corporate affairs is so broad and cross-functional, you get prepared really well for that just in the range of different conversations you have to be part of. So there’s a lot of crossover.”

Jeremy Beadles, Chief of Staff, Heineken

However, as well as the clear synergies and overlaps, combining corporate affairs director and chief of staff into a single position does present some very significant potential challenges. First, it would be difficult to do effectively in FTSE-100-sized multinational.

“At Heineken, it would be impossible just in terms of the scale of our business. I can see why in smaller businesses or individual business units it may work – the corporate affairs head needs to be very close to the CEO or MD and working on similar agenda points to the chief of staff, and it’s based on the same relationship of trust and honesty.”

Jeremy Beadles, Chief of Staff, Heineken

Even so, actively combining the roles potentially raises issues around credibility and trust within the organisation. Before embarking on it, one has to seriously weigh that up, and it will very much depend on the kind of leverage you currently rely upon in the role.

Many find being the ‘voice of truth’ and ‘view from the outside’ a critical part of corporate affairs – it’s often how you build trusting alliances with other executives and wider management; how you get the unvarnished truth from them, which then becomes the engine room of your comms planning. And at executive level, it’s how you demonstrate value a lot of the time:You’re the one person in the boardroom who is presenting the employee view, the government view or the public view.You’re the fly in the ointment, the truth bomb blasting apart the insular boardroom perspective.That’s harder to do if you’re also the CEO’s key lieutenant, as Wall concedes:

“The big challenge is the conflicting truths you have to hold. Sometimes we go round the executive table and everyone gives a view. But I’m actually giving two views. And while that can sometimes be a benefit – you can demonstrate a mediating view between two competing ideas – it can also get quite confusing and, if you’re not careful, people don’t know where you stand.

“And that’s the second challenge – your interaction with colleagues.When you express an opinion with senior colleagues, they want to know if you’re speaking as a functional head or as the chief of staff – which is often a translation for “Is this your boss speaking or you?” So that can be quite tricky if you don’t have good, deep relationships with them already.”

Oliver Wall,  Chief of Staff and Head of Corporate Affairs, Bank of Ireland

For some of our interviewees who had considered a similar structure, it’s this factor above all others that makes a combination of the roles tempting, but a bridge too far.

“Although I see the logic, and in many ways it feels like a very natural development to combine corporate affairs leadership with a chief of staff role, ultimately I’m not persuaded it’s the right course. I think both should remain distinct – partly because, done right, both are a full time role; but mostly because the advisory part of each role is subtly but importantly different.

“If you’re chief of staff, you work for the CEO.Your principal – even only – responsibility is to support them, to look after them, or protect them, and help them achieve success. But in my corporate affairs role, I’m clear that I report to the CEO, and I’m very loyal to her, but ultimately I work for Aviva, and my primary accountability is to protect the company, not necessarily the CEO – though mostly those two goals align. And I’ve  had moments in my career where maintaining that degree of independence, and the ability to ask ‘What is the right thing to do for the company?’ has been vital.There are sometimes incredibly tricky moments in our role; times when you have to say your piece and give advice – that might be actioned – on extremely sensitive issues.That’s a hard enough responsibility, but if you’re also juggling divided loyalties and feeling compromised it could potentially be calamitous. So although I think the chief of staff/corporate affairs combo is a trend we’ll see, I’m not at all convinced that it’s the right thing.”

Stephen Doherty, Chief Brand and Corporate Affairs Officer, Aviva

Of course, that doesn’t negate – or even deny – the natural links between the two roles, which still make chief of staff a solid potential career destination for corporate affairs leaders. Opportunities might also arise to bring the two roles closer together, working in formal partnership on the softer, subtler elements of strategy, stakeholder mapping and engagement; playing off the tension in lines of accountability, but cohering around combined organisational aims.

And for those eyeing it up as a career step, it also offers fascinating ways for you to flex different working-model muscles, without extending too far from your existing skillset.

“As I’ve moved into the role, there are some key elements that don’t follow on naturally from a corporate affairs role – not just remit, but style of work, and how to achieve results. For example, when I first started, I saw some aspects of the role as quite administrative and process-driven – preparing the executive team meetings and agendas, for example, which at first feels like managing executive administrative process. But you soon realise that it really is not that at all. It’s super strategic, because you’re directing traffic, shaping the agenda.

“That was a big wake-up call to me, realising that I’m not just managing process and needed to stop measuring myself by that kind of efficiency, and instead needed to think much more deeply.”

Jeremy Beadles, Chief of Staff, Heineken

A final point that perhaps opens up the most intriguing possibilities for a seasoned corporate affairs director looking for a way to add something new to their career: It’s one of the few significant executive positions, perhaps the only one, that requires no specific previous experience in one part of the business or other.

“When I talk to other chiefs of staff, they all come from different backgrounds – from marketing, strategy, legal – so I can see the avenue opening up to more people from corporate affairs. But there are different types of chief of staff role, and these tend to fit different experience-profiles of candidate:There can be the ‘bag handler’ type that you give to a future superstar on the rise, where you want them very close to the CEO so they’re getting really accelerated development. So you’ve got to look at what the business wants out of the position to be sure that you’re the right fit.”

Jeremy Beadles, Chief of Staff, Heineken

PROFILE

“It was bespoke, the title didn’t exist originally,” he says.“The point of ‘global affairs’ was really to be as broad as possible.We wanted to encapsulate something about the role that was ‘beyond traditional corporate affairs’ – beyond the classic disciplines of communications, government affairs and policy.Those are all still key parts of the remit of course, but we needed to reflect the much greater breadth of them all today, not least as part of wider corporate strategy planning, for example as part of M&A, or reacting to geopolitics and, in particular, the ESG agenda – which is transforming our profession.

“Beyond that, my job also included, running what we called the corporate Global Health unit (which has now successfully transitioned to the business), and supporting the CEO’s chief of staff. So the concept of ‘global affairs’ was something that was broad enough and flexible enough to work across all of that.

“The other important dimension was external. It was having the breadth of title to allow you to speak on behalf of the company to multiple different stakeholders, particularly key ones like government. ‘Corporate affairs’ doesn’t stop you doing that, but positioning the role more broadly allows you a greater sense of company-wide representation, and sends a clearer message that you are the CEO’s envoy.”

Is this where the profession is heading?

“I think titles are changing to reflect the morphing of previously separate teams and the adding on of responsibilities. Somehow, we need to reflect the extra elements being bolted onto the role and get across the breadth of impact we now have. ‘Chief stakeholder officer’ could be another option that gains traction, because major organisations now have such a complex variety of stakeholders, and I think corporate affairs roles are shifting towards being the integrating force of that stakeholder management. But all of these changes are pushing the profession into much broader roles – broader audiences, and ultimately broader impact.”

What do you think this means for the talent and skills profile in the profession?

“ESG is now absolutely critical to corporate affairs, it’s just rocketed up in importance – and you need to think about ESG strategically.To do that you have to be grounded in strategy, your operating environment and have an understanding of equity markets, because the importance of ESG there now is just off the chart. So it all comes back to the classic call across our profession – to understand the business.That was always true; that need was always there. But now, because of ESG, it’s a non-negotiable, if you want to be the top corporate affairs leader of a major company.

“I think ESG also means more strategic work for corporate affairs directors. For me at GSK, global health responsibilities were not just ‘the communication’ of it all, but actually developing a whole new strategic approach to be effective in global health overall: what partnerships we need to forge; the research and development capability we need; our strategic prioritisation and focus.

“I actually think the rise of ESG is making our role in corporate affairs completely different. It’s not just to encourage the organisation into good practice anymore – those efforts are now a given.What you’re expected to do now is to use the company’s sustainability work as research and insight to feed into the company’s strategy and operations. So you need to be on top of it.You need to be able to draw up an advisable strategy and codify what it will mean operationally. Ultimately, ESG now gives you an opportunity to go much deeper into the company to understand the operations, quite beyond the communications of it all.”

Is it just the industry you work in that makes this breadth of worldview necessary? Or do you think the things you describe – which drove the move to a ‘global affairs’ remit – are universal?

“I think all complex global companies with multiple stakeholders are now seeing an enormous crossover between strategy, business performance, internal engagement, external representation, policy making, and overall reputation and risk management. I think that’s true across all multinationals.”

What does that mean for the profession? 

“Clearly, that crossover and its complexity, the way each part influences the other, is a potential headache for any company, just in terms of efficiency and clarity. So corporate affairs directors who are already working across those spaces as integrators and problem solvers, who are super talented and able to synthesise appropriately – and who are really good leaders who care for their people and want to develop them – are going to do pretty well out of this change.

“It means the world’s your oyster.The more skills you add to that classic armoury of corporate affairs/communications/government affairs, the more you’ll see yourself in different, interesting roles, because increasing numbers of leadership positions today require superb stakeholder management – bringing that challenging, ‘outside- in’ view to the organisation; synthesising the inputs of influential parties; and using it to build a forward plan for the business.That blended ability is really in demand right now, so the breadth of corporate affairs really positions the profession well to take advantage, succeed and advance into new areas. It doesn’t necessarily set you up for an operational-type CEO role, but certainly for an advocacy-type CEO role in a few years.”

PROFILE

“It was my mid-30s, and I was director of communications and brand development for the Group and was part of the bank’s executive,” he explains “but I soon realised I’d reached a ceiling; there really wasn’t really anywhere to move upwards from there.

“We’d dealt with a lot of big judgement calls in my time in comms – things that needed good critical thinking, broad horizons, and lots of experience of different areas of banking and business. I had a rule in my comms leadership team around personal development: ‘Left or right before up.’ In other words, rather than just trying to climb the up ladder, redirect that energy into building the most robust ladder in the first place by building out your foundations. Because when you do climb it, you’ll want to be totally sure that it can take the full weight of your climb. Focus on that and, if you do, you’ll ultimately have much more success.

“I recognised that ‘left or right before up’ equally applied to me. I wasn’t going to get any further forward unless I got broader experience – or, as the CEO at the time put it, ‘It would be great to see you in a real job’! It was an unfortunate turn of phrase but his point was: Move out of comms and get closer to the customer – you’ll appreciate the different ways the business runs, and you’ll be better equipped to do bigger, broader roles.That was great advice.

“I started thinking about where I wanted to go and I decided on applying for – and securing – the role of managing director for personal banking – looking after our Royal Bank of Scotland and, over time, Ulster Bank NI retail businesses.”

What was it like to move into business leadership?

“It was an enormous change. Huge.That’s not to say there wasn’t synergy: Retail is obviously the part of the organisation that has a heavy people component:You’re responsible for a lot of customers and employees, and they both have to know that your interests are fully aligned with theirs. After a lifetime in communications, moving out of it is always going to be difficult. Not in terms of ability but in perception – your own as well as others.With communications, you’re pigeonholed, rightly or wrongly – and, to an extent, you pigeonhole yourself. If you want something more with your career, you have to make a concerted effort, because otherwise businesses will instinctively keep pushing you back into the same role.

They won’t doubt your ability but when you want to move from comms – few places seem like a ‘a natural transition.’ Added to which, as a profession, we’re not great at seeing other opportunities and demanding them. It’s sometimes one of the hardest questions to answer as a senior communications professional – what do you want to do next?

“I had that pressure on myself, and I was aware that, coming from a corporate affairs background and jumping in as the MD for retail, there would have been a lot of people watching to see how I worked out. I very deliberately decided that I needed to come at it completely fresh.Although my corporate affairs background gave me some valuable core skills and knowledge, I knew my new job just wouldn’t work if I simply tried to tackle it like a corporate affairs director. I had to leave everything at the door – which meant leaving a lot of personal security at the door too. I got involved in nothing from my corporate affairs days. I didn’t liaise. I didn’t get pulled into any issues. I didn’t allow myself to get called back on anything, despite being asked – I was very disciplined about that.

“The one thing I did carry with me was a fundamental belief that if you’ve got absolute strategic clarity, then you’re on the strongest first footing to start making the right decisions. I spent the first two years completely throwing myself into just absorbing input and understanding what the business was really about, from the customer to the boardroom.

I spoke to customers constantly; I based myself in branches and contact centres; I hit the road and met 300 of our teams and our supporting functions. I really spent those entire two years just trying to learn as much as I could – to catch up, really, because I was now on a management team where everyone had 20 years more experience than me.”

Is it feasible to just ‘catch up’ like that?

“It is a massive leap. I would be lying if I said you didn’t have to take a deep breath and say to yourself: ‘I’m stepping away from something I know I’m good at, where I have the access and experience to use my skills in a way that has real impact. And I’m giving that up to take on something at which I’m completely a beginner.’

“But I was immediately humbled by the move because you realise you’ve got to learn everything – from the branch through to the boardroom – in the opposite direction: not top down, but bottom up. And that’s such an education.You discover the truth behind the illusion of your old job – and quickly get a refreshed view of what really matters.That depth of learning is beyond words, really, because it’s pretty much everything – every interaction, every process, every cultural piece, every piece of messaging and positioning. You carry all your previous knowledge of those things, but suddenly you have a much richer appreciation of the nuances of them all.You just see them in a much fuller way. And that, in turn, increases your understanding of the whole organisation – why things happen the way they do, how everything interconnects. And you look back on what you used to ‘know’ and you realise how superficial some of it was.

“I found that enormously valuable because any time you do that in life – take something you know inside out, such that it’s almost an instinct, and then view it from the opposite direction, standing in someone else’s shoes, it’s indescribable what you gain. It teaches you more, perhaps, than anything else in your career. I’ve consistently said it was the best career move I’ve ever made.

“It’s influenced the way I recruit. I actively encourage considered and deliberate lateral career moves, and I’ve only ever seen people benefit from it.”

What has it taught you about your old corporate affairs position? Knowing what you now know, how would you go back and approach it differently?

“I would have used my position in corporate affairs to learn a lot more, at a deeper level, about the businesses I was supporting. Not just so that I ‘knew more’ – although that knowledge would have made life a little bit easier, and would certainly have made me better at my job. But rather because of the opportunity.The thing about corporate affairs: It’s absolutely set up for you to gain broad understanding, because you need to work across the whole business to do the job. I’ve said to my old team: ‘Use the access you’ve got right now, because you’ve no idea how much you have until you leave it.’

“That would be my advice to others: Use that access and influence to the benefit of the organisation, yes, but also as a chance to be constantly learning and making unexpected connections and collaborations, as they’ll come in enormously handy further down the line.There are very few teams that have the access that corporate affairs teams do.”

What skills have you taken from corporate affairs that are useful to a business leadership job?

“Distillation. It’s just enormously valuable because, with time and bandwidth constraints, a critical part of business leadership is the ability to distil.You need to be able to communicate your ideas really clearly through a whole lot of noise.You need to be able to focus on the one key decision, not get tied up in the ones that matter less – both to keep your strategy on a very narrow, universally intelligible spine, and to focus on which tactics you really must deploy for commercial success.That process is largely the same as the one we hone over years in corporate affairs.

“Also, your time is now. If you’re in corporate affairs, you’re presumably a skilled communicator and that has never been in higher demand at the top of organisations than it is at this very moment.The need for leaders to be great communicators – the breadth of the business agenda they now need to cover and involve employees in; the vision they have to be able to articulate – is enormous. So those skills serve corporate affairs leaders well if they want to transition into a wider role.”

What’s next for you?

“Having now led a large function, and multiple business lines, this opens up a number of different avenues for me, but I’m keen to continue working close to the customer side of things.Whatever I do next – it’ll be something that allows me to leverage both sides of my career experience.”

“Although I graduated in business and communications and have worked in the profession across my career,” she says, “I’ve never thought of myself as purely a communications or corporate affairs person. I’ve worked in audit, finance, operations, as well as running multi-billion-dollar businesses – and now I work in sustainability and transformation. So, for me, it was never about ‘moving out of comms,’ or even moving from one specific place to another. It was always about exploring and seeing what else could be learnt, and how else I could serve the organisation.

“Having a good business understanding is what gets you your ticket to ride and do lots of different things, so I’m very grateful for my years in finance and audit because, from there, I could learn everything I needed to learn.

“I’m now helping to shepherd and operationalize our growth strategy, ‘EverGreen,’ as we transform the company and write its next chapter. I also have sustainability and government affairs rolling up through the team. And I think after this I’ll go back and run businesses again.

“The world is so dynamic and what’s great about some of the high-performing corporate affairs colleagues I can think of is how highly adaptable they are.That’s what’s necessary:They can learn on their feet; they’re super curious; they can understand the fundamentals of the business; they know how to inspire people; they understand what stakeholder capitalism means; they understand the ‘next-generation licence to operate’ sphere we’re now moving into, and how you build trust in that environment; and they know how important it is to be able to attract the most extraordinary talent and retain them.That’s a superb set of competencies to make a career leap from.You can do so much from there.”

Would it have been harder to make the particular moves you have, if you hadn’t worked in audit, finance, and so on?

“Yes, I do think so.When I look at our executive committee, with perhaps one exception, everyone has run big businesses before, including our supply-chain leader and finance leader. So that P&L experience is not exclusive to the commercial arm or the ‘future CEO’ track, it’s a component of every single functional leader. Everyone can point to that as a rite of passage.

“So the finance and audit experience was career shaping for me, more than anything because it teed me up to feel confident. But I think the diversity also communicates something in and of itself. I went from marketing to audit, and zig-zagged my career not just to accumulate certain functional competencies, and not just to get different experiences of business, but to prove that I could.You need to remember that it’s always a leap of faith for a company to bet on a leadership talent. No matter how good the resumé, nobody’s a sure thing, not least because there will always be some change involved – different type of company, different industry, and so on. My diversity meant that I was able to demonstrate why a company should bet on me – because my track record of unusual moves showed that I thrived in career change and had the evidence to back it up.”

What do corporate affairs leaders bring to broader leadership?

“Corporate affairs leaders are the spiders in the web. Other than the CEO, they have the most complete view across the whole enterprise, which means they can be some of the best end-to-end thinkers in leadership.That’s a huge advantage and not to be undervalued when you’re pushing for a wider role, because the opportunities most businesses are trying to tackle right now cannot be unlocked through any silo. No department, even one as important as sales, can get it done on their own. So being able to see across the whole is crucial and gives you an edge.

“I’ve noticed the evolution of the CEO rubric and what boards are looking for when they promote and hire.That rubric now includes a lot more of those classically ‘soft’ corporate affairs skills, around influencing, persuasion, mobilisation, communication; seeing end to end but also being able to inspire the employee base; building culture and trust; soft power. So the competencies between general business leadership and corporate affairs really do align well right now.

“You do have to have a minimum level of business acumen – you can put strong finance and technical people around you, but you have to have a minimum level of knowledge. So, assuming that your corporate affairs skillset is robust, the best place to spend effort and energy is in your business understanding.You have everything else because your skills are more relevant now than they ever have been in the history of modern business.”

How can you improve your prospects of getting diverse leadership experience?

“If you’re still in your twenties and thinking you want a multi-functional career, even want to be a CEO some day, I’d say:Take on big cross-functional moves. Finance, digital and technology are increasingly becoming non-negotiable, fundamental skills, and will be more so with each new passing year. So those are the transitions you need to make to build a good foundation.

“One simple but obvious piece of advice:You will only have a couple of opportune moments to demonstrate you’re more than the label you’re carrying at that moment. Don’t be naïve about what those opportunities are and do not let them pass you by, if you really want to be on more of a CEO/operational leadership track.

“Also: Raise your hand for projects. For example, if there’s an acquisition, consider putting yourself forward as the integration leader, enabling you to demonstrate that you understand the business case and how to deliver synergies. Look for those opportunities to prove it and don’t be afraid. I do meet corporate affairs people who have too much doubt about whether they can do it. Stop it:You’ve got to go for it! This is a completely accessible thing to do if you’re willing to work hard and learn from others, but you can’t be too afraid because you’ll just get run over.”

Would you attribute your successes to any external factors?

“There have been a whole bunch of people who were incredibly instrumental in opening a door, believing in me, or taking a chance on me – it’s critical. At the same time, only you know what you really want. And only you know what you’re really capable of. And no one cares more about your career than you do. So I do think you have to take the initiative.

“I’ve received more bad advice – and sometimes really bad advice – than good advice throughout my career. So you have to have your own north star, because only you have all the information you need to advocate for that place that you dream about for yourself, as no one is going to do it for you. But mentors, sponsors and people who see something in you that you didn’t see in yourself are hugely important, and we all have to a responsibility to do that for others in a generous way.”

Is it important to get knowledge of one industry? Or is moving between different industries even a detriment?

“I’m biased by my 10 years at GE, when it was a collection of vast, diverse businesses across multiple industries – from nuclear power plants to MRI machines, plastics businesses to consumer banks, commercial real estate to movie studios. It was crazy! But I got to go and work in all these different organisations and quickly realised that, regardless of the industry, a business is a business: A business is people, a strategy, resource allocation, delivery, and so on.The only major difference between them is learning what the levers are, and even many of those follow the same patterns.

“Because of all those industry changes I made within one company, the first time I went into food and drink or into retail, the sector was never a discussion. People just saw my industry-skipping as an advantage, in terms of learning how things are done in different ways.”

Any final advice?

“Always speak the language of business. Put your commercial/customer/consumer lens on everything you do and people will start to view you differently. And be bold.”

“The Food+ business within Compass Group looks after one of the world’s leading tech companies – delivering food and hospitality services at their locations in about 30 countries,” she explains.“They see great tasting, nutritious food and the opportunity it presents to bring employees together as integral to their success, and they want their food programme to be globally consistent.”

What made you a fit for the role?

“They’re a really important partner for Compass and they want to work with people who can help to inform and realise their vision, as well as deliver day to day operations. So it felt like a fantastic opportunity for me to get operations experience in an environment where I could bring my capabilities and experience in strategy and communications to the fore, those key components of influence and engagement, ensuring our partner’s programme is constantly evolving.”

What changes did it involve from what you were doing before?

“Having always been in a central function, working in reasonably small teams and mostly with regional and country leadership, the biggest change was the number and breadth of the team. I went from leading a team of 10-15 subject matter experts to a team of about 7,000 talented chefs, managers and associates around the world.That requires a different approach, as does that more direct relationship on the client slide.

“But I was excited about the opportunity and where it might take me. And, even if it didn’t open up new opportunities, I felt that getting experience of actually running a part of the business would broaden my perspective and make me more valuable if I wanted to go back to a central function – whether it’s comms or strategy or something else. I reasoned that if I tried it and it didn’t work out, I would have only benefited from the experience.

“And you have to believe that, if you do a great job, it will lead to bigger and better things, especially if you’ve been with an organisation for a long time. So ultimately, I see it as an investment from Compass to make me a better leader and I’m grateful for that.”

Was this sort of move always the goal?

“I didn’t have a stated aim to work in strategy or be a CEO by a certain date – it was more about looking at what future roles came up, the opportunities and challenges they present, and considering what I could bring to them.That could have taken me in a multitude of different directions. In my mind, if you’re adaptable and curious, if you’re willing to give things a go, that’s a great way to find interesting opportunities and have fun along the way.

“In order to do that, you should not underestimate the value of your existing skillset. My communications background has been critical to my leadership in my current role. Particularly during the pandemic, and with a team located around the world, I draw on it more than any other capability. For me, it is vital to be able to distil a set of ideas and goals and present them to people in a way that inspires them and enables us to build trust and deliver results.”

RECOMMENDATIONS

Finance skills are increasingly becoming non-negotiable

The call for communications professionals to be more business-literate is as old as the profession itself. But today the requirement is more specific than that – and more essential. Increasingly, solid financial acumen is seen as a pre-requisite for senior positions in corporate affairs.That’s not just true in obvious circumstances (e.g., when taking on responsibility for investor relations) but more broadly too, as even areas like sustainability increasingly demand detailed market knowledge.

“ESG is now absolutely critical to corporate affairs, it’s just rocketed up in importance – and you need to think about ESG strategically.To do that you have to be grounded in strategy, your operating environment and have an understanding of equity markets, because the importance of ESG there now is just off the chart. So it comes back to the classic call across our profession – to understand the business.That was always true; that need was always there. But now, because of ESG, it’s a non-negotiable, if you want to be the top corporate affairs leader of a major company.”

Phil Thomson, President, Global Affairs, GSK

Get wider business skills and experience while on the job

Clearly, the argument for expansion in your remit is strengthened if you can point to experience in those areas you want to incorporate into the role. But even if your CV lacks anything wider than communications, it doesn’t mean that further growth is barred. Nor does acquiring broader skills necessarily require formal training or job moves.There are opportunities for getting – and demonstrating – breadth of experience while on the job. In our career conversations with leading candidates, we find they often gain formal approval for expanded corporate affairs remits after a period when they develop them informally through working partnerships or by sitting on non-comms steering committees. It was mentioned frequently in our research too.

“One practical suggestion: Even if you don’t have everything in your remit today, suggest whether you, as the corporate affairs person, could set up and chair a steering committee responsible for all the external facing parts of the business, to make sure everything is coordinated and aligned.That can be a good first step to show that corporate affairs has that role of bringing all these different pieces of the jigsaw in the corporate strategy’s delivery together. And if that works well, the rest may follow.”

Katja Hall, Chief Corporate Affairs and Marketing Officer, Capita

This is even true in the apparently sealed-box skillset world of investor relations, where many offer the same pragmatic suggestion:

“I’d recommend comms people spend more time with their IR teams if that’s an area they want to get into.Think about secondments or rotations where you can initially start supporting the IR team.You can pick it up but you do need a good understanding of P&L, cashflow, balance sheets and financials to really get your capabilities noticed by the business.”

Assad Malic, Group Strategy and Corporate Affairs Director, Currys

“Work with the IRO and set yourself the primary goal of bringing them something – some help, some perspectives that make their job easier, some way of helping them see a path through the fog.Then, through that, build up a relationship with them – and set aside the time – to enable you to see the mechanics.Then be rigorous about pushing yourself: How many investor meetings are you listening to? Do you understand the capital markets? Finally, set yourself a goal: Could you tell the story of the company whilst being grilled by a hedge fund? Ask yourself those questions and you will, over time, be able to develop the right foundations.”

David Shriver, Director of Communications (which includes Investor Relations), Ocado Group

You have a better opportunity than most to expand your experience

Never lose sight of the fact that, in corporate affairs, you are in an almost unique position to expand your skills and competencies in almost any direction you choose.The role demands polymathic understanding of all business and functional areas. If you have big future aspirations, don’t let that opportunity to work across boundaries today go begging.

“The thing about corporate affairs: It’s absolutely set up for you to gain broad understanding, because you need to work across the whole business to do the job. I’ve said to my old team: ‘Use the access you’ve got right now, because you’ve no idea how much you have until you leave it.’There are very few teams that have the access that corporate affairs teams do.”

Simon Watson, Head of Customer Segment, NatWest Group

“For those who are looking to explore the boundaries of what the role offers today, you are in a fantastic position. Corporate affairs is one of the few roles that gives you a licence to sit down with anyone in the business. Indeed, not only gives you a licence to, but requires you to. If you take up that licence, you will build a perspective of the business that is totally unique to you, and certainly different to the CEO’s because people aren’t going to tell the CEO what they really think.That gives you the opportunity to make a very significant contribution.”

David Shriver, Director of Communications (which includes Investor Relations), Ocado Group

Break out of the communications-only mindset

All of these developmental pathways centre on the same subtle, but significant point: changing your focus away from ‘pure comms’. It’s not just that corporate affairs people can be too ready to fall back on their communications skills. It’s that they have a reflexive tendency to think about business issues purely in terms of communications effects.The first step to taking on wider responsibilities, therefore, is to break down your mindset and think coherently and practically about what new perspectives you need to adopt.

“Someone once gave me a piece of advice which I have since given to others:You can be the best in the company at, say, communications, but what are you going to be second best at? What’s going to be your second level of expertise? And how you start to provide added value to executive conversations can be a good starting point for thinking about that. So develop your knowledge of issues on the peripheries.The easiest ones are perhaps the sustainability agenda and brand but, in the modern era, corporate affairs is working on lots of different strategic areas just as part of the day job. If you can identify from that which are the component parts of the future role you want, you have the bit you need to start building out.”

Katja Hall, Chief Corporate Affairs and Marketing Officer, Capita

Recognise the competencies required of all leadership today

By broadening yourself out, too, you’re not just “making up a shortfall” – remember that you’re actively expanding into the required capabilities of the modern executive, regardless of discipline. Put simply:These days, it’s not just corporate affairs directors who need a greater breadth of skills and experience. It’s every senior leader. As long as you keep your work diverse, therefore, you’ll be in a better position than most to build a roadmap to different leadership roles.

“We’re facing change where the leadership skills that are going to be highly valued sit outside the more technical aspects of each discipline. Companies are instead looking for people who can be influential in driving industry change, understanding and interpreting strategy, nurturing stakeholder relationships, and leading people in an uncertain, post- pandemic employment model. It’s an opportunity for the corporate affairs leader to augment their skills across many different areas and focus on what really delivers value for each particular business.

“That would be my advice: Don’t limit yourself to thinking about ‘comms.’Think in terms of what, in your day-to-day remit, provides the real business value. Because most of the big issues that drive corporate affairs leaders, the things that are the real adrenaline pumpers, are those where you have to play across functional borders anyway to get the right result.

“That’s the way to be thinking if you’re considering a broader role:What can I bring to the business that sits across portfolio areas – that I can help with ‘between borders’? Once you’re in that mindset, it doesn’t matter what the role or department is, you can apply yourself to it, and surround yourself with the people who can deliver on it.”

Josh Murray, Group Director of People & Corporate Affairs (and Office of the CEO), Laing O’Rourke

Recognise that communication is core

More specifically, one of the most in-demand leadership skills currently is communications – not just to provide better team management, but because it has been recognised as often the difference between the good and the great at executive level. So you should not be shy about pushing that forward as your greatest quality. It’s not an add-on; it’s a key selling point.

“I do believe that good communication is fundamental to any role – especially leadership – being able to provide that clarity and direction to your team, influence stakeholders and bring people with you. So I would definitely encourage more communications leaders to think about branching out if it appeals, because that communications skillset is a great foundation.”

Clare Hunt, Former Director of Strategy and M&A, Compass Group

Be clear to the ExCo what your “new” definition of corporate affairs is

Even with today’s more coherent understanding of our profession, there is still a wide range of corporate affairs leadership styles – from metrics-focused performance managers to face-to-face culture builders; from skilled multimedia aesthetes to issues managers; from C-Suite factotums to cheerleading brand champions – and your executive teams have seen them all. Even if they appreciate the delivery, therefore, it has always made it confusing for them to know exactly what corporate affairs does – and what it therefore needs in its armoury to be successful. And now, in response to their increasing demands for certain outcomes, we are coming back with yet another new formulation of the role, and asking for added responsibilities and functional oversight on top.

One subtle point that recurs often in our conversations with candidates, therefore, is the renewed importance today of making your own unique definition of corporate affairs clear to the CEO and ExCo – what your concept of the role entails, what it is and what it is not, with a clear articulation of the web of inputs and influences that will deliver the exact outcome you’re seeking – as clarity (or confusion) over this is often the make-or-break element in them signing off on the collaborations and extra responsibilities you need.

“What brings these pieces together is that leading corporate affairs means taking ownership of the corporate narrative, stakeholder needs, and the company’s reputation. But all three of those are now intrinsically linked to your impact on the world. And, in turn, your impact on the world today is shaped by your sustainability ambitions. If you have a brand that has no equity in it, which has to evolve from a shareholder- led narrative to a stakeholder-led narrative, owning the sustainability space is critical. This means moving from a narrow view of sustainability as a process of technocratic compliance to driver of growth; of how we manage and reduce future risks; of how we future-proof the business; of how we drive through a clear sense of the collective narrative of the company.”

Miguel Veiga Pestana, Head of Corporate Affairs & Chief Sustainability Officer, Reckitt

Concentrate on who you’re recruiting

If you do succeed in expanding the reach of the department, be aware that you will be entering an entirely new leadership universe – not just in terms of reach and impact but, crucially, bandwidth.Time and workload management are going to become highly strained. Great recruitment will never be more important to your career success.

“It’s very hectic [overseeing IR, corporate comms and sustainability together] and balancing time constraints is difficult.With IR, there’s just a volume of meetings and conversations you’ve got to get through. And now ESG is so much in the picture as well, it means there’s a lot going on. So you’ve got to have self-starting, highly capable and experienced people in the team. I have great sustainability leaders and comms leaders who take the load – take the lead, in fact – and ‘do the doing.’ So all I have to do is manage them.That’s essential.”

Richard Menzies-Gow, Director of Investor Relations, Corporate Communications & Brand, Informa

Seize the moment – because this is your moment

Corporate affairs leaders of even a few years ago would look with envy at the opportunities you now enjoy.Your skills have never been more needed in the boardroom.Your value to the organisation is implicitly understood at even the highest levels.Your reach and impact is beyond anything previous generations could have imagined.This is your moment to shine. And remember: such opportunities don’t come along all the time. Grab them while they’re here.

“I think all global, complex companies with multiple stakeholders are now seeing an enormous crossover between strategy, business performance, internal engagement, external representation, policy making, and reputation and risk management. So corporate affairs directors who are already working across those spaces as integrators and problem solvers, who are super talented and able to synthesise appropriately, are going to do pretty well out of this change.

“It means the world’s your oyster.The more skills you add, the more you’ll see yourself in interesting roles, because increasing numbers of leadership positions today require superb stakeholder management – bringing that challenging, ‘outside-in’ view to the organisation; synthesising the inputs of influential parties; and using it to build a forward plan for the business.That blended ability is really in demand right now, so the breadth of corporate affairs really positions the profession well to take advantage, succeed and advance into new areas.”

Phil Thomson, President, Global Affairs, GSK

At Broome Yasar Partnership, we have watched the profession take extraordinary strides forward in recent years, and we’ve been proud to play our part in that journey of development. It’s clear from the conversations we have every day with hiring organisations and leading executive talent that there has never been a more exciting time in corporate affairs leadership – and never has the future for career development looked brighter in this industry. We look forward to continuing to help both organisations and individuals capitalise on this unique moment of opportunity.

Our thanks go to all those who supported this report, including those current and former corporate affairs leaders who contributed their thoughts and insight as well as Kieron Shaw, Storyline Communications for copywriting services.