Davos 2025: The Evolving Role Of The Chief Communications Officer

(MENAFN- PRovoke) In partnership with Weber Shandwick, and hosted by the Social Innovation House at Davos, PRovoke media brought together a small group of public relations experts to discuss“The Evolving Role of Chief Communications Officers” in the wake of a recent report by United Minds calling for CCOs to be business experts first, communications experts second.

Talking with PRovoke Media founder and CEO Paul Holmes were:

• Gaby Arenas, co-chief facilitator of Catalyst Now and the Social Innovation House at Davos
• Ashish Babu, chief marketing and communications officer, global markets, Tata Consultancy Services
• Russell Dubner, global chief communications officer, Boston Consulting Group
• Rich Ferraro, chief communications officer, GLAAD
• Tom Goddard, head of global communications, KPMG
• Chris Perry, chief innovation officer and chairman of Weber Shandwick Futures
• Greg Prager, head of EMEA corporate practice, Weber Shandwick

Key takeaways:

• Understanding the fundamentals of business is important, but understand the fast-moving business environment is equally challenging.
• Russell Dubner:“My role is to look ahead and to put forward a set of hypotheses about what we think might happen, weighing the evidence about the path it will likely take.”
• Mastering communications skills does not necessarily prepare people for the trusted advisor role they will take on as a CCO.
• CCOs can benefit by wielding“soft power,” building partnerships with functions such as marketing and legal to increase influence.
• We are living in a world where“algorithms push, call it the fittest ideas, whether those ideas are true or not,” and communicators must adapt.

Understanding the Business

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the United Minds report was the expectation that chief communications officers now need to be“business experts first, communications leaders second.” While the need for communicators to better understand the other dimensions of management has been a perennial topic of discussion, developing broader business skills is more urgent and more challenging than ever.

In particular, an understanding of the business today entails an understanding of the broader business environment, said Perry.“You have to understand what we sell, how we make money, how to read a balance sheet, have a sense of how the company's organized, that's fine. What the United Minds report gets to is you also have to understand the business environment. And the business environment is very different from what it was a few years ago.”

As a result, he said,“A key role for a leader in the communications function is to make sense of the business environment and to inform the company's actions, as well as how you articulate those actions.”

Communications leaders, he said, need to be able more than ever to anticipate how stakeholders will react to different positions.“You can say we should be known for X and our purpose should be Y, but if the market pushes back then we've wasted a lot of time, a lot of effort and we probably did reputational damage.

“Without having that ability to sense what's happening inside and outside the organization, you're going to continue to see a pile-up of self-inflicted damage.”

Prager said other Weber Shandwick research suggested that CEO confidence in their corporate affairs and communications leaders“ is lower today than it's been in the past,” and suggested that both groups“are dealing with issues that they've never had to deal with before.

“They're dealing with technological innovation and revolution, with misinformation and disinformation. And their lack of comfort in being able to grasp these issues trickles down, and it puts a greater emphasis on the people who have the skill set to understand that external environment to be able to apply that to the business.”

Arenas, meanwhile, addressed the difficulty of finding the right CCO for the current environment. “ I am the CEO, so I have spent six months trying to hire a communication officer and it has been a complete nightmare. I can't find what I need.

“Sometimes we have communication people that super focus on the business, but they are not looking the big picture, they are not connected with the reality of people, so they don't understand the audience. And you have people on the other side that are always watching the trends, and they don't understand the business and what they need to sell. We need both things.”

In response, BCG's Dubner talked about how he balances the focus on understanding the perspectives of different stakeholders with the need to provide advice that speaks the language of business leadership.“My role is to look ahead and to put forward a set of hypotheses about what we think might happen, weighing the evidence about the path it will likely take. I think the rigor of the thinking, the analysis that goes into it is probably higher than people expect.

“You have to bring together all the people who own the stakeholder relationships-we have our trust and reputation council-to discuss the right set of moves for their stakeholders.”

What We Call Ourselves Influences How We Think

One issue that is always likely to come up in any group charged with providing reputation or relationship management counsel to senior management is what the function should be called. There are numerous titles, from corporate communications to corporate affairs to external relations-none of which seems to capture the full extent of the role in today's business environment.

Communications, for example, seems to over-emphasize what the organization says rather than the way it acts (with the latter obviously having more impact on relationships with stakeholders). But the corporate affairs title has its issues too.

“ I think chief corporate affairs officer is a fine title if you're not really doing the promote and creative side of the equation,” says Dubner.“If I was the chief corporate affairs officer I would be back in the protect mode and dealing with our public affairs issues and some of those things 100% of the time, but there's also the promote side of it which is 50% of the role.

“Am I enthralled with the CCO title? No. I think it's the least worst description.”

As for the scope of the role, and whether communications should encompass disciplines such as public affairs (almost always part of corporate affairs) and investor relations, Dubner says:“You don't need to own every stakeholder, but you need to be the one who's orchestrating through all stakeholders and you need to bring all the owners of the stakeholders together so there's a coherent strategy.”

Of course marketing-which involves managing the relationship between the company and its customers-is almost always separate from, and in many companies elevated above, the discipline that manages other stakeholder relationships. Yet integrated marketing and corporate communications can lead to a broader perspective.

Babu, for example, now leads both marketing and communications for TCS and says“When I moved from running comms to becoming the CMO, I went from three functions to 10 new functions. That means public affairs reported into me, but also deal cycle, prospecting.”

It gave him a new perspective.“What it did for me was I realized as comms folks, we think there's a problem happening in the world and we want to head it off. But the moment I put on the CMO hat, there are issues like where's the revenue happening, which markets are doing well, and what does business care about? If you come and say we're going to stop doing something that helps people hit their revenue targets, you're going to be pushed out.”

Arenas meanwhile, recalls meeting with someone who has the title of striving and communications leader.“Striving and communications leader because her role is not only take care of the business also take care that everyone inside the company is collaborating. And in the case of our organization, because my communication officer needs to deal with all of that.”

Preparing Communications People for the C-Suite

There has been much discussion about how challenging it can be for chief executives to step into a role that involves managing multiple stakeholder relationships-a role for which the typical CEO career path does little to prepare them. But many of those stepping up to the CCO role-regardless of the nomentclature-find themselves equally unprepared for the expectations of other senior leaders.

Having spent most of their careers mastering the techniques and technological needs of modern communications, many of not prepared to be part of a team solving multi-dimensional business challenges.

KPMG's Goodwin suggested that the typical career path for communications executives, often heading specific sub-disciplines, might not be the best preparation for the CCO role.“ Y ou become a PR specialist, you focus on PR or internal comms, and then you get into these more senior levels and suddenly you are an executive and you're a business leader,” he said.

“And while you've got that tremendous communications experience, being a trusted advisor to the most senior executives is a very different skill. I think we expect people to just pick it up. I think there is something for us as a discipline to think about: how do we help communicators become business leaders.”

Even making decisions on social and political issues-an area that has long been the domain of corporate affairs-has become more difficult, the panel agreed.

Added Ferraro: “ With issues Black Lives Matter, gun violence, abortion, LGBTQ issues, I spoke with so many CCOs and I remember them saying, I have to be an expert on all these social justice issues, and I never thought that I would be, but they were the ones management looked to for answers.”

Did communicators have the right answers?“There was kind of a race for everyone, for brands to be really loud about their support for these social issues and for various communities,” said Ferraro.“Fast forward to last year, and brands are now hiding under the desk. And I think the communications function got blamed. So now I feel that chief communications officers are, the conversations I've had, really hesitant to speak out.

“And I think it's evolving right now, and folks don't have the answer just yet on how to talk about these issues in a way that's going to make everyone happy. It's a no-win situation. But I also don't think that silence is going to work for very much longer because I suspect that employees and consumers and Gen Z in particular care about social issues and they want to see brands speak out.”

Institutionalizing the Function

To some extent, the failure to prepare communications executives for the senior advisory role of the CCO is a failure of succession planning , something that others have highlighted as a concern for the function.

But is it a contributing factor to the difficulty of institutionalizing communications as a leadership function? When one CCO steps down, does his or her successor start all over again in winning the confidence of senior management-a challenge chief legal officers and CFOs do not face to the same extent.

Dubner doesn't believe that's the case.“I don't feel like there's this hoop to jump through to prove that you're of equal value to other functions. I don't think that exists. What does exist is an expectation that you are as expert and as valuable as the other functions. So you'd better show up that way or you undermine your value to the company, to the firm.”

Still, responding to the suggestion that many CCOs shy away from building their own brands because their job is to make the company and the CEO look good, Arenas suggested that CCOs might need to do more to build their personal brands.

“When I think of CEOs and the experience that I have in the Young Presidents Organization and other groups, the CEOs work to build their personal reputation, and the CCOs are behind the scenes, the guys thinking and doing the analysis. But they are not showing up themselves.

“I know all the CEOs of your companies, but I never saw you guys. So I think one of the steps that we need to do as a sector is to start talking about why what you do is important, and not being always the guys behind the curtain.”

But Babu defended the work that CCOs and chief corporate affairs officers do behind the scenes.

“At the end of the day, you are part of a collective and you are all responsible for success,” he said.“I think you've got to be assertive, but you can't do it alone. From working to India, to the UK, to my global role, one thing is I've always focused on is asking people what do you want to achieve? Where do you want to go? How do we do this together?

“I think when you ask those questions, you can say okay let's do this together for the company. I think you need a lot of emotional intelligence, not just communications ability.”

CCOs Need to Exercise“Soft Power”

Babu's focus on consensus-building echoed another focus of the United Minds research: the role of the chief communications officer is working across functions and disciplines to build consensus among senior management.

Prager said the United Minds research showed that“soft influence” internally is a critical role for communicators.“Understanding the needs of each of your colleagues, is crucial, but it needs to be backed up with an enormous amount of knowledge and expertise and data and analytics, all of those things that actually inform and make you valuable to the people that you work with.”

There was widespread agreement about the importance of building relationships across the leadership team, and relationships with other functions.

Said Dubner,“Whether it's on the 'protect' side with the general counsel, the chief risk officer, the CEO's chief of staff or on the 'promote' side with the CMO, you have to show up with something that's informed by their thinking. You have to lock arms with the right partners, so it's all about the relationships that are required to be successful in this job.

“You have to be able to call on the CMO or the chief legal officer before that conversation is going on in the management committee, otherwise you can become pretty isolated and you just won't have the impact you need to have.”

Babu, who now has marketing as part of his remit, agreed.“We spend a lot of time educating the CEOs, but we've got to educate the C-suite,” he said.“They need to understand the value of the communication function. Because when you go to them with a hard decision, they don't want to stop doing what they're doing. Things are good for them. You've got to build a consensus for any action you want to take.”

One reason communication people can bring others together is that, by the nature of their work, they need to speak multiple professional languages, to translate ideas from one specialist language to another.

In many organizations, Babu says,“each function speaks a different language. We speak our own language. I work in a company which is all engineers, so they like a lot of data. They take time to convince. You can't come with cheerleading, how much you love this idea. They need conviction and action.

“From a CFO point of view, the first thing he's going to do is, can I cut your budget? So, you know, you've got to go with the value. You've got to be more like an investment banker. You go in with an idea and say, I'm going to put this money on this idea. That language then helps you. So you really have to think about how do you speak to people.”

Learning a New Communications Language

The need to understand the languages spoken by other disciplines in the C-suite was accompanied by another discussion-one suggesting that the language of communications is also changing, in real time.

“It's very hard to find talent to fit the moment that we're in,” says Perry.“It's like being a CFO and suddenly the way we count money changes. How many CCOs actually know the grammar of the public marketplace today? This is really about a paradigm change for communications in business and unless your sensibilities change and unless you equip yourself with the right capabilities and the right team.”

In particular, he says, communicators have to understand how“the grammar of the public marketplace” has changed in recent years,

He points to a column by Ezra Klein in The New York Times, discussing how the two major political parties in the United States have adapted-or not-to the attention economy.“He talked about the right being more digitally fluent, relying on influencers who have massive, massive audiences. On the other side, the assumption was that controlled messaging still works, that what we say will be trusted, and they played the risk-averse game. They're two totally different modes.

“So what is the right mode when we live in a world where algorithms push, call it the fittest ideas, whether those ideas are true or not, versus those that are still in broadcast mode?”

Perry said communicators need to adapt to the new tech environment.“Brands and communication live in two dimensions now. The stakeholder dimension, which is the human dimension, and machine dimension. It's on our phones, it's embedded in our computers. Trillions of dollars are being pushed into this. Our interface to the world is literally changing as we speak.”

Dubner said that the adoption of AI, in particular, is now critical to building a best-in-class communications function.“You can't have the other functions in the organization going through it and you're not.” He says he has BCG consultants working with his team, targeting a significant improvement in efficiency.“Not cost out of the system,” he says,“but a more efficient workflow in the organization to do higher value work

“If you don't take that action at some point in the next nine months you're just going to be seen as playing yesterday's game and you're doing work that doesn't need to be done by a human.”

When people use technology to learn more about your company, Perry says,“What do you think is going to come back? Not what came from your department.” Content that sticks will be content with“machine readability, which is now a new layer of the user experience, and it is going to tell me more than any campaign, any media placement, all the stuff that we do.”

Is that machine a stakeholder now?“That is the next level which you need to start thinking about how you work with machines.”

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