By Lot Ndamanomhata
Public Relations (PR) and Corporate Communications professionals have long been typecast as organizational support functions, the architects of messaging, the managers of reputation, and the custodians of public image.
Yet this characterization fundamentally misrepresents the breadth, depth, and strategic value of their work. This article argues, with reference to academic literature, real-world case studies, and practitioner research, that PR and Corporate Communications professionals possess a uniquely holistic understanding of organizational life, stakeholder dynamics, financial narrative, and strategic positioning that not only qualifies them for senior leadership roles but makes them exceptionally well-suited to lead at the highest levels.
Excluding them from decision-making tables does not merely overlook a talent resource it actively weakens institutional resilience, stakeholder trust, and long-term organizational performance.
Introduction: The Misconception of the Support Role
There is a persistent and damaging fallacy that runs through organizational thinking worldwide: that Public Relations and Corporate Communications exist to translate the decisions of others into palatable language. Under this view, the communications professional is a craftsperson of words, valuable, certainly, but not a strategist, not a financial thinker, and certainly not a leader.
This view is not only wrong, but also organizationally costly. Grunig and Hunt (1984), whose foundational four-model framework of public relations remains a cornerstone of the discipline, anticipated this challenge, noting that communications practitioners frequently operate at a managerial level in practice while being treated as technicians in title and status.
Decades later, the gap between the strategic capacity of communications professionals and the recognition they receive persists.
The 2023 Global Communication Report published by the USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations found that 78% of communication professionals believe the function is increasingly involved in business strategy, yet fewer than a third feel they have a genuine seat at the executive table (USC Annenberg, 2023). This disconnect represents not a deficiency in capability, but a failure of organizational imagination.
This article makes an affirmative case: PR and Corporate Communications professionals not only deserve to be in the room, but they also possess unique competencies that position them as some of the most effective organizational leaders available.
The Holistic View: A 360-Degree Understanding of the Organization
Few roles within an organization demand the cross-functional engagement that Corporate Communications does. By the very nature of their work, communications professionals must understand operations, finance, human resources, legal affairs, marketing, government relations, investor relations, and community engagement. They are, in practice, organizational translators, able to synthesize complexity across departments into coherent, strategic narratives.
Dozier, Grunig, and Grunig (1995) established that communication managers who participate in strategic decision-making consistently contribute to organizational effectiveness not as peripheral actors, but as central contributors to value creation. Their research demonstrated that organizations where communications professionals participated in the dominant coalition, the inner circle of organizational decision-making outperformed those where they did not.
This holistic exposure matters for leadership because effective leadership requires system-level thinking. Unlike technical specialists who develop deep expertise in a single domain, communications professionals develop broad fluency across the organizational whole. They understand the consequences of decisions not just operationally, but reputationally, culturally, and externally. This systemic perspective is, as Kotter (1996) noted in his study of organizational change, one of the most critical and rare capacities for effective leadership.
Consider what a Corporate Communications director does in a single week: they brief the CEO on media sentiment ahead of a board meeting, review the language in an investor relations disclosure, consult legal on a crisis communication response, collaborate with HR on an internal all-hands message following a restructuring, and coordinate with regional teams on cultural sensitivities around a product launch. This is not supporting work. This is strategic leadership practiced daily without the formal title.
Dispelling the Myth: Financial and Strategic Literacy in Communications
One of the most persistent objections to communications professionals in leadership is the assumption that they lack financial acumen. This assumption does not survive scrutiny. Senior communications practitioners routinely manage million-dollar budgets, evaluate the return on investment of communications campaigns, interpret earnings data for investor-facing narratives, and advise boards on the financial implications of reputational risk.
The discipline of Investor Relations (IR), which sits squarely within the corporate communications function in many organizations, requires intimate familiarity with financial statements, SEC compliance, earnings guidance, and capital market dynamics. IR professionals must understand financial language with precision, because misstatements carry legal and regulatory consequences. To suggest that these individuals lack financial sophistication is demonstrably false.
More broadly, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR, 2020) has recognized strategic communications as a discipline that requires business literacy as a foundational competency. The CIPR’s Professional Framework explicitly includes financial understanding, governance, and strategic planning as core requirements for senior practitioners. The notion that communications professionals are financially illiterate reflects an outdated caricature, not contemporary professional reality.
Arthur Page Society, whose membership comprises the Chief Communications Officers (CCOs) of the world’s largest corporations, has repeatedly documented the strategic and financial dimensions of senior communications leadership. Their 2019 report, “The New CCO,” identified that modern communications leaders are expected to drive enterprise value, manage organizational risk at a board level, and contribute meaningfully to long-term business strategy (Arthur Page Society, 2019).
Furthermore, reputation is a financial asset. Research by Eccles, Newquist, and Schatz (2007) published in the Harvard Business Review demonstrated that reputation risk including crises of trust, stakeholder alienation, and media mismanagement can destroy shareholder value with devastating speed. The professionals best equipped to protect this asset are, self-evidently, those trained to manage it. Keeping them out of the boardroom is therefore not merely a matter of fairness it is a strategic miscalculation.
Stakeholder Intelligence: The Leadership Competency Organizations Cannot Afford to Ignore
Leadership, at its core, is about understanding and influencing people stakeholders, employees, customers, communities, regulators, investors, and the public. No professional in any organization has a more developed, systematic, and empirically grounded understanding of this landscape than the communications practitioner.
Freeman’s (1984) stakeholder theory, which has become central to contemporary organizational strategy, argues that long-term organizational success depends on the ability to identify, understand, and respond to the needs and expectations of multiple stakeholder groups. This is precisely what PR and communications professionals are trained to do, not occasionally, but as the central purpose of their role.
While a Chief Financial Officer understands investors, and a Chief Marketing Officer understands customers, a Chief Communications Officer understands all stakeholders simultaneously, including employees, media, regulators, community groups, and civil society. This multi-stakeholder literacy gives communications leaders a breadth of perspective that is genuinely rare and strategically invaluable.
Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer, one of the most comprehensive studies of global public trust in institutions, consistently shows that how organizations communicate, and who leads that communication, directly determines whether they are trusted by customers, employees, and the public (Edelman, 2024). Trust, the Barometer demonstrates year after year, is now a primary driver of purchasing decisions, employee retention, and regulatory goodwill. Communications professionals are the foremost architects of institutional trust. Leaders who understand trust at this depth lead differently and more effectively.
In contrast, technically brilliant professionals such as engineers, accountants, scientists who are elevated to leadership roles without the development of stakeholder engagement skills frequently struggle. A 2019 study by the Center for Creative Leadership identified that the primary reason technically strong executives derail is interpersonal and communication failure, an inability to inspire, align, and engage the diverse stakeholders their organizations depend upon (Leslie, 2019). Communications professionals do not have this gap. Managing stakeholders is their professional identity.
Crisis Leadership: Where Communications Professionals Excel Under Pressure
No test reveals the quality of organizational leadership more definitively than a crisis. And in a crisis, communications professionals frequently become the de facto strategic leaders regardless of their formal title because they understand what is at stake, who is watching, and how the organization must respond across every stakeholder dimension simultaneously.
Ulmer, Sellnow, and Seeger (2019), in their seminal work on crisis communication, demonstrate that organizations led by communications-competent executives consistently outperform their peers in recovery speed, stakeholder retention, and long-term reputational resilience. They document case after case where communications leadership is swift, transparent, empathetic, and strategically sound and they determined the difference between organizational survival and collapse.
The COVID-19 pandemic offered a global laboratory for this proposition. Organizations where communications leaders had genuine authority to shape organizational response, to determine messaging timelines, to advise on operational decisions with reputational consequences, and to coordinate the multi-stakeholder communication cascade and effectively navigated the crisis more effectively than those where communications was merely tasked with distributing decisions made by others (Kim & Kreps, 2020).
Consider also the Johnson & Johnson Tylenol crisis of 1982, perhaps the most studied case in corporate communications history. The decision to recall 31 million bottles of Tylenol, at a cost of over $100 million, was driven in significant part by the communications counsel that transparency and stakeholder protection were non-negotiable. That decision is now celebrated as one of the finest examples of ethical organizational leadership ever recorded (Seitel, 2017). It was, fundamentally, a communications-led decision.
The Cost of Exclusion: What Organizations Lose When Communications Is Kept Out
The consequences of excluding communications professionals from strategic leadership are not abstract, they are measurable and well-documented. When organizations make major decisions without communications counsel, they frequently discover too late that the decision, however operationally sound, was organizationally catastrophic in its stakeholder impact.
The Boeing 737 MAX crisis, which resulted in two crashes killing 346 people and the grounding of the aircraft globally, has been extensively analysed. Among the organizational failures identified was the systematic exclusion of safety communication concerns from decision-making processes, and the absence of adequate communication counsel when responding to early warning signals (Robison, 2021). The cost of that exclusion was in human lives, financial loss, and reputational destruction and is incalculable.
Closer to ordinary organizational life, research by the Holmes Report and the Institute for Public Relations (2018) found that companies with senior communications leaders reporting directly to the CEO and participating in C-suite decision-making achieved 47% higher returns to shareholders over a five-year period compared to companies where communications was a subordinate function. This is not a marginal finding. It is a compelling, financially expressed argument for communications leadership.
When communications professionals are excluded from the table, organizations also lose the voice most likely to raise uncomfortable questions about how decisions will land with employees, communities, and the public.
They lose the internal advocate for transparency who can prevent small ethical lapses from becoming institutional scandals. They lose the stakeholder map that would reveal which decisions carry hidden risks. In short, they lose the institutional conscience that communications leadership provides.
Bowen (2008), whose research on ethical decision-making in public relations is foundational, argues that communications professionals are uniquely positioned to serve as ethical counsel at the highest organizational levels.
Their training in stakeholder analysis, public accountability, and reputational consequence makes them natural guardians of organizational integrity, a role that, if denied, leaves that critical function unoccupied.
The Rise of the Chief Communications Officer: Evidence from Practice
The evolution of the Chief Communications Officer role in major corporations provides concrete evidence that the most sophisticated organizations have already recognized what this article argues. The CCO is no longer a media-relations manager with a senior title, it is a full executive officer with a seat at the strategy table, responsibility for enterprise-level reputation management, and accountability to the board.
Companies like Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Unilever, and Johnson & Johnson have elevated their communications leaders to positions of genuine executive authority. At Microsoft, Chief Communications Officer Frank Shaw has been a central figure in the company’s strategic repositioning and culture transformation under Satya Nadella contributing not merely to external messaging, but to the narrative architecture of organizational change (Arthur Page Society, 2019).
In the public sector and non-governmental space, the pattern is equally clear. The World Health Organization, United Nations agencies, and major international NGOs have increasingly appointed communications leaders with genuine policy authority, not merely as spokespersons but as strategic architects of how these organizations engage with their mandates and their publics.
Zerfass, Verčič, Nothhaft, and Werder (2018), in their European Communication Monitor the largest annual study of communications leadership globally found a consistent trend over fifteen years of data: organizations that position communications leaders as strategic partners, rather than functional specialists, demonstrate measurably superior performance in innovation, stakeholder relationships, and organizational resilience. The data across thousands of organizations over a decade and a half leaves little room for ambiguity.
Communications Professionals Who Led: Real-World Validation
Beyond structural arguments, history offers direct evidence of communications professionals succeeding in the highest organizational leadership roles.
Richard Edelman, CEO of the world’s largest public relations firm, Edelman, has led an organization of over 6,000 employees across 60+ countries demonstrating that a PR background is not merely compatible with organizational leadership but constitutes a genuine competitive advantage in an environment where trust, narrative, and stakeholder engagement are business fundamentals.
In the political arena, the capacity to communicate, to understand publics, to frame narratives, to build coalitions has long been recognized as foundational to leadership. Presidents, prime ministers, and heads of state throughout history have understood that the ability to engage, persuade, and bring people with you is not a secondary skill, it is leadership itself.
In non-profit and civil society organizations where mission, trust, and stakeholder engagement are often the only real assets, communications leaders have long been among the most effective organizational stewards. Oxfam, Amnesty International, and CARE International have at various points been led by individuals with strong communications and advocacy backgrounds, with impressive organizational results (Nonprofit Leadership Alliance, 2020).
The Inclusive Imperative: Diversifying the Leadership Pipeline Through Communications
There is also a diversity and inclusion dimension to this conversation that deserves explicit recognition. The communications and PR profession has historically been among the more gender-diverse of the professional disciplines with women representing approximately 63% of practitioners globally (PRSA, 2023). Leadership pipelines that exclude communications professionals as a category therefore disproportionately exclude women from senior roles, an outcome that is both unjust and organizationally counterproductive.
Research consistently demonstrates that leadership diversity including professional diversity at the leadership level drives better decision-making, greater organizational agility, and improved financial performance (McKinsey & Company, 2023). Including communications professionals in leadership pipelines is therefore not only a matter of utilising available talent, but also a mechanism for achieving the diversity of perspective that modern organizations require.
Conversely, when organizations insist on populating their leadership exclusively from finance, engineering, or legal backgrounds, they create cognitive monocultures, leadership teams that think similarly, prioritize similarly, and therefore fail similarly. The communications professional, with their multi-stakeholder, systems-level perspective, provides exactly the complementary leadership thinking that diverse high-performing organizations require.
What Organizations Must Do: Practical Recommendations
For organizations committed to maximizing their leadership potential, the following recommendations, grounded in the literature and organizational best practice, are offered:
- Elevate Communications to the C-Suite with genuine authority: The CCO or equivalent role should report directly to the CEO, participate in all senior strategy discussions, and have formal accountability to the board for organizational reputation and stakeholder trust. This is not a courtesy, it is an organizational competency requirement.
- Involve communications leaders at the decision-making stage, not the announcement stage: The chronic error of engaging communications professionals only after decisions have been made must be eliminated. Communications insight is most valuable and most protective when applied before decisions are finalised.
- Invest in the business literacy of communications professionals: While technical financial skills are rarely absent, organizations can support communications professionals through structured exposure to financial reporting, strategic planning processes, and governance frameworks further strengthening an already broad professional base.
- Recognise communications leadership in succession planning: When identifying future organizational leaders, communications professionals should be assessed and considered on an equal footing with those from finance, operations, or technical disciplines. Their cross-functional knowledge and stakeholder acuity are leadership assets of the highest order.
- Measure the value of communications leadership empirically: Organizations should track the relationship between communications leadership investment and organizational outcomes, employee engagement, stakeholder satisfaction, crisis recovery speed, and long-term brand equity building an internal evidence base that demonstrates the return on communications leadership.
Conclusion: The Room Has Always Needed Them
The argument of this article is not that every PR or Corporate Communications professional is a natural-born organizational leader, that claim would apply to no profession. The argument is that the competencies, perspectives, and professional experiences that communications practitioners develop through the practice of their craft constitute an exceptional foundation for organizational leadership, one that is systematically undervalued and strategically underutilized.
Organizations that exclude communications professionals from leadership tables do not do so because they have weighed the evidence and concluded that these professionals lack the capability to lead.
They do so because of an inherited bias, a cultural assumption that has outlived any validity it may once have possessed. In a world where stakeholder trust, reputational resilience, and authentic engagement are increasingly the primary determinants of organizational success, that bias is not merely unfair, it is organizationally self-defeating.
Communications professionals see the whole organization. They understand every stakeholder. They manage complexity under pressure. They protect the organization’s most intangible but most valuable assets. They have been doing the work of leadership without the title for decades.
It is time to stop treating the professionals who best understand the world outside the organization as supporting characters within it. It is time to give them the seat, the authority, and the recognition they have long deserved and that their organizations urgently need.
The room has always needed them. The evidence simply requires that we finally open the door.
*Lot Ndamanomhata is from Ekoka. This article reflects his views and writes entirely in his personal capacity.
