Alysha Mild is the founding father of Flight PR. Join together with her on LinkedIn.
When it’s time for corporations to call their subsequent CEO, they typically look to their C-Suite. CFOs, CMOs, CSOs, CTOs and even normal counsel are the standard suspects who’re within the working by default. In the meantime, their chief communications officers colleagues are not often thought of. It begs the query: why are the very leaders who’ve mastered the artwork of storytelling and perceive stakeholder engagement higher than anybody so typically unnoticed of an organization’s succession planning?
Maybe they’re a bit of too good at their jobs. CCOs spend their days crafting the right messages, mitigating crises earlier than they explode, considering endlessly about optics, working throughout virtually each division, and basically, making everybody else look good. They’re the unsung heroes toiling within the background who clear up the messes and clean over the blunders. In a world the place an organization’s popularity could be its greatest asset or its greatest legal responsibility, you’d assume company management would maintain this function in increased esteem.
In my 15+ years within the PR business, I’ve crossed paths with many excellent comms professionals, however I solely know one who made her strategy to the CEO seat: the indomitable Jill Kelly, who’s wrapping up a two-year tenure as CEO of EssenceMediacom. What’s stopping others from forging an analogous path?
Comms professionals want to finish their inferiority advanced
Whereas the company world has but to totally acknowledge the worth of strategic communication as a key driver of gross sales and enterprise success, communications professionals are responsible of shopping for into the false perception that our abilities aren’t simply as suited to the highest ranks as our colleagues in finance, advertising, technique, or engineering roles.
To get extra perception, I requested Becca Chambers, CCO at San Francisco-based ControlUp, an IT monitoring software program and digital worker expertise supplier, for her ideas.
“Immediately, profitable leaders want a lot greater than inside-out data of their corporations,” she mentioned. “They want abilities like authenticity, connection, coronary heart, empathy, and the type of inventive considering that interprets knowledge into differentiators, challenges into alternatives, and corporations into iconic manufacturers.”
Chambers added: “The talent units that make a fantastic CEO at present look very acquainted—as a result of they’re the precise talent set of a fantastic (CCO). CCOs (want) to know nuanced market dynamics, aggressive landscapes, inside and exterior model popularity, positioning, viewers motivations, and the best way to navigate by a disaster. They have to be relentlessly strategic and relentlessly human. That’s why corporations that win on this subsequent section of enterprise will probably be those who search CCO-like qualities of their high leaders—those that hear, strategize, and join the dots. I can assure that we’ll have the ability to inform which corporations do, and which don’t.”
Certainly, we stay in an period the place manufacturers are constructed and burned on the altar of public opinion; the place a single submit or assertion can ship inventory tumbling, and but, the very individuals who navigate these treacherous waters each day are seen as unfit to carry an organization’s highest-ranking place. Who higher to steer an organization than somebody who’s made a profession out of using their listening abilities, popularity administration, change administration, constructing assist and belief, and cross-functional acumen?
As Son Pham excellently places in this Raconteur piece, the company world more and more acknowledges popularity administration, a core competency of any profitable CCO, as crucial to a corporation’s success. Management, adaptability, and disaster administration are areas the place CCOs excel, given their day-to-day tasks contain navigating stakeholder interactions and shaping public notion. These abilities can outline a profitable CEO, significantly when company popularity could be a firm’s greatest asset or its biggest downfall.
It’s time to normalize comms leaders ascending to the very best ranks.
As communications leaders, we carry rather more worth to an organization’s backside line than the crises we avert and the media we generate. By increasing how we view a CCO’s contributions and nurturing their well-developed management capabilities, the company world can faucet right into a extra various pipeline of potential CEOs already well-versed in one of the vital crucial points of at present’s enterprise: communication.
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