The Most Underdeployed Executive in Your Organization Has a Comms Title

In most organizations — government, corporate, nonprofit, pick your flavor — communications lives at the edges. It handles the press releases. It manages the social accounts. It gets tagged in when something goes sideways and someone needs a statement by 4pm. It is invited to the strategy table approximately a dozen meetings too late, and then blamed when the strategy doesn't land.

This is, to put it diplomatically, a missed opportunity.

Here's what communications teams actually have that almost every other division doesn't: they understand the full story. They know the organization's history and its baggage. They know where trust is thin and why. They know how different audiences — customers, regulators, employees, the general public, that one guy who emails every week — understand and catastrophically misunderstand what the organization does. They are, in effect, the institutional conscience and the most fluent translators in the building.

And most organizations use them to write the monthly newsletter.

Government, too, makes this mistake consistently, which is why it is such a useful case study. A state agency communications team might have decades of institutional knowledge — the legislative history, the policy constraints, the public perception, the technology gaps, the current division priorities, and the hard-won understanding of why the last three initiatives landed with less of a splash and more of a thud.

That intelligence is priceless. And it typically gets activated right around the time someone needs quote approval for a press release about $40,000,000 in funding for a game-changing initiative that Comms had never heard about.

The opportunity — in government and everywhere else — is to stop treating communications as a downstream function. Not the team that packages finished decisions. The team that's in the room guiding the decisions, asking the inconvenient questions nobody else is positioned to ask:

• Who is this actually for?

• What do they currently believe?

• What's the gap between what we think we're saying and what they're going to hear?

• Are the staff aligned on this mission?

Those aren't soft questions. They're just the ones that tend to get skipped in the interest of hitting the launch date.

What does it look like when a communications strategy is actually deployed as the hub? It means comms leaders have a hand on the reins when programs are being designed, not when they're ready to announce. It means using audience insight — the kind communications teams build constantly, often without being asked — to pressure-test ideas before they're public and irreversible. It means running internal rollouts with the same strategic rigor applied to external campaigns: defined audiences, clear narrative, feedback mechanisms, and someone accountable for whether people actually understood and adopted the thing.

Because here's what every organization has in common, regardless of sector: every division has a communications problem they don't know how to name. Legal needs a policy change explained in a way that brings people along rather than triggers a revolt. HR needs a new initiative to feel like an opportunity rather than a mandate. IT needs buy-in on a new system from a workforce that has watched three previous systems get introduced with with confetti canons only to be abandoned.

These are all communications challenges. The person best equipped to address them is already in your building, currently using their energy on approving a Facebook post about how you’re celebrating National Hot Dog Day.

The organizations that modernize most effectively aren't the ones with the biggest technology budgets. They're the ones smart enough to put a communications strategist in a leadership role not only before the plan is finished — but at the starting gun.

That's the person who already knows where it's going to break down, who it's going to lose, and how to fix both before anyone finds out the hard way.

The right person at the right level changes everything. At some point, the smartest move isn't a new initiative — it's giving the right person the room to run.