Counsel before communication

The essays before this one describe the work; this one describes the worker. Each article in the collection has theorised the object of corporate communication – the relationships it manages, the arenas in which they are tested, the stakeholders to whom recognition is owed. None has asked what the communications function itself is for, by what authority it acts, and what it stands to lose when it acts well. The omission is not incidental. The function is hardest to describe precisely where it matters most, because its central task is the one it has the least formal power to perform: to shape conduct before there is anything to communicate.

My thinking on corporate communications, laid out in this collection of articles rests on a single sequence – conduct precedes communication. If that holds, the function's first duty is not to the message but to the decision behind it. It must be in the room where conduct is set, and it must be willing, at the decisive moment, to say that the conduct is wrong and must change before the organisation speaks. The difficulty is that the function holds nothing that lets it say so. It is this absence of authority, and what the function must put in its place, that the essay is about.

Consider what the other functions own. Legal owns the boundary of the permissible; finance owns the allocation of capital; operations owns the means of production. Each commands a domain and can, within it, compel. The communications function commands nothing comparable. Its remit – the relationship between the organisation and those it affects – is the one remit no single function can hold, because the relationship is made and unmade everywhere at once, in every decision taken across the company. The function is therefore accountable for an outcome it cannot command and responsible for a relationship it does not solely control. Its authority cannot be positional, because there is no position from which the whole relationship can be governed.

What follows is uncomfortable but clarifying. If the function's authority cannot be claimed from a position, it can only be conferred through a relationship – the same structure the collection has insisted on throughout: legitimacy is conferred by those who grant it, never asserted by those who want it. The principle the function applies to the organisation's stakeholders applies to the function itself. Its standing to shape conduct is granted by the people whose conduct it would shape – chiefly the chief executive and the senior team – and on terms they can withdraw.

If the authority is conferred, the question becomes how it is earned. Two things earn it. The first is knowledge the room does not otherwise hold: how a given course of conduct will be received, by whom, in which arena, over what horizon, and at what cost when it surfaces. This is the communicative paradigm and arena dynamics turned to practical use, and it is the function's only durable claim to a hearing. But knowledge does not move a decision on its own. It moves a decision only through a relationship with the person taking it, and that relationship has a precondition the function consistently underrates.

The precondition is listening – directed, before anything else, upward. The collection made listening to stakeholders the discipline on which everything rests. The function's own first act of listening is inward: to understand, precisely and without flinching, the worldview of the chief executive and the senior team. Not to flatter it, and not to adopt it, but because counsel offered from outside a person's frame is heard as foreign and set aside. You cannot move a decision from outside the logic that produced it. To change conduct, you must first understand the reasoning that makes the present conduct seem not merely defensible but obvious to the person holding it. The relational paradigm applied outward to publics is here applied to the one relationship the adviser cannot afford to misread. The first relationship the company neglects is with its employees; the first relationship the adviser neglects is with the principal.

Stated plainly, the work has a shape, and the shape is translation in two directions. The function carries the outside in – the reading of how conduct will land, who is affected, which arena is forming, what a stakeholder's silence actually means – and it carries the inside out, rendering the organisation's intent in terms its publics can recognise as addressed to them rather than at them. It is the one role positioned at the membrane between the company and those it affects, and its value is not that it relays but that it refuses to let either direction of the translation go missing. The corporation that does not hear the outside makes confident decisions about a world that is not there; the publics that cannot read the corporation withdraw the consent on which the whole framework depends. The function stands in that gap and works it both ways.

Three things follow from that position, and they are the actual content of the job. The first is to make the corporation listen – not to assemble listening, which most organisations already do, but to connect it to the decision, which most do not. Good listening here is not volume but selection: the salient stakeholders, read methodically across the forming arenas, and brought into the decision on its own cadence rather than after it. The test is a single question – has anything the organisation heard ever changed what it decided? Where the answer is no, the listening is decoration and closing that gap is the function's first task. The second is to help senior management and the board understand – to carry the outside into the executive's own frame, in the register of consequence and exposure rather than sentiment, so that a distant concern arrives as a live input to a decision and not as noise to be handled. The third, and the one that makes this counsel rather than reporting, is to widen the set of decisions available. The function does not bring the chief executive a verdict; it brings alternatives the executive had not seen, each with its conduct, its exposure and its cost set out, and then leaves the choice where it belongs. This is the guide's part of the work: not to choose the route, but to make the routes and their consequences visible enough that the principal can choose well.

All three acts depend on a single quality, and it is the real subject of the essay – approached carefully, because it resists being stated. The function's whole worth is that it will say the costly thing when no one else in the room will: that the conduct is wrong, and that it must change before the organisation communicates. That willingness is the function's integrity, and integrity is the source of whatever conferred authority the function holds. And yet integrity is the one quality the function destroys by naming.

The reasons are exact. To announce one's integrity is to claim a virtue, and a claimed virtue is already compromised, for the same reason a claimed legitimacy is – both are recognitions others confer, not properties one declares. To position oneself as the keeper of the organisation's conduct is, by implication, to position the chief executive as the one who would otherwise lack it; the moral argument becomes a moral accusation, and an accusation ends the hearing. And to invoke integrity as though it settled the matter is to claim an authority the function does not structurally hold, which exposes the claim as a bluff the moment it is tested. The function that says, in effect, trust me, I am the conscience here, has in the saying forfeited the standing the sentence assumes.

Integrity, then, cannot be performed. It can only be demonstrated, and it is demonstrated in precisely the way the collection has demanded of the organisations it studies: through conduct, over time, before any claim is made. The adviser earns the standing to challenge conduct by their own conduct – by being right when being right is expensive, by having listened first so the challenge lands inside the principal's reasoning rather than against it, and by carrying the moral question inside an argument the principal can own. Conduct precedes communication, turned at last on the counsellor. The integrity is real. It is simply never named.

This determines the form effective counsel takes. The function does not say that a thing is wrong. It says that the course creates an exposure and then sets out the mechanism by which it surfaces, the stakeholder who carries it, the arena in which it will be contested, the horizon over which it will return, and the cost when it does. The moral content is not abandoned; it is carried inside a consequence the principal can reason about as their own. The equity story, the collection argued, is built to let investors reach their own judgement at the lowest cost to the company. Counsel to the chief executive is built on the same principle – to let the principal reach the conduct decision themselves, rather than have it pressed upon them. The adviser does not ask to be trusted as a conscience. The adviser equips a judgement and trusts the judgement to arrive where conduct requires.

It is worth being plain about when this fails, because the failures are how the skill is learned. Counsel fails when it arrives as accusation, and the principal defends the conduct instead of examining it; when it arrives as a signal outside the principal's frame and is filed as noise; and when it arrives as a verdict, which removes the agency that makes a decision hold. It succeeds in one case: when the outside enters as a live input the principal can own, weigh and act on as their own. The difference is seldom the substance of the advice. It is almost always whether the adviser listened first.

None of this makes the standing secure, and it is dishonest to pretend otherwise. The function depends, for its access, on the very people it must sometimes oppose. The relationship that confers its authority is the relationship it risks each time it uses that authority for its proper purpose. This dependence is not a flaw in the design to be engineered away; it is the structural condition of the role, and it has always been so. Arthur Page could hold the brief because he had accumulated the standing and was prepared to spend it; the standing was worth holding precisely because he would spend it. A function that has made itself permanently safe – that has arranged never to risk its access – has, in securing itself, ceased to perform the only task that justified its place in the room.

So the function's authority is earned in the moment it is most willing to lose it. It accumulates standing through demonstrated counsel, listens its way into the principal's frame, and holds in reserve an integrity it never announces and occasionally must spend. The willingness to lose the relationship is what makes the relationship worth having. That is the uncomfortable centre of the role, and the reason it cannot be reduced to craft. The function is the custodian, inside the room, of the condition the whole collection rests on: that the organisation exists by the consent of those it affects, and that someone present must be prepared to say so when it is least welcome.

The function's authority is conferred, never held; its integrity is shown, never said; and the one who will not risk the first has no claim to the second.

 My thinking on corporate communications is laid out here: www.jorgenchristiansen.no/how