Corporate communications is relational

Corporate communication is a two-way discipline that begins with listening. It must be based on a structural foundation.

Corporate communication is a two-way process that brings together information and relationships. The most important and the most difficult part is listening. Communication is also more emotional than rational. 

My writing below develops this insight and charts the consequences for different disciplines within corporate communication.

I start by showing how several corporate disciplines gradually have been oriented towards relationships and understanding, of not only stakeholders and rightsholders, but also the wider publics. Then I explain the humanist philosophy this thinking rests on before I discuss the implications for how the communications director must approach the job.  

Over the years I have developed and followed a set of principles, originally based on Arthur W. Page’s work. His work is best understood by reading the text where I first found his thinking laid out.

As I explain in “the emergence of a stakeholder-relational logic in corporate communications”, a relational logic now shows up in several corporate disciplines. Following this logic, communication is best understood as the management of relationships with stakeholders: two-way, research-based, dialogical, and embedded in how the organisation decides. The rest of my writing is based on this conviction.

The text “Anti-PR” follows this insight to one conclusion. What is colloquially called PR, obtaining favourable attention in the press, is the most primitive approach to public relations. What public relations ought to be is a bridging function that carries information across the organisation’s boundary in both directions and changes its decisions, rather than a buffer that manages perception so the organisation can carry on unchanged.

The public attention a corporation receives is a consequence of its conduct.

Working with public relations (in the form of publicity) is about ensuring that the corporation gets the attention it deserves, not about seeking attention that is positive. I see relationship-orientation as foundational, and publicity-seeking as situational. Situational assertion resting on no foundation is the discipline’s purest failure mode.

“It’s emotional, stupid” should serve as a reminder for all communications directors. If communication is relational, it has an emotional core. Trust, credibility and the willingness to keep listening are shaped more by emotion than by reason. The rational content of a message travels on an emotional signal. When the signal is wrong, the content often fails to land. Facts alone rarely win emotional arguments.

With a relational approach to communications, I see communications as symmetrical. In “the arc of history toward symmetry” I discuss an objection the relational logic invites, that real corporations’ relations to their surroundings are not symmetrical. Corporations advocate their interests and hold more power than the parties they engage. The essay concedes the point as description – pure symmetry is a fiction – and then refuses the opposite conclusion, because pure asymmetry does not survive an open society. What exists is better described as mixed-motive, and the decisive variable is time: while asymmetry may win the transaction, symmetry wins the decade.

For an organisation that depends on consent it can neither coerce nor escape, the long-run equilibrium bends toward symmetry because consent, once conferred, can always be withdrawn.

“Power is the condition” takes up what the symmetry argument concedes but does not pursue, that organisations and their publics do not meet as equals. Corporations enter relationships with capital, infrastructure, expertise, data and institutional standing, and some shape the very conditions under which others act.

The essay argues that this does not weaken the relational case. It is what makes it necessary.

Legitimacy is the condition under which power can go on operating without constant resistance. The more consequential the power, the more demanding that test becomes. While a marginal actor is judged by its intentions, a dominant one is judged by its effects.

The more power an organisation holds, the more legitimacy it needs. The practical question is therefore never whether an organisation has power – it obviously has – but what standard follows from the power it holds.

Working with sustainability reporting, I have learned how developing a report requires listening. When the EU directive CSRD emerged, it turned out that “CSRD formalises listening”. This is the point where the relational logic enters governance. For a moment the EU-directive looked set to require of nearly every large company what communications professionals had found it challenging to win purely by persuasion. CSRD’s mechanism, double materiality assessment, makes a company assess itself in two directions at once – its impact on the world and the world’s effect on it – an assessment that cannot honestly be made from inside an office.

What CSRD formalises is therefore not only disclosure but a discipline: the obligation to look outward and listen, in a structured way, before the company accounts for itself. The EU’s 2026 Omnibus then narrowed the scope sharply, taking most companies out of the mandatory regime, but it narrowed the scope, not the logic. Double materiality stays, and the obligation to look and listen survives. For boards the conclusion is unchanged: listening is a discipline of governance.

In “the first relationship” I turn the relational paradigm inward, to the relationship a corporation is most tempted to take for granted. Employees are not an audience to be informed of a strategy, but the people through whom it is executed or quietly defeated. They read conduct directly, at close range, every day.

This makes internal communication the truest test of the relational paradigm, and its hardest case is communicating honestly through genuine uncertainty rather than projecting a false certainty or going silent.

The importance of relationships and emotions is easiest to see in difficult situations and during a crisis. “Issues management is about relationships, not publicity” describes how my thinking is applied under pressure. The first question when trouble arises is not what to say but who will experience that they are affected and what must be done for them. Here the concept of “publics” (those who recognise a consequence as a problem and organise around it) as opposed to “stakeholders” (broad categories defined by consequence, whether or not an issue has arisen) becomes clear.

If and when the time comes for informing publicly about what has happened, then what you say follows from what you do and how you say it is informed by listening to people affected by what has happened.

In “the structural turn in public affairs” I move from how and why an organisation communicates to where and on what basis it engages politically. Every industry has a defining characteristic. It is not the feature the corporation finds most commercially attractive, but the structural fact that, if handled badly, would cost it the right to be heard and therefore the right to operate.

This defining characteristic creates a structural exposure the corporation cannot avoid, and from the exposure follows the need for a foundational approach: the long-term posture it must consistently demonstrate in order to remain worth listening to.

This is the layer the established traditions leave out. Grunig tells us how an organisation should communicate, but not what the bridge is anchored to on the corporation’s side. Arena thinking describes how issues rise and fall in competition for scarce attention, but supplies no basis for deciding what position to take. Issues management treats the corporation's response as reactive, and never asks why it is exposed in the first place.

The foundation answers that question. It also settles what happens when a commercially attractive position conflicts with what the foundational approach demands: the foundation takes precedence. The reason is structural. The foundational approach derives its political force from credibility, and credibility is what the principles protect. A corporation that advocates without principled conduct will be heard once. A corporation that advocates with it will be heard repeatedly.

“Strengthening public affairs by supplying a solid framework” describes the same model as a leadership team would use it. I visualise it by drawing a horizontal line. Below the line sit the foundational approach and the guiding principles, which govern positioning and conduct across issues and political cycles. Above the line sit the current priorities, derived from the corporate strategy and the external agenda, and changing with it. Day-to-day work takes place above the line, but it is effective only if it stays anchored below it.

If short-term priorities contradict the foundation, credibility erodes. If they ignore current realities, influence disappears. Without the foundation, public affairs is a lobbying calendar. It may look great, but it is hardly effective.

Then, in “influence runs out before attention arrives” I add the dimension the preceding texts leave out: time. Attention and influence tend to move in opposite directions. The room to shape an issue is widest while few people are watching, and much of it has closed by the time the issue becomes visible.

The consequence is uncomfortable. A function that takes its cues from media coverage will usually arrive after the point at which it could have mattered.

The text also develops the distinction between publics and stakeholders further. Publics form around a problem, are specific to it, and cannot be mapped in advance, while a stakeholder category can. The early phases of an issue belong to publics, and what a public needs is not a message about the consequence, but a change in it. That form of influence never shows up in a model of an issue’s life cycle, because a concern that has been met does not become an issue.

Finally, I explain why public relations, public affairs and regulatory affairs rest on the same foundation (described in “Strengthening public affairs by supplying a solid framework”). The exposure that produces the issue is a fact about the corporation and its industry, not about a department. What differs is the counterpart, and with it the evidence required and the register. The posture is one. The proof is three.

The relational logic is then applied to the capital markets in “the purpose of investor relations”. This is where the application is oldest. The goal of investor relations is a lower cost of capital and protected commercial degrees of freedom, and not a higher valuation, not visibility, not trust as an end in itself. Trust is a precondition for reaching the goal, never the goal.

This purpose, and the relational approach, is then applied in “how to make an equity story”. An equity story is not a feat of narrative, but a structured account of how a company creates value from other people’s money over time, built to let investors form their own judgement. That means it is built by listening to how the market already values you, and not by drafting a story.

“The case against weakening quarterly reporting” brings that logic to a recurring policy question. Short-termism is a real problem, but reporting frequency is not its cause. The cause is what companies, analysts and investors do around the cycle. The remedy is behavioural. Quarterly reporting remains the recurring, auditable occasion on which a company and its owners confront the same facts – and is the natural home of the equity story.

I then turn from rationality to philosophy in “listening is a moral discipline”. Every preceding essay argues for listening on grounds of effectiveness. Listening works, it produces intelligence and it lowers the cost of capital. That is true, but incomplete. An organisation that listens only because it pays will stop the moment it does not.

Beneath the technique is a humanist commitment – that the people an organisation affects are owed recognition, and that legitimacy is conferred by them rather than claimed by the organisation. From that, not from utility, the principle that conduct precedes communication follows.

“Counsel before communication” turns from the object of the work to the subject that performs it. I have so far described my approach and the work with relationships, arenas and stakeholders the discipline attends to. In this text I discuss the communications function itself; what it is for and on what authority it acts.

The answer is that it holds no formal authority at all. Its standing to shape conduct is conferred rather than commanded, earned by listening first and hardest to the chief executive. It is also held by an integrity it forfeits the moment it announces it.

Its work is translation in two directions and the widening of the decisions a leadership team can see: it makes the organisation listen, helps the board understand, and brings alternatives rather than verdicts.

It is the reflexive test of everything that precedes it: conduct precedes communication. That holds also for the counsellor.

The famous “Address to the Continental Oil Company” is where the relational approach first entered corporate language and where I first found this thinking expressed. “The father of corporate public relations”, Arthur W. Page, argues in this speech that since a corporation is chartered by public authority to serve public needs, it lives by a public approval it must deserve rather than claim. This is the origin of the social licence on which the foundational approach depends, and of the principles that govern this work. Page even separates the function that surveys public reactions and feeds them back into operations from the one that merely publicises what is done – the bridging-versus-publicity distinction that my article on Anti-PR makes explicit, drawn decades before the public relations theorist James Grunig formalised it. It is where the principles named at the top of this page, and the moral ground set out above, come from.

Please note: These essays are my own work. AI tools have occasionally been used for proofreading and language editing.