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 implication for how the communications director must approach his job.  

Over the years I have developed and followed a set of principles, originally based on Arthur W. Pages 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. CSRDs 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 are 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 affected) as opposed to “stakeholders” (those with established relationships) 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 show the necessity and value of a foundational and long-term strategic approach to public affairs. My thinking is developed from how and why an organisation communicates to where and on what basis it engages politically. In this text I integrate the relational paradigm with arena dynamics and explain how the defining characteristic of an industry produces a structural exposure, which in turn dictates a foundational approach.

“Strengthening public affairs by supplying a solid framework” describes this thinking through a model as a leadership team would use it. The framework describes how public affairs work must be based on a foundational approach and guiding principles, which together govern positioning and conduct. Based on this foundation the corporation attends to current priorities, which change with the agenda. Without the foundation, public affairs is a lobbying calendar. It may look great, but it is hardly effective.

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 leeway, 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 peoples 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. It’s 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.

It’s 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.