Listening is a moral discipline

This body of work has argued, across several essays, that corporate communication is a relational discipline: two-way, research-based, grounded in listening, and embedded in the decisions an organisation takes rather than appended to them afterwards. The argument has mostly been made on grounds of effectiveness. The relational model works better than the transmission model because it is a more honest account of how people receive information, and because organisations that listen learn things their competitors do not.

That case is true. It is also incomplete, and in one respect misleading. If listening were only a superior technique, it would deserve to be abandoned the moment it stopped paying – and the people an organisation listens to would be, in the end, instruments of its advantage. The relational paradigm cannot rest there. Beneath the method is a commitment about people, and it is worth stating plainly, because a discipline that does not know why it exists will not hold under pressure.

More than a better technique

The instrumental case for listening is real, and I have made it repeatedly: in The emergence of a stakeholder-relational logic in corporate communications, where systematic engagement produces intelligence; in The purpose of investor relations, where it lowers the cost of financing; in Issues management is about relationships, where it detects trouble early. None of that is wrong. But an organisation that listens only because it pays has not adopted the paradigm. It has adopted a tactic, and a tactic is kept only as long as the payment continues. The first difficult quarter, the first stakeholder whose concern is expensive to address, and the tactic is dropped.

What distinguishes a discipline from a tactic is that a discipline is maintained when it costs. That requires a reason which survives the absence of immediate reward.

The humanist commitment

The reason I hold is a humanist one. Secular humanism locates value and responsibility in human beings rather than in any authority outside them. It treats persons as ends in themselves, possessed of dignity and the capacity for judgement, and it joins reason to compassion rather than setting the two against each other. I do not introduce this as a private belief that happens to sit beside my professional work. It is the ground the professional work stands on.

Two consequences follow directly for corporate communication. The first is that the people an organisation affects – employees, neighbours, investors, the communities along a supply chain, the generations who inherit the consequences – are not an audience to be moved. They are persons owed recognition. Listening is the form that recognition takes. To listen is to treat the other as someone whose understanding of their own situation has standing, rather than as a variable to be managed.

The second is that legitimacy is conferred, not claimed. An organisation does not possess legitimacy as a property it can assert through messaging. Legitimacy is a judgement rendered by those affected, on the basis of how the organisation conducts itself. This is not a constraint imposed on the corporation from outside. It is what legitimacy is.

Conduct precedes communication

From this, the principle I return to most often follows necessarily. If legitimacy is a judgement that others render on the basis of conduct, then the primary object of professional attention is conduct, not message. Communication that runs ahead of conduct is an attempt to obtain a verdict one has not earned – and the people from whom it is sought are usually better at detecting the attempt than the organisation expects.

Arthur Page, whom I read first and regard as the intellectual ancestor of this position, put it in terms that have not been improved upon: a company's reputation is determined by the conduct of its people, and it must prove its case with action rather than words. The gap between what an organisation does and what it claims is the place trust dies. No communicative skill closes that gap; only conduct does. The communicator's most valuable contribution is therefore frequently to say that the right output is not a better sentence but a different decision.

Why this is a discipline and not a sentiment

It would be a misreading to take any of this as softness. Listening as moral recognition is more demanding than persuasion, not less. It requires hearing what one would rather not hear, treating a counterpart as a peer when the power between you is unequal, and honouring a room that has gone silent as information to be understood rather than an obstacle to be overcome.

It is most demanding in the case that formed my own commitment. I came to this work through the problem that Brundtland framed as intergenerational, and that Jørgen Randers framed, in the Limits to Growthtradition, as a question of whether we are capable of hearing consequences that are distant in time. The parties most affected by many corporate decisions – future generations, distant communities, the silent majority of any stakeholder group – cannot speak in the room. Recognition of them is not a passive intake of stated views. It is the deliberate effort to hear those who are structurally quiet. That effort is the discipline. It does not come naturally, and it is never finished.

The relational corporation, restated

The corporation, on this view, is a bundle of relationships and not only a bundle of contracts. I have argued that elsewhere as an analytical matter – the relational layer explains long-term performance that the contract-and-shareholder view alone cannot. Here the claim is more basic. A company is, in moral fact, the sum of how it treats those whose lives are bound up with it. Shareholder value is the consequence of relationships conducted well over time. It is not their purpose, and an organisation that inverts the order – treating relationships as instruments of value rather than value as the fruit of relationships – corrodes the thing it is trying to produce.

An honest limit

None of this dissolves hard conflict, and it should not be made to. Recognition is not agreement. To listen to a stakeholder is not to be obliged to yield to them, and a paradigm that confused the two would deserve the charge of naivety. The duty is to hear and to weigh, not to be captured. Where exactly those limits lie is a question this body of work has not yet examined and should.

But the foundation is not in doubt. The relational paradigm is not, at bottom, a claim about what works. It is a claim about what people are owed – from which it follows, fortunately but secondarily, that honouring the obligation also tends to work.

An organisation that listens only because it pays will stop the moment it does not. An organisation that listens because it owes the hearing will still be listening when it matters most – which is, as it happens, exactly when it pays.

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