Internal Communicators Are The Next CCOs
A hot take
I’ve always found the internal/external divide in communications pretty stupid. If that distinction ever made sense, it was only in the Walter Cronkite era, where “news” was something bestowed upon the public by the press, and who qualified as “press,” or what we today call “external comms,” was uncontroversially decided.
Today’s media landscape is much more eclectic. The lines between internal and external are blurrier. We get news from X feeds and group chats. Company emails get leaked; employees spill gossip to reporters on encrypted messaging apps.
In this brave new world, boxing audiences into external or internal is anachronistic and overly simplistic. Certainly, businesses need to consider their employees, but that’s just one audience of many. Others might be investors, super-fans, or partners—all technically “external” audiences that you might communicate with more intimately than your average customer. And your employees don’t live in a bubble; they see your earning’s reports and the backlash your CEO is getting on Twitter.
The lines between internal and external are blurrier. We get news from X feeds and group chats. Company emails get leaked.
This is all to say that modern communications depends on intimately understanding your audiences. What do they currently believe about you? How do they get their information? And more than any other subspecialty, internal communicators are experts at understanding who needs to hear what when. Fundamentally, that’s the whole art of communications—not just of internal communications—which is why I believe that the next generation of Chief Communications Officers will be those who came up in internal comms.
Here are a few advantages internal comms pros have as they climb the ranks:
1. They move fast and manage crises.
From navigating an increasingly polarized social landscape to galvanizing employees to conjuring an imagined future from thin air (startups are just stories, after all), today’s most interesting comms challenges all run through internal comms. As ex-Activision CCO
put it, an external crisis is inconvenient; an internal crisis is existential. The trials of the last five years honed internal communicators’ ability to move quickly, navigate a whole mess of stakeholders, and quickly re-right the ship in a crisis.2. They understand business strategy.
Those stakeholders I mentioned above? Often they’re not employees at all! Sometimes they’re investors or board members or social media trolls. Internal comms is now the command center for crisis response writ large. Before any comms can happen, internal communicators need to understand what the right business response is. Sometimes the response is a literal “response” in the sense of an internal email or a public-facing statement. But just as often it’s an operational outcome, like changing a trust and safety policy. This means internal communicators have to understand business strategy, not just comms strategy.
As CCOs continue to absorb more corporate functions, like marketing, HR, and impact, the ability to understand how communications ladders into broader business strategy will only become increasingly important. (This is also why I think CCOs are the next COOs, but, you know. One step at a time.)
3. They’re platform experts and community managers.
The last decade has seen a Cambrian explosion of internal communications platforms. A startup founder might talk to her team via Zoom, Slack, Gmail, Loom, Notion, Teams, and Guru (if you use Outlook you’re dead to me). But these platforms aren’t unique to internal comms. Companies are creating Slack groups for their biggest fans to offer feedback. Most of my political news this cycle came from Signal chats, WhatsApp groups, and Google docs circulated as frenetically as 90s-era chain emails. In other words, the same platforms internal communicators have become experts in are now becoming ubiquitous tools for information-sharing writ large.
The same platforms internal communicators have become experts in are now becoming ubiquitous tools for information-sharing writ large.
Internal communicators have also spent a lot of time thinking about how to cultivate community over the last few years. That’s important because communication is no longer a one-way transfer from a cable news studio to viewers. People want a two-way dialogue—to respond and be responded to. So much of good internal comms is understanding how to set up a productive community, with all the cultural norms and default settings that go into making it work. As even “external” comms becomes more dynamic, internal communicators are the ones who know how to invite conversation without descending into a free for all.
Fundamentally, the job of the communicator is to understand what the right business approach is, align people around a response, and figure out how to communicate that to the right people. That’s the asylum internal communicators were raised in. Business doesn’t operate along an internal/external divide, and neither will the next generation of communications leaders.