In recent weeks, I’ve watched something shift in how the largest companies think about their communications functions: Not a new tool, not a new title, but a fundamental rethinking of how the work actually gets done. Corporate communications leaders are increasingly involved in shaping business decisions, not just authoring statements defending them.
Ask most modern CCOs, and they’ll tell you that traditional media relations — once what the function was known for — is now a small part of the job. The larger piece is enterprise impact: Monitoring, assessing and evaluating how external stakeholders and developments will impact the broader health of the business and its ability to deliver results.
That’s a meaningful change from where this function sat a decade ago, but most org charts haven’t caught up. Many communications functions are still designed around vertical ownership: Corporate comms owns the broad-based external narrative, public affairs owns the narrative to global policymakers, brand communications owns the narrative to customers, employee comms owns the internal story and investor relations owns the financial message. Each team is good at its job, and each optimizes for its own lane.
Unfortunately, in our current era, that’s precisely the problem. Again, modern CCOs will tell you that most enterprise developments no longer land neatly in these different lanes. A restructuring hits Wall Street, the workforce and the media simultaneously. A product recall is a regulatory, customer, employee and brand question simultaneously. In an environment where everyone is media, the gaps in a public narrative become clear more quickly.
A different world demands a different architecture, and the most effective enterprises have figured out something crucial: The modern communications team must organize around the work, not just the function. In my work helping communications teams navigate restructuring, I’ve found that companies do best when they define their work as workflows, via a practice of horizontal collaboration. In this model, the communications function ceases to be a series of parallel tracks and becomes a single operating layer. Corporate comms, employee comms, investor relations, legal and government affairs work together toward a common end goal. The leader serves as the orchestra conductor, navigating what is quiet, what is loud and what is in harmony in real time as essential decisions are made.
A critical structural component of this horizontal shift is the rise of what I call “strong COEs,” short for “centers of excellence.” In the past, a COE might have been a handful of people making tools or templates. Today, they are dynamic hubs designed to scale complex activities like crisis management, employee communications, media relations and creative work. Driven by the extreme volatility and lack of predictability in the external environment, companies are increasingly redirecting resources from decentralized business unit teams to centralized COEs to avoid duplication and achieve efficiencies. It’s a highly practical move: If BU1 is quiet but BU2 is facing a massive crisis, a CCO with a strong COE can instantly pivot and redeploy specialized crisis leads to the fire. This approach not only standardizes operations and eliminates narrative gaps, but it also gives CCOs the agility to dedicate resources precisely when and where they are needed most.
In practice, moving to a workflow model requires several concrete shifts in how teams operate day to day. Decisions happen in cross-functional forums, not via sequential handoffs. This means no more throwing a draft over the fence to legal or IR and waiting days for a response. Issues are owned collectively, not routed by function. The team swarms the problem, rather than debating whose “lane” it falls into. Leaders spend time orchestrating strategy, not just approving or aligning. The CCO acts as the conductor, not editor-in-chief. Teams are deployed dynamically, not fixed permanently to specific business units. Resources flow to the highest enterprise risk or opportunity.
To see this in action, consider how a workflow model handles a sudden cybersecurity breach. In a siloed organization, the IT team alerts corporate comms, which drafts a media holding statement. Hours later, employee comms realizes they need an internal memo. The next day, customer comms scrambles to respond to panicked users, while IR fields calls from analysts. The narrative is fractured, reactive and slow.
In a workflow model, a central “crisis COE” activates immediately. A cross-functional pod comprising leads from media, employee, customer, IR and legal convenes. It develops one unified core narrative. From that single source of truth, the IR lead adapts the message for the Street, the employee lead pushes guidance to managers and the digital team monitors real-time customer sentiment to adjust the external tone. The work happens concurrently, not sequentially. The enterprise speaks with one voice, at the speed of the crisis.
For a CCO, leadership in this context is less about owning the message and more about owning the process by which the message gets made. It requires knowing which colleagues to bring in before a decision is made and how to keep the work advancing without roadblocks or confusion. The skill required is as much coordination as it is traditional communications.
The communications leaders I know who have made this transition share a few common traits. For one, they’ve stopped policing ownership, writing rules of engagement that say, plainly: We consult before we act, we escalate when we’re stuck, we move together and we share a common vision. For two, they’ve accepted certain bare-faced truths about the workflow model: Shared responsibility is often uncomfortable, and gray areas are real, but these are part of the process. Three, they don’t fear healthy tension: In a workflow setting, functions are forced to collaborate and challenge one another, ultimately leading to a more successful outcome.
Some CCOs have pushed back when I’ve proposed this model, saying they don’t have direct oversight over all contributors. For example, many don’t directly manage public affairs or IR, and giving up control feels like a liability. But if I’ve learned one thing in my work helping dozens of these leaders navigate the new normal, it’s that influence without authority is, in fact, the job.
Done well, a modern communications function sits at the intersection of every major decision a company makes: strategy, reputation, culture, crisis and workforce. It should be designed for horizontal coordination, not vertical control.
The silo model made sense when communications was simply a support function. It doesn’t work in the modern information era, and it certainly doesn’t work in an era where the challenges companies face in the external environment are wide-ranging and unpredictable.
Most org charts haven’t gotten that memo yet. It’s time to hand the job to a process, not just a department.
Ben Kalevitch is a Managing Director of United Minds.
This article was originally published by PR Week.
