BIG companies rarely collapse because their product was poor. They collapse because their reputation was poor. That much is not in dispute. The trouble starts when Heads of Corporate Affairs keep speaking the language of press coverage while the board wants to hear the language of profit, loss and risk. That is where the gap begins. The board sees corporate affairs as a tool for protecting business value, on the same footing as finance, legal or risk audit.
Figures from the Institute of Directors (IoD) and the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) in the United Kingdom, in their 2022 report on strategic planning and crisis preparedness, point to something serious. In four of the past five years, the under-representation of Public Relations professionals at board level has remained among the top five challenges facing the profession. That is not bad luck. It is the outcome of how the profession presents itself to directors. Anyone who walks into the boardroom with a good story alone, without numbers to back it up, walks out empty-handed.
That same report, recently referenced by AMEC, the global body for communication measurement and evaluation, makes one core point: communications teams that use boardroom vocabulary, words like “objectives,” “outcomes” and “business results”, find it far easier to earn a seat at the table. The board does not want to know how many newspapers ran a story. It wants to know how much sales grew after a given campaign.
A company’s reputation is an asset, not a feeling. The “PR in the Boardroom” report by Ambitious PR, citing the World Economic Forum (WEF), states that a quarter of a company’s market value is directly tied to its reputation. Another study by Apex Global Learning cited in the same report shows that every extra star in online customer reviews lifts revenue by five to nine percent, with an eighteen percent revenue gap between businesses rated three stars and those rated five. Those are not figures a boardroom can afford to dismiss.
The risk of getting this wrong is real. HSBC was fined in the United Kingdom after its adverts were found to be misleading about its contribution to fighting climate change, while omitting other material facts about its own investments. That is the risk of “greenwashing”, dressing up in fine language without matching action. The board does not want fine language, it wants evidence. A company that makes a public promise must be ready to show conduct that matches that promise, or regulatory penalties and reputational damage will follow together.
On measurement, AMEC‘s Integrated Evaluation Framework offers language the board already understands from other parts of the business: inputs, outputs, outtakes, outcomes and impact. This framework allows a Head of Corporate Affairs to stand at the table and say, for example, that a given campaign cut customer complaints by a specific percentage, or lifted investor confidence by a specific margin. That is the language heard in a boardroom, not the count of social media “likes.”
Crisis preparedness matters just as much. Ambitious PR’s report insists that a crisis plan must be part of the board’s risk plan from the outset, not a briefing delivered after the fire has already started. Companies without such a plan find themselves fielding journalists’ questions while still unsure themselves of what actually happened.
There is another lesson, even though it does not come from the PR industry directly. A design leader in the United States, Leonardo De La Rocha, rewrites the CEO’s update every Monday into language his team of thirty people can understand. He says the gap between what the board knows and what the team feels is exactly what breeds rumor and anxiety at work. That is precisely the job of a Head of Corporate Affairs, translating in both directions, from the board downward and from the floor upward. A company with someone doing that work in the middle keeps its message from rotting on the way, or being warped by canteen gossip.
Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress, once said that if they don’t offer you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair. That is exactly what Heads of Corporate Affairs need to do, stop waiting for an invitation, and instead build value proven in numbers until the seat becomes rightfully theirs. No board on earth fires someone who is visibly cutting risk and growing revenue.
To plan is to choose. Those who cling to the old language of Public Relations, waiting to be handed a place without building the evidence for it, will stay outside the decision-making room forever. Those who choose data, international frameworks like AMEC’s, and the language of the board, are the ones who will occupy the front seats, and the ones who will decide the future of their companies.
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