Can communications professionals drive major business decisions?

It’s not uncommon for communications professionals to feel that their role within a company, while important, does not allow them to truly impact the company’s business direction. In other words, communications professionals often don’t believe that their role can have a major impact on the fundamental business decisions being made at the highest level.

In a number of ways, however, the input of communications professionals, or situations handled by them, does have a major impact on the company’s decision-making process, directly translating into changes to the company’s core plans, strategies and execution in the executive suite.

It is easy to see how crisis management situations connect communications professionals to decisions made in the board room. With the recent BP oil spill, for example, handling the crisis required the company’s PR team to work directly with executives to determine how to improve the public’s understanding and perception of the events that unfolded. 

Crisis management, however, is reactive in nature. Communications professionals, therefore, can hardly take the credit for shaping or establishing a new direction for the company. It’s the crisis that instigated the changes.

Crisis management’s often-ignored 'cousin' - crisis prevention - can have the same kind of impact as crisis management but with the added benefit that it can help to avoid the agony that comes with a messy crisis. Proactive in nature, holistic crisis prevention viewed from a business as well as a communications perspective is an opportunity for communications professionals to impact the organisation at its core.  

Years ago, an Asian company was being harassed by aggressive NGOs for facilitating the sale of controversial products through its online commerce platform. While the products were being sold legally, the harvest of these products was often conducted in illegal ways.

The company, which drew a certain amount of revenue from the sale of these products, was clearly not responsible for their illegal harvesting and was not legally responsible for checking how the products were harvested, so it was reluctant to discontinue the sale of the products.

With the help of its public relations agency, however, the company’s communications team was able to make a very strong case to the executive team that the continued sale of the items could be very damaging and costly. The team mapped out potential crisis situations, drew multiple scenarios and made specific cost-estimates of the potential impact on the company’s business as a whole.

The communications team did such a good job of presenting the potential significant reputation risk of the continued sale of the controversial products that the decision was made to suspend their sale immediately. In the end, the company judged that it could afford to lose a little bit of money but that it could not afford to lose its reputation.

With the help of its public relations agency, the communications team had made a meaningful impact on the company’s decisions and had managed to shape - arguably, for the better - its business direction.