Shape your Comms Team Leadership Brand

Communications professionals spend their working lives shaping how others see an organisation. Far fewer apply the same discipline to how the organisation sees them.

This has real consequences for the team. When the business thinks of Comms as the people who produce documents and send emails, that is what it asks you for, and usually at the last minute. When leaders see you as advisors, they bring you in earlier, while decisions are still being shaped and your input can make a difference.

What a leadership brand is

A leadership brand is not self-promotion. It is how clearly and confidently you communicate who you are, what you do and why it matters, and how consistently others experience that value in your work. For a team, it is the shared identity and reputation the function holds across the business: what people expect from you, what they come to you for, and how much weight they give your advice.

Every Comms team already has a brand. It either forms by default, through the volume of requests you fulfil, or by design.

Why it matters for Comms

To guide the organisation’s communication, the team needs to be seen as leaders with judgement worth seeking out. Without that standing, even excellent work tends to be treated as delivery.

A shared leadership brand creates alignment across the team in three areas:

• The value we bring: how narrative, strategy, commercial performance, reputation and culture are shaped through our work, and what that means for the business.

• Our ways of working: the standards and boundaries we hold, the work we prioritise, and the relationships we build across functions.

• How we show up: how team members present themselves, contribute in meetings and relate to stakeholders.

Where to start

Communicators understand the audience’s “what’s in it for me” intuitively. Communicating from here is your professional strength, so turn it on your own team. Start with three questions:

1.     What do we want to be known for as a leadership group?

2.     How do we want stakeholders to experience our function?

3.     Where do we add the greatest strategic value to leadership conversations?

Then turn the answers into a simple statement of who you are, what you do and why it matters, in the language of the people you advise. Use it consistently: in ELT updates, planning sessions, on the intranet and in how you introduce yourselves.

Finally, test your current habits against it. Decide what to stop, what to elevate and where to focus. Small, consistent signals, such as how you respond to a request or contribute in a meeting, shape how others see your team more than any single piece of work.

One question to take back to your team this week: What value do you want the executive and board to associate with your team’s judgement?