Your CEO may rate you, but half the business has no idea what you do

The so-called seat at the table issue masks a bigger legitimacy gap for public relations within management. It's both a vertical and horizontal challenge.

A cohort on my Communications Management and Leadership course raised a familiar frustration yesterday.

You have the ear of the chief executive. You brief the board and your counsel is sought in a crisis. Then you sit down with an operations or HR director and find yourself explaining, again, why the communications function is not a newsletter or press release service.

The instinct, and mine for most of my career, is to treat this as a single problem of influence within management. In fact it’s two.

The vertical challenge

We’ve spent more than 50 years on the first problem. The Excellence Study made the case in the 1990s that public relations can operate as a management function, contributing to strategy and decision-making. The European Communication Monitor has tracked the same ground for the past two decades.

The evidence also explains why the potential often goes unfulfilled. Management views the function as a business service. The test is participation. Practitioners contribute to strategy when they deliver insight to management and are in the room when decisions take shape.

A German study of consulting relationships in 2025 provides primary evidence. Interviews with 30 senior consultants and 30 chief communications officers found no shared understanding of what communications consulting is, and no consistent definition of quality in the advisory relationship.

Law, accountancy and management consultancy spent decades building that infrastructure. Public relations is a long way behind. It’s hard to be recognised as an adviser when there is no shared standard for judging the advice.

The horizontal challenge

The second problem is the one the cohort recognised immediately.

A Swedish study of more than 6,000 employees in 11 large organisations in 2017 found that 90% regarded communication as an increasingly important success factor, but only 42% said the task of the communications team in their organisation was clear.

A German study published this year of more than 1,000 employees went further by splitting management into two tiers. 97% of top executives claimed to know what the communications function does, and 80% knew its objectives. Among middle managers the figures fall to 80% and 58%.

The researchers describe a horizontal legitimacy gap. The C-suite broadly understands and values the function, but the managers who run business units and control budgets are sceptical.

It’s a strategic miss because these are the managers who lead the functions communications works alongside: marketing, HR, finance, legal and operations. They are the customers for the function’s work and competitors for parts of its remit.

Recognition doesn’t travel

The vertical management case is made through alignment with organisational objectives and measurement interpreted in terms that a board can understand. Access to the people who decide does the rest.

The horizontal case is made function by function and manager-by-manager, on their terms. Show operations the external issue spotted before it disrupts the schedule. Show HR the employee understanding that change programmes depend on.

A communications director who succeeds only at the first builds a function with executive air cover and no operational roots.

There is a deeper reading from my doctoral research. The sociology of professions describes occupations competing for jurisdiction over contested work. Public relations shares its territory with marketing, HR, legal and investor relations. Influence with those functions is boundary work.

Settlements are always provisional. A new chief executive, a restructure or a budget round reopens the question.

That’s the uncomfortable answer to the cohort’s frustration. The work of recognition is never finished. The functions that hold their standing keep re-making the case.

We’ve announced dates for the Communications Management and Leadership course in September, October and November. The vertical and horizontal recognition challenge are the types of issues we tackle.

Further reading

This article was originally posted on my Substack. The Wadds Inc. newsletter is read by more than 5,500 communications and public relations practitioners. We take a slower, critical perspective on the research, evidence and developments shaping the field.