Why your communications manager belongs at the leadership table

Last week I was in a room full of local government communications professionals from across BC, gathered for the LGMA communications forum. These are people who care deeply about their work, think carefully about their communities, and show up every day to the messy, important job of helping public institutions communicate well. Spending time with them reminded me why I do what I do and also why the conversation we keep having is about where communications belongs in an organization.

That conversation goes something like this: communications is a support function. You bring them in once the decision is made to help with the announcement. They write the news release. They post the update. They make it look good. And then everyone is surprised when something blows up.

One of the sharper observations I heard at the forum last week came from a presenter who put it plainly: communications is not a department. It is a business function. That distinction matters more than it might seem. Departments deliver services. Business functions shape how the organization operates. When you treat communications as a department, you tuck it in a corner and call it when you need something written. When you treat it as a business function, you bring it into the room where decisions are made. The way an organization communicates is inseparable from the way it operates.

Here is the thing: communications managers are not just messengers, they are one of your most important sources of early intelligence about reputation, risk, and relationships. When they are not at the leadership table, you do not just lose a skilled writer. You lose someone whose job it is to think about how decisions land before they do.

Let me walk you through what I mean.

Reputation is not something you build after a crisis. It is something you either protect or erode with every decision you make, long before the public ever hears about it. Your communications manager is the person in your organization whose job it is to think about how your community perceives you — not just today, but over time. They know what issues are simmering. They understand what the public mood is around certain topics. They can tell you, before the agenda item is ever approved, whether a proposed change is going to read as cost-cutting at the expense of residents or as a reasonable operational decision. They can tell you if your timing is off because of other issues percolating that will make your announcement land wrong. That context shapes how you make the decision, not just how you announce it.

Risk is where it gets even more concrete. Good communications managers are not making stuff up—they are doing pattern recognition. They have seen what happens when organizations announce things without context, when the framing misses the mark, when a decision that made complete sense internally looks completely different from the outside. That skill is wasted if you only involve them after the fact.

Here is a scenario that will sound familiar to many people in this field. A municipality decides to consolidate two community programs to reduce costs. The decision is sound. The programs overlap, the savings are real, and staff have done the analysis. Communications is brought in the day before the announcement and asked to write the news release. The release goes out. The phones start ringing. A resident group that depends on one of the programs feels blindsided. A councillor gets an earful at the grocery store. The story runs on the local news with the frame “town cuts services.” What the communications manager would have told you, had they been in the room three weeks earlier: there is a vocal and organized group connected to one of these programs, the timing is sensitive because of an upcoming budget vote, and we need a community notification and engagement window before we go public. Not to change the decision but to land it properly.

Relationships are the third leg of the stool, and in local government, they are everything. Your communications manager understands your community’s history, tensions, advocates, critics, people who show up at every public meeting, and the people who never do but are watching closely. Decisions land differently depending on that context, and someone needs to be carrying that knowledge into your leadership conversations. That someone is your communications manager.

So what does it actually look like to integrate communications into decision-making rather than just into announcement-making? It means your communications manager attends senior leadership meetings, not just the debrief after. It means they are on distribution for briefing notes early enough to provide input, not just for final approval. It means when a new project, policy, or operational change is on the table, someone in the room asks: have we looped in communications? It means building a short communications impact question into your decision-making framework, the same way you build in a financial or legal lens. And it means your CAO or director trusts their communications manager enough to hear “I am not sure this is landing the way we think it is” as useful intelligence rather than an obstacle.

None of this requires more budget. It requires a shift in where communications sits in the conversation, and when.

The professionals I sat with last week at the LGMA forum are more than capable of doing this work. Many of them are already doing it, in organizations that understand the value they bring. But too many are still being handed decisions and asked to figure out how to make them palatable. That is the wrong model, and it costs more than you think.

Five things you can do right now

1. If your communications manager is not in the room when major decisions are made, start there. They do not need to make the decision but they need to be part of the conversation before it is made.
2. The next time you are considering a significant operational change, ask your communications team: how do you think this will land? Then actually listen to the answer.
3. Add a communications lens to your decision-making process. A single question: “have we thought through how this will be perceived?” is enough to catch a lot before it becomes a problem.
4. Stop treating communications as the last step. If the first time your communicator hears about something is when you are asking for a news release, you have waited too long. Good communications can not fix a bad decision.
5. Look at where your organization has had public communications go sideways in the last few years. In most cases, you will find that communications was not involved early enough. That pattern is fixable.