Has Your Public Affairs Program Kept Pace with Your Growth?

A quick question for executive leaders: Has your public affairs program kept pace with your organization's growth?

One pattern I've observed over the years is that organizations often evolve faster than their government affairs and communications functions.

As organizations grow, they add new markets, new stakeholders, new business lines, and new strategic priorities. The external environment becomes more complex, the internal requests for expertise multiply, and expectations for public affairs increase accordingly.

Yet the structure, resources, and strategy supporting the function often remain largely unchanged – rising or falling slightly with the overall company budget targets for the year.

Importantly, this is rarely a reflection of the people doing the work.

In my experience, public affairs teams consistently find ways to exceed expectations despite growing demands and competing priorities. The question is usually not whether the team is capable. The better question is whether the organization has evolved the function to match its current needs and future ambitions.

About a year into a previous role leading a large public affairs portfolio, the AVP and I embarked on a comprehensive and thoughtful assessment of our communications department. Although performance across key metrics was very good, if not excellent, it was clear that there were opportunities being left on the table, and, more importantly, staff was feeling the impact of increased workload, shortened deadlines, and overall capacity-constrained environment. 

The finding: the answer was much more complicated than hiring a stable of new FTEs. We realigned strategic priorities, reassigned responsibilities, added managerial paths for high performing staff, and, yes, made a strong case to our CFO that we needed to adjust headcount to match the growth of the organization. In the end, performance improved, staffing stabilized, and we developed a plan that was sustainable and adjustable going forward. We performed a similar exercise with our government affairs department the following year with similar positive results.

The bottom line is that team structure, staffing model, reporting relationships, use of external advisors, and strategic priorities that worked ten years ago may not be the right fit today.

For senior executives and board members, it is worth asking:

• Does our public affairs structure reflect where the organization is today?
• Are responsibilities aligned with our strategic priorities?
• Do our people have the resources and support they need to succeed?
• Are we positioned for the challenges and opportunities ahead?

Sometimes the most valuable exercise is not adding resources right away, but stepping back and evaluating whether the function has evolved alongside the organization it serves.