Building a collaborative executive comms strategy

A smart executive communications strategy can be the difference between chaos in a crisis and grounded trust. It’s an internal communicator’s job to have the processes and steps in place to help leaders hit the right notes when it’s their opportunity to speak.

At Ragan’s Employee Communication and Culture Conference earlier this year, Melissa Moody, director of corporate communications at Merck, said that the most effective leadership comms structures allow comms pros to advise leaders on the situation and how to talk about it.

“Executives sit at the top,” Moody said. “But they expect us to have the bird’s-eye view and help them connect the dots.”

Moody said that before 2023, Merck didn’t have a well-defined executive comms strategy in place. This led to situations in which individual executives were working independently with communicators without a centralized approach that focused on the business.

“We had individual people working with individual executives in silos, not connecting with each other,” she told the audience. “And the executives didn’t really know what the others were saying either. It was clear we needed a strategy to bring everyone together.”