3 Hard Lessons I Wish I’d Learned Sooner About Corporate Comms
TL;DR
The biggest adjustment in moving into corporate communications usually isn’t learning the business. It’s learning to think differently about communication itself.
Change in Career. Change in Mindset.
Like many internal communication professionals, I didn’t grow up dreaming of a career in corporate communications. Mostly because I didn’t know corporate communications existed until my first “grown-up” job in publishing.
And by publishing, I mean the truly glamorous life of being a story assistant for three kitchen and bath magazines. This meant I quickly became familiar with things like banquettes and the apparently life-changing difference between nickel and polished nickel faucet hardware. Very Devil Wears Prada, if Miranda Priestley had strong opinions about backsplashes.
Somewhere between digging through photo archives for the perfect breakfast nook and crafting captions about marble countertops, I became aware of a mysterious internal team whose job was communicating with employees. Fascinating.
Years later, when I transitioned into my first corporate communications role as a copywriter for a financial services company, I realized something pretty quickly: yes, the writing and communication skills transferred. The mindset did not. At least not entirely.
Here are three lessons I wish I would have learned sooner.
1) You Can’t Think Content-First Anymore
A recent conversation with someone transitioning from news media into internal communications reminded me how naturally many of us default to thinking about content creation first. We’re trained to feed the machine. Find the angle. Write the story. Publish the piece. Repeat.
And yes, content absolutely matters in IC. But content isn’t the job.
The job is helping organizations create understanding, alignment, trust, engagement, and action. That requires us to zoom out before we ever start drafting messaging.
Instead of asking, “What should we create?” we need to ask:
What business objective are we supporting?
What do employees need to know, believe, or do?
What organizational context shapes how this message will land?
What outcome are we trying to influence?
We’re not filling pages or feeding a homepage anymore. Our communication should be tied to a larger strategy and a measurable purpose. That shift in thinking took me longer to fully understand than I’d like to admit.
2) Patience Becomes Part of the Job
If you came from journalism or publishing, corporate communications can initially feel like someone replaced your sports car with a very cautious airport shuttle.
Things move slower.
Sometimes much slower.
There are approvals, stakeholder reviews, legal considerations, leadership sensitivities, competing priorities, and approximately 57 people who suddenly feel they need to be consulted about a two-sentence announcement.
In media environments, speed is often the priority. In corporate communications, alignment usually is.
That doesn’t mean bureaucracy is always helpful. It definitely isn’t. But organizations are ecosystems, not newsrooms. Communication decisions can impact culture, employee trust, operations, leadership credibility, engagement, and business outcomes. We’re rarely operating independently.
Learning patience, systems thinking, and how to navigate competing priorities became just as important as learning how to write a strong message.
3) Start With the Audience. Always.
This sounds obvious until you realize how often organizations communicate based on what leaders want to say instead of what employees actually need.
The best comms pros I know pay close attention to how employees actually experience work. What are their routines? What pressures are they under? What motivates them? What competes for their attention? What matters to them?
One of the most useful things I borrowed from publishing was audience personas. Thinking deeply about who we’re trying to reach changes the quality of communication dramatically.
Because employees don’t experience communication in a vacuum. They experience it while multitasking through meetings, juggling deadlines, responding to Teams notifications, and reheating the same cup of coffee for the third time.
If we don’t understand the audience context surrounding the message, the message itself usually won’t land.
The REal Shift
The transition into corporate communications isn’t just about learning a new industry or organizational structure. It’s about shifting from a content production mindset to a strategic communication mindset.
That was the harder lesson.
The polished nickel faucet expertise, surprisingly, came much faster.
