Lee Cain, who served as Boris Johnson’s communications chief for 18 months, recently recalled that an audit of the government’s communications operation revealed thousands more staff than previously thought.

Speaking on The Independent’s In the Room podcast, Cain said that, having been told that 4,000 people worked in government comms, the audit uncovered closer to 8,000.

While recollections may differ – I’ve been told that the differential was around 1,000 – Cain had stumbled upon an issue many corporate affairs directors will recognise. Welcome to the world of shadow comms.

It is particularly evident in organisations that have grown through mergers, where the acquired companies quietly retain some (or all) of their comms teams to ensure their story is not overlooked or misrepresented.

Or when a business unit feels their needs are not being met by the central function. Sometimes it is the remnant of a business strategy, in which each unit was empowered to run its own comms – without a cohesive, overarching narrative – resulting in a mismatch of agendas.

I heard recently of a senior business head asking his EA to write a few ‘releases’ promoting his interests. She soon delegated that task to a new recruit, and shortly thereafter hired a team (and agencies) to do ‘comms’ for the department, of which she became head.

And one director of communications was surprised to find an applicant making much of their experience in comms at a previous organisation. He knew that organisation well, having also served as its director of comms. But he’d never heard of the applicant.

When Ed Petter (now of the parish of Haleon) arrived as group director of corporate affairs at BT in November 2016, he discovered that communications activity was scattered across the business. Roughly one third sat within the central function, a third were embedded in business units but did not report into comms, while the remainder occupied various corners of the organisation.

Collectively, they had issued 378 press releases in the previous 12 months. (Imagine being the poor hack dealing with that inbox!)

Given the scale of BT’s then challenges, Petter believed it necessary to create a single team with a ‘unity of purpose’, some of whom were then deployed within business units, albeit singing from the same hymn sheet.

Petter’s experience suggests that the problem with shadow comms is not that people are communicating. It is that they may be communicating to different objectives.

But he was only able to tackle this issue because he had a mandate from the CEO to shape the function as he saw fit. That distinction matters more than it appears. Those corporate affairs directors I have interviewed who have successfully consolidated a scattered function also had the backing of their CEO, who understood the value of good communications.

And therein lies another difficulty, and one that Cain also ran into. He proposed making the operation more efficient but was told it was not that simple. Most of those communicators were not his to command or to cut. They worked for somebody else.

But how do you tackle that? It’s a question I’ve often asked corporate affairs directors. For some, it is about using the ‘strength in numbers’ case. Too often, shadow comms is a one-person band supporting a business unit across all its needs.

Sometimes, they have prior comms experience. Sometimes they don’t. But what they likely do not have is a helicopter view of the communications landscape, or the ability to challenge a boss who believes they warrant a Lunch with the Financial Times style profile.

Joining the ‘mother ship’ offers support, cover (in the event something goes wrong) and, if needed, professional development. And the business unit (if not the egotistical boss) feels it is being given appropriate recognition.

For others, it is about hard economics. The task of proving the value of communications is already complex, but in an organisation where the function has many masters, it becomes nigh on impossible. Identifying agencies with identical mandates or maverick communicators with different agendas from that of the corporate line will make the finance department happy. It also provides a defensible account of what the organisation spends on communications, and what it gets back.

Yet eliminating shadow comms altogether may not be possible or, indeed, desirable. Increasingly, employees are building personal brands on LinkedIn - often to the benefit of their bosses. Business units want direct access to stakeholders. And executives are communicating in their own right (and, in some cases, really enjoying doing so. Some decentralisation may be inevitable. The trick is not controlling every communicator. It is to lean into the situation and to make sure that everybody knows the story they should be telling.

Let me introduce myself

One of the pieces of advice that ‘newsletter gurus’ – yes, they do exist – offer is for newsletter authors to regularly introduce themselves, so that new subscribers feel welcome and know what to expect. I haven’t done that because it feels a bit, er, weird. ‘Hi, I’m Helen, and I’ll be writing today’s bumper edition. My ambition in life is to achieve world peace. Or at least to watch The Pitt.’

But I do think it is a discipline that could serve corporate affairs departments well. I recently had lunch with an old friend who heads up corporate affairs at a FTSE 100 company. Her team had just completed a round of ‘here’s who we are, and here’s what we can do for you’ sessions with different departments across the organisation.

It’s no good complaining that you’re viewed as the press release people, or the ones who advance the slides in a Teams meeting, if you haven’t taken the trouble to explain what corporate affairs can offer beyond that.  

But introducing yourself gets you one meeting. Demonstrating your value gets you many more. At last year’s Corporate Affairs Summit, Safina Mirza, group director of communications at Canary Wharf Group, explained how she built the function from a standing start when she joined in 2022.

She didn’t embark on a roadshow within the group. Instead, she worked out who ran each part of the business, learned what they were measured on, and then reported back in terms that showed how her team’s work had helped them achieve their objectives, from sales targets to wider business goals.

And every Friday, Safina writes an email to her management committee detailing what her team has achieved that week and what they plan to focus on the following one. Notably, she writes it herself rather than delegating the task.

Forget the seat at the proverbial table… there are multiple tables across an organisation at which corporate affairs can have an impact. But nobody pulls out a chair for a function they don’t understand.

Footnote: Safina’s current title is managing director, marketing and communications

Footnote two: There will be no newsletter this Friday while Helen concentrates on her second ambition. World peace may take a little longer.

Book for this year’s Corporate Affairs Summit

Seeing as I have brought it up, this year’s Corporate Affairs Summit takes place on 7 October and the agenda is a good one! I can assure you… it is certainly worth the bargain ticket cost of just £125 because it is constructed with the audience front of mind.

I will be having a ‘fireside’ chat with Alice Macandrew, corporate affairs director at the BBC, who has promised a ‘no holding back’ conversation.

Russ Brady, director of group communications at Co-op, will be sharing the lessons learned following last year’s cyber-attack, which the retailer has said cost at least £206 million in lost revenue.

And thirty-five years after ‘Doing a Ratner’ entered the communicators’ lexicon, Gerald Ratner will be sharing his memories of that fateful speech to the Institute of Directors.

We’ll be looking at the corporate affairs function of the future, talking to in-house practitioners who have restructured in recent times. We will also consider what the next wave of AI deployment might look like for corporate affairs, plus the thorny issue of misinformation and disinformation.

Plus plenty more besides.

Only open to senior in-house communicators, as always. Book here.