COMMUNICATIONS TEAM AUTHORITY INDEX

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Name* This field is required.
First Name
Last Name
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Email* This field is required.
example@example.com
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Company* This field is required.
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If your team asks questions behind a request, like "what's the purpose of this," what happens?* This field is required.
There's rarely a real answer, or at least not one that makes sense. Your team gets redirected to just produce the communication.
Your team gets an answer, but it's about the message, why this framing, this channel, not about the decision behind it.
Your team gets real context on the decision, and it shapes how they approach the work, sometimes enough to suggest a different approach.
Your team doesn't need to ask. They helped build the reasoning in the first place.
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When does your team typically find out about a major decision that will need communication?* This field is required.
After it's made, when it's time to tell people. Sometimes, only after word has already spread and your team is retaking control of the narrative or doing damage control.
After it's made, when your team is brought in to help with phrasing, logistics, audiences, channel, and sequencing so it lands as intended with the people who matter.
While it's being finalized, in time to push back or adjust something if it's off. Though sometimes that's met with irritation at the delay, or the sense that your team is making it too complicated.
At the start, before the decision has taken shape, because your team is asked to weigh in as a party with an important point of view in how the decision gets made.
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Where does your team sit relative to the executive team?* This field is required.
Buried several layers down, at least four layers between the comms leader and the CEO. Or split across departments: internal comms under someone who reports to the CHRO, PR under someone who reports to the CMO, executive comms not a solidified function and largely handled by EAs, and so on.
Reporting into a function that doesn't have a skillset or competency in communications.
Close to leadership, consulted often on big things, but not a standing seat at the executive table.
In the room by default. Reporting lines and structure exist because leadership expects your team there for major decisions.
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How does your organization measure the value of your team's work?* This field is required.
Mostly by output: did the announcement go out, did the new employee app launch, did the event happen.
By how well something landed: tone, reception, engagement with the message, likes, shares, etc.
By outcomes: did the message actually move the behavior or decision it was meant to move.
Partly by the outcomes, and partly by what didn't happen: the crisis that never escalated, the reputational hit avoided because your team was in the room early.
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When legal and finance are in a room weighing risk on something sensitive, is your team there too?* This field is required.
No. Your team hears about it once there's a message that needs to go out, and there's no room to negotiate.
Sometimes, if the messaging side of it is complicated enough to need your team early, and to negotiate the message with them, particularly legal.
Usually, if the topic is big enough to warrant it.
Always. Your team's input is required in that room, the same as legal's or finance's, and others.
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Your team has a seat at the table. Does a decision ever go differently because of what they say?* This field is required.
Your team doesn't have a seat in those conversations yet.
Your team has a seat sometimes, mostly to explain a decision after it's been made by people a few levels higher in the organization.
Your team has a seat and gets heard, but the decision was mostly formed before they got there. Adjustments happen by consensus when you raise a flag. You need buy-in from others that it's a big enough thing to adjust, so you pick your moments.
Your team has a seat, and more than once, a decision has gone differently because of what your team has said.
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Could your team explain how the company actually makes money and how leadership measures whether the business is winning this quarter or year, without asking for it to be explained to them first?* This field is required.
Not really. That's not something your team tracks.
Loosely. Your team knows the basics, revenue drivers, the general shape of the quarter. They need to know this so they can update the employees, investors, or other stakeholders.
Yes, and your team uses it to make the case for what comms should prioritize.
Yes, fluently, and it's part of why your team is in the room. It's built into how they show up in front of leadership.
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When you think about getting broader scope, more influence, or a different reporting line for your team, what's the honest answer?* This field is required.
That topic is a landmine. Your team knows it won't be welcome, so nobody asks. Or they've asked and gotten a hard no.
It's been discussed informally. Ideas have been floated, including ones your team believes are the right path forward, but nothing's changed. The answer has mostly been "no" or "not now," and the sense, spoken or not, is that it isn't a priority.
It's gotten incrementally better: more visibility, a seat on a specific initiative. Progress is happening, just not as fast or as thoroughly as your team would like.
Your team has the structure it needs: standing to advocate for budget and staff, a case that's been built and validated, the same as peers in HR, finance, and marketing. Your team isn't treated any differently from those functions.
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How much of your team's work is self-identified as a business priority, versus reactive to other people's requests?* This field is required.
Rarely proactive. Work comes almost entirely as inbound requests from other business areas. Your team can sometimes anticipate requests based on prior work, but rarely plans for the details or coordinates in advance.
Sometimes proactive, sometimes reactive, in roughly equal measure. Your team identifies some communications needs on its own and handles just as many requests reactively.
More often proactive than reactive, though there active work is still a good volume. Even when your team knows something is coming, it doesn't always know the details early enough to prepare, and you're still working to educate other business areas on when and how to involve you in advance.
The vast majority of the work is proactive. Your team knows what's coming and is ready for it, aligned with the executive team on the priorities for the business area.
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How much ability does your team have to decline other people's requests?* This field is required.
Basically none, and not much room to redirect either. Requests come fully formed, and your team's job is to execute them as given.
Your team doesn't decline the request to communicate, but there's real room to redirect the tactic: channel, timing, format, sequencing. That's most of the job at this level.
Your team can decline or redirect a request now and then, but it takes justification and isn't guaranteed. It depends on who's asking and how big the ask is.
Your team has real authority to decline requests that don't serve a business priority, and executives back that call.
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Quiz Score
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