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The role of communications has changed. The expectations are higher. The margin for error is smaller.
Earning Your Seat is a podcast for communications leaders operating under changed expectations without a clear playbook.
Hosted by Dino Delic, Stephanie Lerdall, and Genevieve Brammall, the show places the hosts inside an experience many communicators recognize. Smart, capable leaders learning in real time how influence is earned, tested, and sustained.
Each episode features candid conversations with leaders across communications, data, media, and technology. Alongside those conversations, the hosts test ideas in real time, question what they have been taught, and confront where common advice breaks down under organizational pressure.
This is not aspirational thought leadership. It is a practical look at growth as it happens. How communicators earn trust, collaborate across functions, and lead with authority in a world moving faster than the role itself.
Pull up a chair. The work begins now.
Dino Delic (00:00):
This is Powered by Meltwater. Hi, I'm Dino Delic, and in the studio with me is Genevieve Brammal and Stephanie Lerdall.
Genevieve Brammall (00:22):
I'm Gen and I'm the head of PR in News Corp Australia.
Stephanie Lerdall (00:26):
Hey, I'm Stephanie Lerdall. I lead comms for Morningstar, which is an investment research firm.
Dino Delic (00:31):
For a bit of context, I've asked Genevieve and Stephanie to join me as my co-hosts. They're two communications professionals at different stages of their career, and I know they're going to learn a lot about themselves from these industry experts I'm putting in front of them because I have an underlying motive. This is part podcast, part experiment, and part comms bootcamp. This is Earning Your Seat. In a lovely turn of events, this week's guest, Katie James, was introduced to us by last week's guest, Becky Edwards. Now, Katie specializes in upskilling communicators, which is exactly what we try to do with this podcast. So I knew we had to get her in. Through her company, Kademy, Katie has surveyed hundreds of comms leaders, and in this episode, she's sharing her findings, including the capability gaps and career traps comms leaders find themselves in. Along the way, Katie, Gen, Steph, and I share real world examples, practical frameworks, and a few honest reflections on the challenges communicators face in staying strategic in a rapidly changing environment.
Katie James (01:39):
Being able to proactively go to the business and advise is what kind of is sets apart our high performing teams from maybe more of a tactical team where it's all about reacting to what is given to you.
Dino Delic (01:54):
Whether you're leading a comms team or trying to grow your influence within your organization, I believe our conversation offers a thoughtful look at where the profession is headed and how we can prepare for what's next. Let's get into it. Your team at Kademy Group has a pretty extensive curriculum, all these workshops and all these best practices. So I'm curious about when you work with major brands, what are the critical skills that you see people are most hungry for? The ones that are least present and also the ones that you also feel like make the biggest difference. I know that's probably like five questions in one, but Ivan, wherever you want.
Katie James (02:36):
So I've been working with corporate comms teams for a number of years, and I feel like for many, many years now we've talked about how do we professionalize the function? How do we become more strategic advisors? How do we get a seat at the table? And we really started Kademy with that underpinning all of the training and the work that we do with them, how do we help comms teams to really make that shift from audit takers, tacticians through to more of that strategic advisory? So that underpins a lot of the training that we do. And Dino mentioned the skills assessment that we run. We've had thousands of communicators take in the last few years. And it's really interesting looking at those results because I think it kind of amplifies what we're hearing in those conversations, which is that a lot of those traditional skills, content creation, that kind of thing, we're very confident in.
(03:30):
And you can see in the results that people are generally quite skilled in those areas. And it's probably more of the skills around business acumen and measuring and showing impact. And then also some of those influencing skills. So more of the interpersonal, being able to push back and guide and advise rather than being the person that gets the project right at the end when everyone's already had those strategic conversations. So I think a lot of what I'm focusing on in conversations with clients is around that piece. What are all the skills that we need to be able to have more of that influencing advisor role with our stakeholders?
Dino Delic (04:11):
I've been speaking a lot lately with the USC Center for PR, because we're doing some collaborations with them. And what's interesting to me is that the place, the center, which is basically trying to do collaborations and partnerships with industry to get funding for the program. And they put out the global communications report every year. They do the global relevance report and then they do collaborations. But the leader of the center is Fred Cook, former CEO of Golan. He's not a young man, let's put it that way. So he comes from a certain era. And it is interesting what you just said there, one of the skills that you focus on is business acumen. And my personal observation, and this is a broad sweeping statement, so it's a generalization. It's not really very accurate. But as I've worked with big companies, I noticed that the bigger the company, the more that comms just focuses on doing comps, the less that they focused on the business.
(05:13):
And sometimes that's a good thing, right? Because you've got this massive operation you've got, like in Stephanie's case, huge team. And so your job is to be the communications experts. But what I've found is that somewhere along the line, people lose sight of the North Star. And I asked Fred, because he's teaching a class, he wants to teach AI in PR next semester with us and Microsoft as a collaboration. I was like, out of curiosity, how does business show up in this curriculum?
Stephanie Lerdall (05:40):
Business acumen. I used to subscribe to this idea that that's what I need. I'm sure I need that because I'm a comms person. I don't know numbers or whatever. But even still, I sometimes hear criticism that the CCO is missing more business acumen or what do you really need? Because at that level, I know how the company works. I know how we make money. What is a sign that the comms team is missing business acumen?
Katie James (06:09):
I think if the leaders aren't coming to the comms team for that advice and influencing, then I think part of that could be around business acumen. It was interesting. I was speaking to the leader of a large pharmaceutical company the other day and we were talking about, is it business acumen? He actually said he felt like it was geopolitical acumen that his team needs. And that's the real thing that he wants from his team at the moment. And what he said he meant by that was that we need our team to be able to understand the business, understand how we make money so that when they go into conversations with stakeholders of the business, that they are able to ... You don't need to have a finance degree, but you need to be able to understand what people are talking about and be able to be part of that conversation.
(06:52):
It needs to go beyond just understanding what's going on in your business now because we're operating in such a fast-paced environment, there's so much going on, it's quite volatile that you need to be understanding how your business sits in the landscape that you're operating in the external environment you're operating in so that when stakeholders come to you and say, "We need you to do this project because there's this thing going on, " you need to be able to say, "I noticed this in the news or I anticipate that something might happen and therefore I'm coming to you already with a proactive plan." And I think it's the same in your maturity model, Dina, that you were sharing with me before, that that proactivity, so being able to proactively go to the business and advise is what kind of is sets apart our high performing teams from maybe more of a tactical team where it's all about reacting to what is given to you.
Dino Delic (07:48):
This passage actually reminds me of something very important. Why do we want to be data-driven and what data should drive us? Sometimes people are fixated on adopting best practices or being as good as their competition or their peers when really what we should be doing with this data or which data should be driving us is the internal needs of the business. Every team has different needs and every business has different needs of their communications team. So I use this as a reminder for everyone, try to understand what your business needs from you versus just trying to figure out how you can be as good as the competition, because sometimes the skillsets and the capabilities of a different communications team is not going to be necessary in your company.
Genevieve Brammall (08:29):
I feel exactly the same. I think in our business, the shift that I've noticed for myself has been when I've been invited to come to help problem solve, where no one's seeking a communication solution necessarily, but gathering the best minds in the business from a range of different departments to approach the problem solving from whatever perspective you bring to the table. And for me, that means a deep connectedness with the customer and the way that they're interacting with media, which is our product. And so I'm able to bring that lens from what the customer might be doing in an external space and applying it to the way that we operate internally, connecting the dots to try to contribute some thinking around how we might do things differently. And that doesn't necessarily ever relate to any output from me, particularly. It's not about the press release or the angle or the message or the comms approach, but within it, when we land on whatever the solution might be, and there may be 10 things that we take out of the meeting that are action points.
(09:41):
Ultimately, there will be communications somewhere in that mix and to have been able to influence those outcomes, even the ones that don't relate to my area means that there's this holistic view and that the company knows that they've had the brightest minds at the table helping shape the way forward. So I think the challenge is trying to work out if you don't yet have that invitation to come and join that meeting, what are the steps that we need to take as leaders in business and comms leadership roles to earn that seat, to earn the invitation, to get people to understand that you're a dot connector because that is to me feels like the gap.
Dino Delic (10:22):
In the first part of our conversation, we talked about a growing capability gap in communication. While many teams are highly skilled at creating content and managing channels, there's a glaring lack of business acumen in our teams. It's business acumen, Katie tells us, that elevates someone from being a worker to a leader. And then Steph asks a great question, "How would you even know if you're missing business acumen?" Surely you'd have to somehow know if you were already at the top. And the answer, if the higher ups aren't coming to you for advice, then you simply don't have it. In the next section, we discuss how to be a well-rounded communicator and what it can mean to you and your team. We also talk about the so- called managerial trap and how the simple act of asking better questions can change the role communications plays inside an organization.
Stephanie Lerdall (11:13):
Actually, as you were talking, Gen, I think I'm going to set some markers of success as you're invited to a meeting and there is no output from you. They just wanted your brain and for you to be informed because they think you're influential in the company.
Katie James (11:27):
I think this is such a really powerful because we did some research recently because we were doing some stuff around change communications. And the number one trap that I heard in so many interviews, we must have done 50, 60 interviews with comms leaders. And one of the biggest traps that their comms teams were always falling into around change specifically was that they became like a default project manager for stuff. It's because they have these great connections and generally really lovely people that want to please a lot of the time and I think often end up in this default project management role where they're taking on responsibility that is not about their comms expertise, it's about managing the whole thing.
Dino Delic (12:11):
Yeah. I think about the movie Oceans 11. Everybody has their little special skill. There's the schmoozer, there's this, there's that. But at the end of the day, they all are a team and they're all trying to accomplish this goal. And I think when you say business acumen, I totally feel Stephanie's pain that I'm sort of implying is that there's so much pressure and responsibility put on a communicator's plate and then this fluffy business acumen thing, are they really enabled to do it? Are they given the time and the training? It seems like it's really just like an expectation to do way more than your job and to be on top of it. But the way that Stephanie just put it there, that you know that you've achieved it is when people come to you for advice that's not really in your lane. It's almost like there's a couple levels.
(12:58):
There's three levels, I guess, very little business acumen, meaning you struggle to really understand how your company makes money, which I think is rare, but sometimes it happens. Then there's the micro level, which is you know how business operates in your company, but then there's the macro level, understanding how business works in general, consumer trends, how media's changing and not just for the purpose of communications, but in general, how information travels and things like that. I think the more well-rounded you are, you cover all those different levels and then you can contribute a lot more to the conversation. Here's an example that came up. Last week I was at an event in Atlanta. We put on a customer event and we were talking about generative AI the whole time because we were launching our tool to help attract LLM visibility and our chief product officer was there and he's great because he's a former marketer.
(13:45):
So he was giving people a lot of advice about messaging marketing and the changing media landscape and all that sort of stuff. And then one lady during the Q&A takes the microphone and says, "How do we ensure authenticity for our brand on newer platforms, connecting with younger audiences such as TikTok, for example. We see that Apple's doing it really well. They're responding to people on TikTok now in the comments. They're getting really involved in social media." And she said, "Well, we're a law firm, so I just want to make sure, how do we do that authentically?"
Stephanie Lerdall (14:16):
I mean, maybe they're a law firm that serves 16 year olds in car crashes. Who knows?
Dino Delic (14:22):
I thought, well, hang on, you're jumping straight to, we've got to be on social media and we've got to speak to this younger audience, but a well-rounded communications person will ask a question first like, "Why would we want to do that? " Here's the struggle that maybe Katie, you and I share that people come to us for advice and help and when you tell them that maybe they skipped a previous step, I felt in that moment, the obvious question was, why would you want to copy Apple? Just because it works for someone else doesn't mean it's going to work for you. Apple didn't do that accidentally. They did it because that was their way of achieving their business outcomes. So they designed their communications with business outcomes in mind. You're designing your communications with someone else's communications in mind, and that's never going to work.
(15:11):
Might, it's a numbers game. So anyway, I threw a few things in there, but I feel like that's the business acumen that I think about, which then makes it very challenging because I feel like it's so obvious to people. When you say it, then they're almost like, "But you're not telling me anything I don't know.
Katie James (15:27):
" I think this is the bias that I always see though is that I think comms people are quite quick. That's a massive generalization. Some of the comms teams that I'm training are quite quick to jump to outputs. So jump to channels, jump to messaging, jump to the tool. And I think that what we're constantly trying to do is pull them back to what are your objectives? What are your KPIs? How can you measure this effectively? Have you asked the right questions? We do that. In the measurement course, we're talking about metrics and how you start to put some meaningful KPIs around what you're doing. From an influencing point of view, you were saying, Gen, how do you help people to start doing that if it's not something that they're used to? And I think sometimes that's skill. So sometimes you actually have to help people to understand, here's some of the questions that you might want to go back with.
(16:24):
And that starts to train your stakeholders to, oh, when I go to comms, they're not just going to say yes. And when do you want me to send that out? They're going to ask me some really interesting questions about what I want to be different afterwards and around what I'm trying to achieve.
Genevieve Brammall (16:39):
I agree. I feel like asking questions is the greatest skill of a communicator. It's a basic journalism skill. And so if I'm in a big meeting, and for me, business acumen doesn't mean that I need to know how to do someone else's job. I certainly do not know how to do finance the way that the finance team does, et cetera. But I know how customers behave. I know how consumers behave. And so it prompts me to ask the questions of the team, "Is there a way that we could do X?" And someone else has the answer, but I'm the one that's able to sit there. And I'm not the only one, obviously, but multiple people across multiple departments are able to do the same kind of thinking, but to bring that lens and to be not afraid to ask the question. So to come with confidence and courage, to back yourself to know, I know my patch and I know that I know the customer really well and I know the environment really well.
(17:35):
I don't know the answers necessarily to my questions. Sometimes I think I do know the answer, but I might still ask it as a question rather than a statement because then that is more inclusive and it allows other people to bring their smarts to the table as well. And it also doesn't preclude differences of opinion to help shape the outcome. So questions to me are the number one skill of any great leader. It's someone who doesn't assume all knowledge, doesn't dictate the terms and is open to other people's ideas. And saying that, I don't think you can just constantly ask questions because then it looks like you don't know anything. So you have to be able to back yourself with maybe a statement that says, "I think X, however, I'm interested in your opinion of why." I do think that reporting lines sometimes matter in this context.
(18:22):
So I report through to marketing in my PR function and it was a very deliberate move by me. I used to report through to corporate affairs and the communications team, but I felt very disconnected from the business bottom line when I worked in communications back at ... It was a long time ago and not necessarily saying it would still be the case if I reported through there. Our business has evolved enormously since then. But now where I report, I am deeply embedded in the business of the business. And so my KPIs are very, very closely aligned with my marketing colleagues, KPIs and our editorial colleagues and all other departments. We're all aligned in our KPIs. And I think that sometimes comms teams can be very disconnected because they sit almost like a silo where perhaps the CEO is directing strategy if you don't have the confidence in a CCO to really direct, but you can still be very disconnected because you're approaching everything from a communications lens rather than a business lens.
(19:26):
So I feel very fortunate because my approach has to match the business strategy or I'm not relevant.
Dino Delic (19:33):
What's the best thing about communications? Agility, speed and responsiveness. What's the most challenging thing about working with communications? Agility, speed and responsiveness. Sometimes your greatest strength can become your greatest weakness. And one of the reasons why communicators struggle with measurement is because they've already started doing the work before they've done the measurement and the research that helps guide the work. And so then we've finished with the campaign and now we think the tool is going to magically show us the insights about how awesome we did and we didn't really think about where the data's going to be and we also didn't think about how the data is connected. But should you slow down? If you have the time, then yes. I've often instructed teams, let's not worry about analyzing the last quarter's worth of data as quickly as possible. Let's think about what you have coming up in the calendar and let's think about what data is going to demonstrate the impact of that work and how can we find that data.
(20:28):
Because just with a little bit of advanced notice and planning, you can really drive impact across the organization. And what you'll find is that some of the things that you might be doing are not really driving an impact at all, and there's no tool or report that's going to magically make that happen. At this point, we've established the importance of not just business acumen, but of well-roundedness, asking better questions, connecting dots across the business. All these help shape decisions before the messaging even begins. But if asking questions, advising leaders and shaping strategy are the skills that make communicate as valuable today, what happens when artificial intelligence enters the picture? In this next part, we talk about how AI is already changing the way teams work, what tasks machines might take over and which human skills will matter most in the years ahead.
Stephanie Lerdall (21:17):
I wanted to ask about the questioning skill. I've been spending a lot of time this week reading about how the communications functions will be upended by AI. And it's really challenging me to think about what skills I need to make sure I'm passing on to the team and cultivating. I too feel that most of my job is to ask questions that make people reflect, but I'm convinced that we'll have diminishing value over time because even you're going through a complex organizational change, I think I might prefer to send you to a chatbot that asks you some questions about who's changing and why, and do you really have an explanation? And that might be even more effective than the questions that I could come up with because it has the knowledge of the whole world. So what's in an AI future? What are the skillsets that are going to persist?
Katie James (22:14):
I think it will change a lot of what is required of a comms function almost every conversation someone's asking around AI and what others are doing in AI at the moment. So I'm speaking to lots of comms teams about it. Certainly where we are right now, you need a human involved right at the beginning and at the end. And I think that a lot of what we've talked about is how do we become more of these strategic advisors? To do that, you have to let go of other stuff. And I think that there's a lot that it can do around the kind of tactical bits that is consuming so much of our time that AI can take on for us. And that means that you have more capacity for that strategic advisor, influencing role and bringing your expertise, your audience understanding, the human aspect of what we do into the conversation.
(23:03):
I think there is a lot that AI can take on. I think not many comms teams that I'm working with have got there yet where they're really utilizing it to its full capacity. I think a lot of comms teams that I'm working with are still mostly using it for drafting, editing, all that kind of creative stuff and not really thinking about how they can use it for more of the productivity, efficiency, data capture, some of the maybe more revolutionary use cases that you could have.
Stephanie Lerdall (23:31):
You might have just like, I think you caught me on a doom day, but I'm putting increased pressure on myself because I'd really feel like if I don't figure this out, my stakeholders will.
Katie James (23:43):
That's what every comms team is thinking about at the moment.
Stephanie Lerdall (23:46):
What's the stuff that I want them to do with AI without me is the question I'm asking myself.
Dino Delic (23:53):
Well, maybe I can share a statistic that I came across last week preparing for this presentation. So I saw a report by Salesforce and eMarketer. In March 2025, the percentage of people who were trusted AI recommendations was like 42%. In November 2025, what do you think that number is?
Genevieve Brammall (24:19):
Lower.
Dino Delic (24:20):
86. In eight months, the same audience went from less than half trusted the recommendations that came from an LLM to virtually everyone, eight and 10, more than eight and 10. And so that to me says that if people are trusting these recommendations, they're getting a lot of value. And so the way that I used that statistic was to remind people like, look, everyone's telling you you need to be on AI, but you need to understand how these LLMs are, what they're recommending and how they're recommending it. Because if your brand's there or not there, that has significant implications on the customer journey. But if you then go to use that statistic as a proxy of, if you're saying to your colleagues, you're going through a massive organizational transformation, go have a conversation with AI, they're pretty likely to trust their recommendations if the data transfers over.
(25:14):
But I took a different approach like this was at the start of the year, or it's probably actually the start of last year, sales is also concerned about their jobs being taken away by AI. And so when I was leading a sales team, I was like, "Well, how about I just replace myself with AI?" And I developed this obsession to create the AI version of myself. Everything I knew, every transcript, every email, every piece of written documentation that I could get my hands on. And I've got years of emails and calls and proposals and conversations, and I put it all into different GPTs and created a bot. And anytime somebody in my company asked me a question, I took that Slack or that email and I put it in there and I pretended like I was the person asking myself, the AI version of myself, nine times out of 10, it was great.
(26:06):
Nine times out of 10, it would be what I would say to someone and I would just give that to them. And then the next thing I did was I would give them the link. I'd say, "Go ahead next time and just interact with this thing." And instead of them getting rid of me, they ended up relying on me and they wanted me to build more of these things and they realized that my expertise was what powered this thing. And so it's almost like I created the ATM version of myself, but when someone wanted to talk about real investments, they still went inside and sat down with the investment banker, but conducting transactional like, "Hey, where's that thing or what's that thing you call this thing? And what about this framework?" The GPT gave it that. And I kind of feel like, does that present an opportunity?
(26:50):
Not that my genius idea is transferable everywhere, but from my experience, I've not seen anyone get replaced by AI. They say you get enhanced by it, but if you try to replace yourself, you realize how much time you free up and you give people an ATM and you don't have this line of people in the bank waiting to just cash checks or mail things across and now I can be more strategic. Is there an opportunity for you and your team to look at yourselves as we're going to be the ones that replace ourselves with AI?
Katie James (27:20):
I spoke to someone a few weeks ago actually in a comms team who had created an agent that she was getting loads of requests to kind of rewrite stuff and put the company, make sure it has the company language and for press releases or speeches or these types of things. And so she created an agent that just scanned any document that leaders were sending and had all the checks that she would normally have to do. Are we using colleague instead of employee and have we got the right language? Are we talking about most relevant things that are going on in transformation? And so that's saved her a bunch of time now. She just puts all of that stuff, all of those requests through the agent and it does the first pass. It still needs her to look over it, but it saves a bunch of time.
Dino Delic (28:10):
I think there are a lot of tools, a lot of uses for AI where you can have it do checklists and make sure that there's quality control. But where I've found it worked the best is with value add, where how do you add value to other people? And if you can then automate that, like for example, our product marketing team, we just had an incredible new hire come in and handle one of our most important relationships. She doesn't know communications at all. She's new to the space. And so she's judging her new employer by the amount of product updates. She goes, "I've never seen a company do weekly product releases." She's like, "How do you keep on top of this? How am I supposed to explain to the client how they're going to use it if every week there's seven new features and I don't even know what they are.
(28:55):
" So that's an interesting observation. So I looked at the updates because I just take them for granted. We know what they mean. I've been here 16 years. So I looked at the announcements like, it doesn't actually say anywhere in there how it's going to make a communicator better at their job. It just says, "We added this capability. We increased this capacity, we did this, we moved this button, but it doesn't actually just hit the people in the face with the value." So I have my playbook that I've created off the assessment, put that into a GPT, and then I took all our year-end release, put it through that, and said, "Go through each and every single one of these announcements and tell me how this makes communicators more data-driven and earn a seat at the table." And it was great.
Genevieve Brammall (29:36):
That is very clever. And the other thing I would add to that is part of that person's concern is being overwhelmed, right? You coming at them every single week with iterations. If I was in that position, I would say, let's do it monthly maybe. If you're doing 52 updates, maybe you can consolidate them into once a month and then Even though the capability might actually be soft launching every week, you're doing it at the beginning or end of each month. So you're consolidating the storytelling for your customer to be able to, in one go, say, "In this month, this is the additional capability that Melwater has added, and here's what it is going to do to help me be better at my job." So I think your approach is right, but I would consolidate the comms so that it's more impactful as well when a company comes out and says, "We've done all of these things and collectively these things together can help you be better at your job rather than here's one little tool or one little tactic which may or may not be relevant to you.
(30:41):
" Eventually it all becomes white noise. So you stop reading. We all get so many spam emails every single day from companies trying to tell us something about themselves. Whereas if you can make more of an impact ... I saw a friend of mine did it the other day. She runs an agency, a comms agency, and I know that she had been hiring different people over the past several months, I would say. And she waited until she completed the last hire. And then she did an announcement to the market of internal promotions and new hires. So it looked like this agency is so dynamic and incredible and it's got three internal promotions and three new hires. They're going to shape it. And she then introduced a trademarked term for the way that her business delivers value to its customers. Excess earned attention was the phrase.
(31:38):
And basically what she's saying is, "We over-deliver when we are doing comm strategy for you and your product or whatever it is, and this is how we do it. And these are the people that we have now hired into these roles to make this happen." And when I saw that, I'm like, "That is so much smarter than telling me we have a new creative director. We have a new head of publicity." Like you do six announcements, you're just telling me about people, that's white noise. But collecting it together and waiting, it was just so much more clever. It's memorable. I've parroted off her whole press release for you. I wouldn't have done that if she'd done six releases.
Dino Delic (32:11):
Yeah. And obviously you can see that that's a reflection of our product strategy that we think we are innovative and industry leading if we're just making noise about adding that stuff in. That's a very cynical way to look at it. But again, going back to why I then put it through that system, it was because if you go back to that statistic of 42%, 86%, it's the tools are adding value. They're not just doing what you can do faster, but they're adding some value. And so again, I think a lot of what I hear is in communications, people are trying to use AI to just automate and streamline and make more efficient. Whereas out of all the AIs that I've built, the little custom GPTs, the one that people love the most are the ones that add value and people will keep coming back to that.
(32:59):
And that's again, being a trusted advisor is if people come to you and they say, "Oh, help me make this message a little bit clearer." And you do the quality control sort of checklist aspect, "Hey, let's change this word." But when you become a trusted advisors, when you say, "Have you thought about doing it this way?" And that's adding value, but I think a really good communicator adds value when they not only blend expertise in communications, but that business acumen to sort of bring it full circle to the company.
Katie James (33:25):
This is just another tool that we have to understand how we can use. I think I see so many comms teams that are running at how do we use AI as if that's the end goal. And I think it's thinking about this as just another one of the tools that we have in our armory that we can use to share our comms expertise.
Dino Delic (33:46):
Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably know by now that AI plays and will continue to play a very big role in comms. Yes, it can do a lot of the tedious stuff like drafting and editing, but rather than replacing communicators, our consensus with Katie is that AI has the potential to elevate the role, freeing up time for the work that matters most, strategic thinking and advising, ultimately adding value to the business. Of course, it's always easy to talk about drawing the line between AI and humans, but how are comms teams actually feeling about this? Are they? Are we prepared for this? Luckily for us, Katie has already asked hundreds of comms leaders this exact question. In this part of the interview, we talk a little bit more about Kademy and some of the most interesting findings they've had surveying comms teams. Would you be able to tell us your favorite customer story?
(34:40):
I know this sounds like a cheesy, like let's do a plug for Kademy, but I am genuinely curious. Tell us about the value that you bring to the world.
Katie James (34:46):
I have always really loved working with corporate communications functions. I think they've got just such an interesting view across the whole organization. I've loved working with lots of global teams and being able to have those conversations. One particular story, maybe one more recently actually, because I'm speaking to so many teams that are really concerned about keeping up and exactly what you were saying, Stephanie, we want to be able to figure out what we're doing with GenAI before we're kind of left behind. I'm hearing that a lot. I don't want to be left behind. And so more recently, I was working with a financial services organization and they came to us with this exact concern. We don't want to be left behind. They had a pretty big team. I think that it was interesting because they came to us not really knowing what the answer would be.
(35:38):
And so we figured out together, we actually built with them a survey because what they were saying is we don't know, we want to be able to set some meaningful goals for where we want to be in 2028, 2030 around what progress we need to make before then, and we need to start planning for that now. So with them, we built a GenAI survey, baseline survey, and it looks at lots of different use cases for communications. And it was really in partnership with them that we put that together so that it really achieved what they were looking to do. And I think that's something I really love about Kademy because we are a small organization. We're able to listen and build and adapt based on what our customers need. And I've worked at large organizations before. My business partner was at Gartner before, and that's just not something you have the luxury of doing in those organizations.
(36:34):
So you hear all of these customer challenges and actually you can't always keep up with the product development at the pace that you want. And that's something that we are able to do and be small and agile. So I really appreciate that. So we built this really great ...
Dino Delic (36:48):
The thing I love about this little story is one, vendors like Kademy operate like partners, hold onto them. And if you have a vendor that doesn't operate this way, then steer them in that direction. What was great was that the client expressed a problem and Kademy didn't just say, "Oh, what thing on the shelf do we have? And let's deploy that. " They got a little bit creative, which is a sign of a great partner. But also what I love is that they're conducting their own primary research. They're understanding the audience, they're understanding the needs of the internal customer. And so I love people who think like this because there are so many people who, again, jump into action because of what they think is needed, but sometimes taking just an extra second and polling a few of your stakeholders, constituents or target audience doing some message testing, that can yield powerful insights that will help you apply your strategic thinking and then maybe devise the right strategy versus just going with a hunch and getting to action.
Katie James (37:48):
Survey that allows you to look at what's the current knowledge and interest and confidence that people have across lots of these different use cases. And for this financial services company, we surveyed probably 400 or so people across their comms function. And then we were able to look at the baseline that they have right now, set some goals around where they needed to get to. So identify what are the use cases that they believe are going to make the biggest difference for them. And I think that made a real difference to the uptake that they were seeing around people using the tools, gave people a lot more confidence, I think, in being able to use that, especially in a financial services organization where there's a lot of understandable concerns around governance and risk and security.
Stephanie Lerdall (38:36):
I haven't really gotten past the 400 people in the comms function part.
Dino Delic (38:41):
Did you learn anything surprising with the comms team that large? Did you see more of what you've come to expect or were you like, "Oh wow, I didn't know that they were struggling with this or that they had this strength area," for example, in a team somewhere.
Katie James (38:54):
Yeah. I mean, not just with that company. I think what's been interesting with this survey now that we've taken it across quite a few organizations is that, and maybe this isn't surprising, but interest is a lot higher than knowledge or confidence in every use case that we see. And there's also actually confidence is higher than knowledge, which is slightly concerning because it perhaps means that people are trying things that they're not necessarily as confident in executing. So that's some interesting data that we've seen from all of the people that have taken that survey over time.
Dino Delic (39:30):
Katie's story about surveying hundreds of communicators highlights something many teams are feeling right now, the pressure to keep up. Interest in AI and new tools is high, but knowledge and confidence are still catching up. And for many organizations, the real challenge isn't just adopting new technology, it's figuring out how to make smart decisions about where to invest time, money, and attention. That naturally raises a bigger question. In a market flooded with new platforms, vendors, and promises, how should communications leaders actually evaluate what's worth adopting? And how can teams avoid getting stuck in analysis paralysis while trying to choose the right tools? In the following part of the interview, our convo shifts to the buying side of communications, from handling objections in sales conversations to the role, relationships, trust, and real problem solving play when we decide which partners and technologies to bring into the organization.
(40:27):
So Stephanie and Gen, I had lunch yesterday with Carmen. Remember the neuroscientists that we interviewed. So we had this cognitive neuroscientist that we brought in because her job is to help companies do better presentations and be more memorable. And it was fascinating. It was a great conversation. She was telling me about a study that she's working on. She works mostly with sales teams. That's how I met her because our sales team introduced her to me and she was asking me about objection handling. So this is going to be a bit of a left field question. And so when you have this sales dialogue, which is we provide a tool, you provide courses and education, inevitably objection handling comes up here and there. Somebody in your company, I don't know if it's you, but somebody does the sales of figuring out, okay, what's the contract going to be?
(41:12):
And Carmen asked me, we talked about spin selling, Challenger and some third one that I'd never heard of. And it forced me to reflect a little bit because I sat there and I thought for years, and I know this sounds like very philosophical and high and mighty, but I don't believe in objection handling. I don't believe that my job is to figure out how to find the crack in the question and then handle it and just get over it. That treats the relationship like an arm wrestling match. I believe if someone has an objection, what's behind it? And then you go back to coaching. What do they want? Okay, they say what they want, but what do they really need? Okay, if they need this, then what do they really want? And I feel like I'm just helping people discover that because if the objection handling is around price, okay, why can't you afford it?
(42:06):
Fine. Let's find something that you can afford. Let's rescope, but let's have that conversation much earlier. I think it's just an interesting place that the industry has come to because there are so many vendors, so many solutions, and everybody now has to be a really good customer. And I'm seeing it firsthand with this GenAI stuff. No one knows how to buy this. And so when they see a new tool, you don't want to be swindled, you don't want to just listen to whatever a salesperson says or whatever the marketing material is. And even Gen and Stephanie, I've had so many experts come in and we've been talking about Gen AI and that's their area of expertise. And I don't think the three of us are any wiser about how to use this or how this is supposed to work. And I have a tool, my company has one, then that creates a scenario where you've got an army of salespeople and an army of marketing people, an army of product people, and they're all ganging up on the communications people.
(42:55):
And the communications people are supposed to then play defense and ask good questions and not buy something that they don't really need. And the amount of training and money that goes into objection handling ... And I just think at the end of the day, the customer can just be paralyzed and decide not to do anything. And that's why sales statistics, because we've been paying attention to that over and over, indecision is increasing significantly, which is paralysis by now. I've got multiple vendors all saying the same thing. I can't figure out which one is the right one. And so I wonder then, we've talked a lot about communications, but your organization has to secure contracts and find people. So what perspective can you share on the way that you've seen communicators become different buyers over time? I know it's really only been six years, but the industry's proliferating and GenAI is making it crazier.
(43:51):
So maybe you have some advice for communicators that are listening to this about how they think about adding to their tech stack or curating the vendors that they have and the agencies and so on and so forth.
Katie James (44:02):
Yeah. I mean, it'd be interesting to hear, Stephanie and Gen, how you kind of manage that. But I think from my perspective, one of the biggest benefits that I think we can share with comms teams is just to be able to help connect the dots with other comms teams. I think so much of what we do is to just, or so much of what comes people are coming to us and want to know about is what's going on at other organizations and how are other people thinking about these things. So I don't know if it's necessarily for me to tell people how, because there's one, the agency that's going to be good for one organization may not be right for you or the tool that's right for them is not right for you. But I think being able to, because everyone's running so fast at stuff and are so busy in their day-to-day, it can be very easy to become quite insular, I think, in your own organization.
(44:51):
And so I think just that exposure out to what's going on in other comms functions, whether the comms leaders doing can sometimes be the most helpful thing because sometimes you're reassured, actually we are all dealing with the same kind of stuff and I'm not left behind and I'm not doing anything differently to what all these other comms leaders are worried about as well. And sometimes you can get new ideas that you don't have to pay me for, that other comms leaders are doing things that you could pick up and do at the same time or great experiences that they've had.
Genevieve Brammall (45:23):
I think that that's probably the one thing that will last the test of time as well outside of AI. One of our greatest skills is our ability to engage with stakeholders and bring new ideas to the table. And so relationships are absolutely critical to a communicator's toolkit. And AI is a tool in the kit, but it's not the person who can bring those relationships to the table. When Dino was in Melbourne recently, he hosted a breakfast and there was maybe 20 people around the table in that corporate comm space. And it was just a round table discussion. It was ideas sharing, it was problem solving sharing, it was discussing the challenges that we might face and the commonality of those. And there's really great confidence knowing that a problem shared is a problem halved. You don't necessarily walk away from the table with a new solution and go back and instantly apply what you've learned from a breakfast with your colleagues.
(46:21):
But you do go back feeling confident that you're not alone and perhaps that what you're doing in your space is actually a little bit cutting edge or a little bit leading or that you're maybe a little couple of steps ahead of the curve or whatever it is. But those relationships, AI can't buy. I also think that what you were saying before, Dino, about that objection handling, to me, the lesson in all of that is if you're in sales or, and I think we're all in the business of trying to communicate and problem solve, is to really focus on selling the value, selling a solution and not selling a product. Because if you sell a product, it's all about, I'm the vendor, come here, I'm bright and shiny and new and I can do all these things and so can every other vendor. So if every vendor is selling their product, the way to cut through is to say, "Well, I've got a product and my product's probably really similar to all the other products are seeing, but this is what my product can do for you.
(47:22):
" And if you focus always on what the customer need is, then to me it's so clear that you're then whittling from being spoiled for choice, all of these options, the market leader is going to be the one who is shortening the gap and closing that gap to just a few products that are talking about value. And if you think about the products in the world that have lasted the test of time, have continued to iterate and have continued to win market share, Apple to me just springs to mind instantly that they saw challenges for customers and they solved the customer challenge and then spoke to what it would mean for the customer. They didn't necessarily come out and go, "Hey, good, you know what we did? We created a phone that doesn't have a keypad on it and here's all the product features." No, no, no.
(48:10):
They basically started to tell us how you could use the product to enhance your life, do things differently, et cetera.
Dino Delic (48:17):
Oh yes, and you there. It's understanding the problem. And that's why this conversation for me is so valuable and I learned so much from you guys because I truly then get to understand what is the problem because there's no solution without a problem. And now it sounds like sales philosophy, but I mean, this conversation has proven for me, and I've said this to you guys before, but I've told my leadership that they need to hire Genevieve and Stephanie to run our communications because you guys truly get it. This conversation about objection handling reveals something deeper about the communications profession today. In a world crowded with tools, vendors, and constant innovation, communicators are being asked not only to evaluate solutions, but to navigate complex relationships, competing priorities, and a flood of information. And in many ways, that's exactly where the real strength of communications leaders lies, because whether you're choosing the right technology, working with vendors or guiding stakeholders through change, success often comes back to the same core skill, understanding people, their motivations, and the problems they're trying to solve.
(49:23):
So with that in mind, the conversation turns to a practical question for communications leaders. If relationships, influence, and proactive thinking are what sets strategic communications apart, what can someone actually start doing today to start earning a seat at the table? Sit tight. Here's what you need. If you were advising a comms leader who's trying to earn a seat at the table, what's one thing that they can start doing today to take a step in that direction?
Katie James (49:53):
I think go and increase your network in your business. Go and speak to lots of people. Go and understand what it is that they care about. Ask really good questions and listen. And I think that then you will start to learn things about your organization, about the people in it that will help you when it comes to that point where you need to influence or you need to call upon someone. I think that Gen said it earlier actually about we're really good relationship people. I think people can use that skill to their advantage and really use that to understand their business and understand their stakeholders, not just going to them when you have a project or you need something or you're working on a specific thing.
Dino Delic (50:44):
That's very good. I'll tell you what I'm walking away from this conversation, sorry, Stephanie, is the biggest sort of idea is there are people in a communications team who are sort of obsessed about and manage the tech stack, but there's almost like this stakeholder relationship stack that is worth thinking about. Who are the relationships that you need to have and which ones do you have strong connections with? And who are your collaborators? Who are your detractors? Who are the people that always talk shit about you behind your back or don't help you out in meetings or ask you really tough questions and who are the people that back you up and support communications? I feel like almost like visualizing that in a map and then figuring out how those things are connected and maybe assigning somebody in your team to be like the consigliere, if you will, like managing it or just like you manage a tech stack seems like a very, very important, powerful thing to do.
(51:32):
That's the idea that I've walked away from this with. Stephanie, what about you?
Stephanie Lerdall (51:36):
I think my key takeaway you said earlier, Katie, that the thing that separates the good from the bad or the strategic from the not is bringing proactive solutions to a problem that others haven't identified for you. And so to me, I think I learned that a little too late in that the goal needs to be to free up your time such that you can do that because if you're always reacting to what people directly ask of you, even if you can manage it, you're missing that big opportunity.
Dino Delic (52:11):
If only there was a way to visualize how much spare time somebody has, because it just creeps up on you, right? More and more responsibilities get added to your plate and then before you know it, you're just overworked. But the biggest downstream effect of that is not having time to think strategically and think through things because if you're busy doing ... It's like that Simon Sinek quote that he said there was two guys chopping wood and the one guy who went home at lunch for an hour a day worked less, but he did a better job because he went home and sharpened his acts. And that's really the strategic part is just focusing on how to do the job, not just always doing the job.
Stephanie Lerdall (52:46):
Well, thank you so much, Katie. It's really good to chat with you.
Dino Delic (52:50):
I think this is a perfect place to end the episode, but before you press stop, let me give you a little more. As we've heard from Katie, the future of communications isn't just about producing great content or managing channels. It's about understanding the business, building strong relationships and bringing proactive ideas to the table. Communicators who want to earn a true seat at the table need to invest time in understanding what their stakeholders care about and building networks across the organization. And as Gen and Steph highlighted, creating space for strategic thinking is critical because if communicators are always reacting to requests, they miss the opportunity to shape the conversation. The rise of AI may change how work gets done, but the core strengths of great communicators, curiosity, judgment, and the ability to connect people and ideas will always remain essential. We don't need to interview 400 people to confirm that.
(53:49):
Earning Your Seat isn't about passively absorbing, it's about executing. Take a moment and reflect and think about how you can use what you've just learned in this episode to grow, recalibrate, and improve. Thanks for listening. I'm Dino Delic. We'll see you next time on the next episode of Earning Your Seat.