Hey Reader,

Each week in this newsletter, I answer a question from a reader. Today’s question comes from Austria, from an internal comms manager who is feeling a bit deflated. They ask:

Well firstly may I commend you on being so vulnerable and open to send this in. And I quite like this word you’ve invented there, ‘stuckness’, I know immediately what you are talking about and I’ve experienced it in my career before.

That kind of feeling where everything is fine but you’re wondering what it might be like if everything was great. Like you have a sense you could be getting better results but you’re not quite sure how.

I have 100% been in your shoes. And in my work as a community leader and consultant in our profession, I can absolutely assure you that you’re not alone in feeling stuck. Your question sparked a lot of reflection and I’ve identified a couple of common themes that make comms pros feel stuck.

Let’s explore them in this newsletter and see if they resonate with you.

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Are you a human garbage dumpster?

That’s what Ali Wozniak jokingly called herself early in her comms career, because people dumped all their random grunt work on her and she had to deal with it. She hadn’t yet learned how to be a strategic comms professional.

She figured out how to operate strategically the hard way, working it out on her own over the course of her career.

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Ali is now a Director of Internal Comms, a senior strategic professional, and also a member of The Curious Tribe. As she reflects on these junior roles early in her career, she tells me:

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You feel stuck because you’re helpful

Perhaps you feel, as I used to feel, that being helpful to stakeholders is the top priority in your job. That your job as a comms pro is to be cooperative, helpful, a team player, collaborative. And in your head this subconsciously translates to: I will be seen as unhelpful if I say no.

So you say yes. Over and over again. And as a result, you end up working on all sorts of things that really aren’t important. You’re polishing a slide deck for the engineering townhall, you’re editing an intranet article that no one is going to read, you’re working on a comms plan for a low-priority routine HR policy.

And what’s really happening here is your helpfulness, which is not in itself a bad thing, is making you become stuck. You become stuck in this cycle of:

• Can you do me a quick favour?
• Yes of course, I’ll add it to my list
• The list gets longer and longer
• You’re always busy
• But you never get to the list because you’re so helpful you keep adding to it
• And people ask you for more and more help because you're just so damn HELPFUL

And of course one day you’re sitting in your performance review and you have this blinding realisation: your boss doesn’t care about how busy you are or how helpful you are. They care about the results you’re delivering.

And your helpfulness may be the thing that’s stopping you getting results.

Now I’m not suggesting that you stop being helpful. That is probably stupid advice, and it's advice I would ignore myself. What I am suggesting is that you try what worked for me, because I too love to be helpful and will never be able to quit. What worked for me is rethinking what “helpful” means.

Try this reframe:

❌ I will not be helpful to everyone who asks for a favour

✅ I will be helpful to the business priorities

Now maybe this way of thinking is obvious to you. It wasn’t to me. This way of thinking completely changed how I looked at my job and my responsibilities, and opened up really good conversations with my boss about how I was spending my time and how I could begin to focus more time on work that really mattered.

You feel stuck because you’ve stopped learning

Sometimes in a job, you’re doing all the right things but you naturally hit a sort of plateau. You’re doing as much as you can, but when you’re by yourself or reporting to a non-comms leader, you might find you stop learning or that you have no source of training or inspiration.

You want ideas for how to do things differently, you want insights to help you grow, you want to push yourself to become better at your job. It’s very bloody hard to do that by yourself. I learned that the hard way in my career. I’ve always been very ambitious and hungry to learn, and often felt ‘stuck’ when I worked as a team-of-one because who was I supposed to be learning from? My boss didn’t understand me, I didn’t have a team to bounce ideas off, I had no way to learn from comms peers.

Because you know how people learn in other professions? They learn on the job by being surrounded by other people who are more experienced than them. You watch how they approach stakeholder requests. You observe how they deftly say no without actually using the word ‘no’ in order to focus on core priorities. You learn on the job just from being around them, listening to them, hearing how they approach things.

I was missing this for most of my career. It felt so hard to figure things out by myself so much. It was causing all my ‘stuckness’!

I think in hindsight this is why I built The Curious Tribe. Getting great at internal comms doesn’t have to be so difficult or take so long. You can learn faster and better from a group of peers.

[Plus it’s FUN, which is more important than we give it credit for.]

If you’re reading this and you’ve been feeling stuck, maybe this is your signal to come join us. 85% of tribe members get their membership funded by their employer. If you want to persuade your boss to pay for your spot, use this letter to convince them it’s worth it.

Thanks for reading and stay curious,

Joanna

Find me on YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and check out my book​

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Want to work together?

• Join The Curious Tribe. This is my membership community for ambitious, curious communicators who want to achieve more in their roles and have fun at the same time. Membership allows you to work directly with me for 12 months, make deep connections with other communication pros who 'get it' and improve your skills through training and learning. More info here.
• Ready to review your channels and content but don't know where to start? Download my practical Internal Comms Audit Playbook to guide you through a DIY audit - no expensive consultant needed.​ This has ready-to-use templates and checklists to give you a systematic way to do your own audit which you can repeat every single year. Get it here.
• Take a shortcut. I've developed a collection of tried-and-tested templates, checklists and how-to guides for the key processes you'll need in your role as an internal communicator. You can download my Internal Comms Cheat Sheets here.​

This newsletter is not written with AI. It's a joy to write this with my human brain every week. I love writing it and I hope you enjoy reading it.

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