Hey Reader,

Each week in this newsletter I answer a question from a reader. This week’s question comes from an Internal Comms & Engagement Officer in London, who says:

Okay the first thing I want you to know is that this is probably the number one challenge for all internal comms pros everywhere. It's not you, it's not your company, it's not your stakeholders. This is universal. It's a shared pain and a shared challenge.

It's a trickier challenge to navigate when you are, as you say, a bit of a people-pleaser. Because tackling this challenge does require asking questions, redirecting people to other solutions, being able to push back confidently but politely. I say this from experience as I have been a people-pleaser most of my working life and it's only in the last few years I've really thrown off the shackles and changed my mindset. It might help you think of pleasing YOURSELF first and foremost, and you'll never be pleased if you're constantly drowning in work and churning out all sorts of tasks that are ultimately pointless.

In today's newsletter, let me give you some practical advice that I myself would have wanted when I was in your shoes earlier in my career.

Deanna Zabel joined The Curious Tribe with a clear goal: get promoted.
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When she joined the tribe, Deanna was working as an Internal Comms Lead. She felt hungry for more; greater strategic responsibility, influence and impact.
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She knew she was capable and she was ready to go after it. So she set herself a clear goal:
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🎯 Get promoted.
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She did it in 6 months after joining the tribe.
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Okay here's how you can successfully navigate this challenge with your stakeholders.

1. Engagement ≠ results

Something I often noticed when I worked in-house, and I see it now with clients as a consultant, is that many stakeholders and senior leaders are absolutely fixated on "engagement". They want to know how many people read their blog, how many people watched their video, how many people attended the townhall. And they want you to push the content more and more until it gets more views, more opens, more clicks.

But... for what?

You might get a 99% open rate on an email but that doesn't tell you anything about the results, the outcome, the impact of that communication. All it really tells you is that your delivery vehicle (your channel) is operating as it should and that your communication reached your audience. Reach does not equal results. Engagement is not the same as results.

So it can be very helpful in these conversations to steer your stakeholder away from "engagement" and towards their desired outcome. If they want more engagement on their content or more visibility on their projects, what's the end game? What are they trying to achieve? Why do they want more views or more engagement... what's the purpose of it all?

You would be surprised at how often stakeholders struggle to answer questions like this. They're often in a sort of tick-box send-it-out-mode, so you may need to prod and probe and ask questions to help them unpack it with you.

2. Indulge your curiosity to go deeper

Now that you've got your stakeholder talking and you're veering the conversation away from engagement rates and more towards a desired outcome, you can go deeper. Curiosity is your superpower here. Literally all you need to do is ask a bunch of questions and listen well. And you can (and should) use the same questions over and over again every time these requests come in.

Ideally what you're trying to do here is to use curiosity as a tool, one that will help you unearth the desired outcome of the stakeholder. Try these questions:

• Who is your target audience for this communication?
• (If they say it's for all employees, ask another: Is this really relevant to every single person in the company, or just a few specific groups?)
• What do they need to do after reading this email/ blog?

Now my favourite question is "What do they need to do after reading this email/ blog?" because that's the one that you can use to create a communications objective. Here's a little formula I've been tinkering with for objectives:

• Audience + desired action

In other words, who is your audience and what do you want them to do?

For example:

• We want line managers (audience) to complete the end-of-year performance reviews (desired action)
• We want frontline workers (audience) to download our new mobile app (desired action)
• We want all employees (audience) to sign up for the free flu vaccine (desired action)
• We want engineers installing home broadband (audience) to upsell other products to the customer (desired action)

Do you see how simple and clear this is? That's the kind of statement you want to try to co-create with your stakeholder in this conversation.

If they have no action for employees to take, then you can have the delicate conversation about whether the communication is needed at all. It’s handy to have one channel in the organisation where nice-to-know content can go, ideally a non-broadcast channel like Viva Engage or a social feed where people can skim past it if it’s not relevant. It gives pushy stakeholders a home for their content without overloading employees’ inboxes.

3. Put measurement in their court

Once you have a clear objective, then it's time for another great question: how will you know if this communication was successful or not?

Because at the moment, your stakeholders are judging success on rates of engagement or levels of visibility. This is primarily because they haven't set a clear objective at the start and they're not measuring results. It's hard to measure something without an objective, to be fair!

So you take your objective that you've now created with them, let's say this example:

• We want frontline workers (audience) to download our new mobile app (desired action)

And you ask your stakeholder how this will be tracked. Is there an IT dashboard that shows how many employees have downloaded the app?

Because this is ultimately the measure they want to track, not engagement rates or open rates. Did employees download the app or not? The open rates will tell you the email reached them, but it won't tell you if they downloaded the app or not.

This is the beauty of outcome-based measurement btw, the data often already exists elsewhere in the company and your stakeholder will know where to find it and how to get it. You just need to help them understand that the success of the communication isn't the engagement, it's the action.

4. Be consistent

My advice is to ask clarifying, curious questions every single time a stakeholder comes to you with a tactical request. If you begin to feel like a broken record then you're doing it right. Repeat, repeat, repeat: what are we trying to achieve here? Who needs this information and why? How will you know if it worked?

This is the part that might help you the most as a recovering people-pleaser. You're meeting every tactical request with the same questions and you're effectively training stakeholders to expect them. Over time they’ll arrive with the answers already prepared, and they’ll stop asking for tactics because they’ve learned that nothing goes out without a clear objective behind it. This part is a bit of a journey and takes time so be kind to yourself and know that with practice and a few wins under your belt, it gets easier.

A final piece of advice

I do want to add one more thing: this approach won't always work. Some stakeholders will simply never tolerate redirection or being told "no" in the politest way possible. Sometimes they outrank you, they're a dominant personality, maybe they're your own boss... and sometimes you just need to concede you've lost the battle and you send the bloody thing out.

This is disappointing, yes, but it's not the end of the world and it's probably not a big deal. Ask the questions, do your best to create a comms objective, try to redirect towards outcomes... but choose your battles and know when it's simply a dead-end conversation. Save your energy for the next one.

If this stuff was easy, I'd be out of a job and so would you! Internal comms is tricky because we're navigating a lot of organisational politics and difficult personalities.

What other questions would you like me to tackle in this newsletter? Hit reply and let me know.

Thanks for reading and stay curious,

Joanna

PS The Curious Tribe will be moving to a new model in January 2027 where I will only take new members in for the first 5 days of each month. The rest of the month will be waitlist only. If you want to get in ahead of this change, come join us here.

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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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