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Hey Reader,

Each week in this newsletter I answer a question from a reader. This week's question comes from an internal comms professional who asks a short but powerful question:

This question is powerful because it hits the reality of working in an internal comms role, or at least most roles. Many of you are operating as a team of one or a tiny team of two, some of you are experiencing cutbacks and layoffs and shrinking resources. But as team sizes are getting smaller, the expectations on internal comms teams aren't changing; if anything, they've increased.

So what do we do? How can we make a real impact with minimal resources and a very lean team? Let's talk about today's newsletter.

Here's the first thing I want you to know: being a small team doesn't mean you can't succeed. It doesn't mean you can't make an impact. Some of the most effective internal comms professionals I know are solo practitioners or tiny teams. The difference isn't their team size, it's their approach.

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SPONSOR: The Curious Tribe

Being stuck as a tactical comms person is disheartening

You’ve put in the hours writing content, managing channels, organising events, creating comms plans, putting out endless fires.

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Being successful in internal comms is hard.

​But the path to becoming a strategic communicator doesn't have to be lonely.

I've built a membership called The Curious Tribe specifically for internal comms pros like you. In the tribe, you'll:

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Okay back to today's topic. Let's talk about how you can maximise your impact when resources are tight. I'll share two practical approaches that have worked for me and that also work with my clients. I hope they work for you too.

Stop trying to do everything

Okay let's get the obvious-but-difficult one on the table first. You need to stop trying to do everything. It's impossible and you're setting yourself up to fail.

Here's how you start: you need to get ruthlessly clear on your purpose. What is internal comms actually trying to achieve in your organisation? Not what everyone WANTS you to do or what stakeholders are DEMANDING you do, but what you MUST do to drive real business value.

What does that look like in your organisation? That is your starting point.

Because here's the thing, when you're a lean team, you simply cannot be all things to all people. You'll burn out trying (I should know, I've done that, I don't recommend it tbh). Instead, you need to define the 2-3 things internal comms must achieve in your company and use that as your filter for every single request that comes your way. Get crystal clear on your purpose and align all of your work around that.

Maybe your top priorities are driving alignment with company strategy and coaching leaders to communicate effectively. Great. Now you have a framework for saying yes or no to requests. Does making that poster for Finance align with either priority? Probably not. Does spending an hour coaching your CFO on how to communicate the quarterly results? Absolutely yes.

You can use your new-found clarity as a decision making framework and make clear, quick decisions about what to work on (and what to say no to). This kind of clarity is your superpower as a small team. You can't do everything, so you get to be selective about what matters most. Talk to your boss about this and see if you can get on the same page. This is how you get started.

Help other people communicate WITHOUT you

Once you've got clarity of purpose and you know what you need to be laser focused on, you're going to find yourself saying 'no' to lots of things. But it's not super practical to just tell a stakeholder "no, I won't do that" and it's not realistic either. What you can do instead is to start finding ways to help other people do these comms tasks themselves themselves, either completely by themselves or else with a bit of guidance from you.

The idea is that you're going to help other people communicate more effectively without you, rather than doing all of the work for them (which I recognise it often easier and faster, but isn't good for you - or them - in the long run).

Enabling stakeholders to do the work themselves is the key to getting out of the cycle of tactical delivery work where you feel stuck, overwhelmed and with no time for anything strategic.

You can start building self-service resources for your stakeholders to use. Think templates, toolkits, guidelines, examples, how-to guides. You can set up a resource hub where stakeholders can access these resources themselves whenever they need them and you can signpost to them again and again and again.

Yes, this requires an upfront investment of your time. But it pays dividends in the long run by reducing the volume of tactical requests landing on your desk.

These two approaches work hand-in-hand

If you get clear on the purpose of your team, this helps you say no to non-strategic and non-impactful work. And having a resource hub to help stakeholders communicate without you gives you a way to say no without being seen as difficult or uncooperative; you can point stakeholders to helpful documents and resources they can use to communicate effectively.

These two things are the building blocks for long-term success.

In saying all that I do want to explicitly acknowledge that being a lean team is hard. I've always found it difficult to be a team-of-one, juggling competing demands, trying to get the balance right between quantity of work and quality of work, wondering if I'm doing the right thing. In hindsight, I think I built The Curious Tribe because of how lonely and isolated I felt when I worked in-house; I really needed a peer group to lean on and share with and get advice from. It didn't seem to exist back then so I built it myself out of sheer stubbornness!

So going into 2026, I want you to focus on what matters. Get super locked in and get clear on what is important. Being strategic isn't a luxury for when you have more resources; it's actually more important when resources are tight.

You've got this.

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.​

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