Hey Reader,

Each week in this newsletter I answer a question from a reader. This week's question comes from Ontario, Canada, from an internal comms manager who is feeling a bit tired and fed up.

I read this question and felt oddly suspicious... have you been reading my journals? Are you ME visiting from the past? Because I have had this exact experience earlier in my career and remember feeling totally stumped and quite stuck and frankly annoyed. Why weren't leaders taking me seriously when I was working so bloody hard?!

I was very similar to you. I loved my work, I prided myself at being quick to accomplish tasks and I spent a lot of time helping stakeholders and they always seemed very happy with me. I got a lot of real-time praise for helping them with projects and I felt really good about it. But I never got any time with the big boss leaders and they didn't seem to really know I existed. And I wasn't sure what I could do differently to get their attention and get them to understand why my work mattered to the business.

In hindsight I look back and I can see that I was caught in a bit of a trap, one that was very easy to fall in to without realising and one that I had to work hard to escape.

That's what we'll talk about in today's newsletter.

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The Curious Tribe

Working hard and still feeling invisible to the people who matter is a horrible place to be. And figuring your way out of it on your own is even harder.

The Curious Tribe is my membership community for ambitious internal communicators who want to operate strategically and make an impact at work. The tribe has 85+ members from all around the world with an NPS score of +81... and 90% of members renew for a second year or more.

Inside the tribe you'll find the full masterclass behind today's newsletter: From service provider to strategic partner. It's where I take you the whole way out of the trap I'm describing today, covering the stuff there isn't room for here, like how to calculate your "yes tax" (the real cost to the business of all that low-value work you keep saying yes to), how to set strategic boundaries that protect your time and my four-step framework for saying no to even the pushiest stakeholder without damaging the relationship.

This is available right now, on demand, to watch when you're ready. 👇

Are you the next member of The Curious Tribe? 👀

Join the tribe here

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What kind of compliments do you get at work?

Okay let's talk about the trap I fell into so that you can avoid it, or maybe you're already in it and you want to get out.

I began to wonder, really really deeply wonder why leaders didn't see my impact. And I started to look back through my emails and my notes to see what kind of compliments I was getting on my work. These were the kinds of things people were telling me:

• "Your newsletter looks great"
• "Thanks for organising the event for our team"
• "You were so fast to add that new button on the intranet"
• "Thanks for being flexible and helping us out at the last minute"

Have a look at these compliments. They're warm and genuine, but the overwhelming, impossible-to-ignore theme was that people were thanking me for executing on tasks, for doing tasks quickly, for dropping my workload to help with theirs.

None of these compliments thanks me for solving problems or creating clarity or driving behaviour change or really any sort of outcome. I think in hindsight my desire to be liked and my tendency towards people pleasing had led me to build a reputation as the person who produces brilliant stuff on demand and who is always willing to help others. This is delightful for colleagues (I was doing all their work for them!) but of course leaders wouldn't take me seriously when I was operating like this. I was just a pair of hands to do jobs, I wasn't really thinking about how my work impacted the company or if I was spending my time on stuff that actually mattered.

It was time to change

Once I could see the people-pleasing trap I had fallen into, I knew I wanted to change. I wasn't sure what to do but I'd heard a lot of people saying things like "you should be more strategic" (which frankly I didn't know what that really meant) so I figured I should get curious about that.

And I spent the next few years learning about what a strategic communicator does, how they spend their time, how they operate... and my whole career changed.

I stopped 'helping' people as much and stopped living in my inbox, reacting to requests for tasks and making my to-do list based on what people wanted. And I started instead thinking about questions like:

• What's important to the business this year?
• Am I doing any work that links to the priorities?
• What kind of work could I start doing that the CEO would care about?

And little by little, I began to change.

Curiosity was my cure

The biggest shift I made was so simple honestly: I stopped saying 'yes' immediately when people asked me to do tasks and I got curious instead. I literally just started asking questions.

For example, if a stakeholder came to me asking to send out an all-staff email, instead of saying yes and adding it to my to-do list, I slowed down and asked a few questions. Things like:

• What are you hoping to achieve with this email?
• Who is the audience for this information?
• What do they need to DO after they read this email?
• How will you know if the email was successful?

These questions felt almost rude at first, like I was being difficult or awkward, but I quickly realised they were the very opposite of difficult, because they were me finally adding some value. And I was so shocked to find that stakeholders often had a tough time answering these questions. They often didn't really know what they wanted to achieve, they just wanted to "send it out" and hope for the best.

I soon realised I could help them. The tactic they asked for was rarely what they needed and I was able to guide them towards other means of communication and sometimes I'd advise them not to communicate at all if it wasn't relevant to the audience.

And slowly slowly slowly, something fundamentally changed about how I worked and how I was seen in the business. Simply by being curious I stopped being the people-pleasing person who could churn out tasks quickly and I started being known as the person who was good at solving problems and giving solid communication advice. And I began to notice the compliments changed, I was now getting recognised for my thinking rather than my executing. And my leaders started to notice and I was taken more seriously.

I'll be honest though, asking the questions is the easy part. For a recovering people-pleaser like me, the genuinely hard bit was what came next... actually holding the line when a stakeholder pushed back or saying no to someone far more senior without losing the relationship. That didn't come naturally, and it took me a long time as I was figuring it all out by myself.

Becoming strategic takes time

If you are also in this situation and you want to change, you're in the right place. Transforming into a strategic communicator is something I can help you with, it's a journey and it takes time. We talk about strategic comms all the time in The Curious Tribe and tribe members get incredible results like:

• "I got a big fat raise from my boss"
• "I got promoted to Senior Manager"
• "I got my first Head of Internal Comms job"

So if you're ready to make a change, this is your sign to come join us. You don't need to figure all of this out alone, I'm here to help you.

Thanks for reading and stay curious,

Joanna.

PS I enjoyed thinking about this and writing this issue, it was quite a reflective process and a worthwhile one. Why don't you go back through the compliments you've received in the last few months and see what you can learn?

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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