As organizations face accelerating change, rising complexity, and AI-driven transformation, Strategic and Editor-in-Chief Mike Klein are making the case that the future of communication leadership depends not on more content, but on stronger community.
Communication leaders have never had more tools at their disposal—or more pressure to deliver results. They have more channels, data, technology, and ways to reach employees than at any point in history. Yet many organizations are discovering that access to information alone does not automatically create understanding, trust, or momentum.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not only automating work, but accelerating it. That is putting unprecedented pressure on hierarchies. The extent to which organizations can balance the need for control while enabling teams and individuals to make faster, more aligned decisions is rapidly becoming one of the defining questions of the day.
That shift creates a new challenge. It is no longer enough to distribute messages efficiently. Organizations now need people to make sound decisions with visibility into the bigger picture, clear priorities, and confidence in the direction of the business.
In other words, the modern communication challenge is not information. It is alignment across the organization.
That is the lens through which Mike Klein, IABC Fellow, has built a distinguished career. Across more than two decades in internal communication and organizational change—including senior roles with Shell IT International, Maersk Oil, Cargill, VEON, and major international transformation programs—he has focused on how communication helps organizations operate effectively through change.
Today, through his advisory practice, Changing The Terms, Mike works with organizations navigating AI-driven disruption. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Strategic and is founder of #WeLeadComms, a global recognition community for communication leaders.
Across each of these roles, his message is consistent: communication must evolve from a support function into something more foundational—an engine for capability, trust, and coordinated progress.
Why Community Matters Now
For years, many communication functions were built around content production. Success often meant publishing more updates, launching more campaigns, or managing more channels. While those activities still matter, they no longer solve the deeper challenge organizations face.
When organizations become more fluid and teams more dispersed, performance cannot rely solely on top-down messaging. It depends on people having the context, confidence, and relationships needed to move in the same direction. That is where community becomes a strategic advantage.
Starry Blue Brilliance: How has the role of community changed as communication leaders face greater complexity, distributed teams, and AI-driven transformation?
Mike Klein: “Wheel reinvention” is one of the great occupational curses of the communication profession, but it’s baked into how people often come into roles and evolve them. Lots of people move into “comms” roles from the outside or from other functions, and proceed to create their activities from scratch, without peers in the organization or much connection to folks outside it.
Now, with professional development budgets tightening and layoffs becoming the norm, communication pros have an existential need to connect with, learn from, and support each other. It might take time and cost money, but there’s increasing awareness that doing nothing and being passive is not sustainable.
“Wheel reinvention is one of the great occupational curses of the communication profession.”
Mike Klein
How Strategic Is Building Something Different
Strategic has positioned itself around this need by creating more than a publication or events platform. Through Strategic Magazine, training programs, awards, live events, and mastermind sessions, it connects multiple parts of the professional experience.
What makes the model distinctive is the way these elements reinforce one another. What begins as insight can be developed through learning, applied in practice, and strengthened through conversation with peers.
The result is an ecosystem designed to help communication professionals grow, contribute, and stay connected in a rapidly evolving field.
SBB: What makes Strategic’s model different from traditional professional networks or content platforms in communication?
MK: The biggest difference is that we’re mainly here to be a platform for contributors first. We are providing a platform for people with ideas and initiative who want to be heard to get their viewpoints into the record (a crucial step in the world of AI search). We’re a place where people who want to be seen as leaders can be visible, reachable, and impactful – not only to the comms community but to the businesses, sectors, and communities in which they operate.
The biggest difference is that we’re not an association or an organization – we’re a platform. We’re a place to build, to distribute from, and to connect upon. We’re also a “publication” – which means that publishing on Strategic adds value in the way that publishing on one’s own blog or on LinkedIn doesn’t, and that’s going to be a huge differentiator as AI search becomes the main means of getting one’s thoughts across globally.
Why Shared Standards Matter
As communication becomes more central to business performance, leaders are increasingly expected to show measurable value. That means moving beyond output metrics and demonstrating how communication supports trust, readiness, engagement, and business execution.
Yet many organizations still define communication success through outdated measures.
Professional communities can help close that gap by elevating stronger standards, recognizing excellence, and creating clearer expectations for what effective communication looks like today.
SBB: How can communities like Strategic help raise standards and strengthen communication’s influence inside organizations?
MK: We do it in a couple of ways. First, we support our contributors by giving them a real byline for their content that they can share with their organizational stakeholders. “I got this published in Strategic Magazine” is a different hook for a piece to share with a senior leader than “look at my blog post or LinkedIn article.” Second, we’re partnering with the Global Communication Certification Council to support Certification in the comms profession and offering a number of scholarships to go through the Certification process.
Leadership in a New Era
The expectations placed on communication leaders are changing quickly. In many organizations, they are no longer responsible only for messaging plans or internal updates. They are increasingly expected to advise executives, guide change, strengthen culture, and help teams perform under pressure.
That broader mandate requires more than technical skill. It demands judgment, business fluency, adaptability, and the ability to turn complexity into clarity.
Mike often describes communication as a form of coordination infrastructure—the system that helps organizations move together as they grow more complex.
SBB: What capabilities will define successful communication leaders in the next era of business?
MK: The first will be the ability to grow and nurture networks, inside and outside of their enterprises. The second will be proactivity – the willingness to initiate, to ask tough but valuable questions, to seize opportunities. And the third in my top three would be resourcefulness: how to build and deliver effective solutions with a minimum of budget and permission.
The Untapped Power of Connection
It is no longer structure alone that creates stability, or information alone that creates progress. In a world where organizations are more distributed and change is constant, success depends on something less visible but far more powerful: the strength of connection between people working toward a common direction.
Yet this is where many organizations still have a blind spot. Formal communication systems often prioritize distribution, announcements, and feedback channels, while paying far less attention to how trust, influence, and momentum actually move through everyday relationships across the business.
If organizations want people aligned around shared priorities, they need to understand not only what is communicated, but how people connect, interpret, and mobilize one another in practice.
SBB: Where do you see the biggest missed opportunity for organizations trying to build alignment today?
MK: This is something organizations glaringly miss. Very few communication pros talk openly about word-of-mouth and its role as the massive beating heart of internal communication, and fewer take the initiative to understand it, research it, and measure it. Organizational Network Analysis is the single most powerful research tool on the planet, and very few comms folks are aware of it and fewer still are willing to touch it. But if organizations are serious about moving in a common direction, the focus needs to shift from distribution and feedback to connecting and mobilizing people and action. That’s the biggest opportunity we face.
“Very few communication pros talk openly about word-of-mouth and its role as the massive beating heart of internal communication.”
Mike Klein
What Comes Next
The future of communication will not be shaped only by new tools or faster channels. It will be shaped by whether organizations can build trust, maintain clarity, and stay connected through constant change.
Those outcomes rarely happen on their own. They must be built intentionally through leadership, capability, and communities that help people learn faster together.
This is why the conversation around communication is becoming more strategic. It is no longer simply about what organizations say. It is about how they sustain progress as they evolve.
SBB: What separates organizations that treat communication tactically from those that use it strategically?
MK: It’s a good question because it’s really rare when organizations systemically do it well. It also depends on what organizations actually need. In an organization that’s driving and seeking stable success, it’s often invisible: comms leader impact showing up quietly in crises avoided, customer dissatisfaction minimized, stakeholder friction well-managed. In organizations that are in dynamic or ambitious states, it’s much more visible and requires a different stance – where communication actually needs to be the driving theme of leadership. I wouldn’t use the term “tactically” and “strategically” as much as I’d use “defensively” and “proactively.”
“If organizations are serious about moving in a common direction, the focus needs to shift from distribution and feedback to connecting and mobilizing people and action.”
Mike Klein
Communication is no longer about what organizations send. It is about how people act when they are connected.
In fast-changing environments, alignment does not come from messages or structure alone, but from the relationships that shape how decisions are made in real time.
That is what makes progress possible.
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