How to Help Your Leadership Team Become Better Communicators
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About this Guide
Great communicators don’t necessarily make great leaders, but brilliant leaders are always superb communicators. That business leaders today must prioritize communication as a critical skillset is beyond debate. We know it from our own worklife experiences and from having witnessed the critical role CEO communication played during the pandemic, in addition to numerous research papers.
Last year, the global consulting firm McKinsey, published the results of extensive interviews with top CEOs around the world: CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest—and according to co-author Carolyn Dewar, communication skill is the thread that runs through everything that the best of the best excels at.
Leaders need to be able to clearly communicate the ambition, vision, and direction of the company; be able to align the organization; mobilize teams through leaders; engage the board; and connect with stakeholders, especially employees—the people who ultimately will deliver on company goals.
None of this can be accomplished without a prioritized focus on communication. Indeed, recent years have seen the emergence of increased employee expectations of highly visible and engaged leadership communication.
And in these times of rapid and unrelenting change, the need for an organization’s top executives to be visible and to communicate clearly and constantly at every stage of the change process is more critical than ever before—if they want people to change their behaviors and buy into the program.
This guide explores how IC professionals can not only help their CEOs and leadership teams become better communicators, but in doing so, become key trusted advisors for their engagement and relationship with employees.
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The Internal Communications Measurement Masterclass & Playbook
Internal communicators measure plenty. Open rates, click-throughs, attendance, views, and reach—most IC teams have dashboards full of the stuff. What they struggle with is proving that any of it made a difference to the business. And business impact is the only measurement their leaders genuinely care about. It's a gap most IC practitioners feel acutely. Gallagher's 2026 Employee Communications Report found that seven in 10 internal communicators still measure only basic activity metrics, and fewer than one in eight measure business impact. Measurement is the weakest capability in their global readiness model, and teams relying only on activity data are the ones struggling most to demonstrate their value. This is a two-part guide built to close that gap. Part One is the Masterclass. It sets out why outcome measurement matters, the frameworks that make it manageable, and the principles separating measurement that proves impact from measurement that just fills a dashboard. Part Two is the Playbook. It's the templates, the worked example, and the sample dashboard—the practical tools you'll need for a successful comms campaign. Read the Masterclass for the thinking. The Playbook is where you'll find the tools to put it into practice. We hope you find them useful. Tim Vaughan Editorial Director, Poppulo
The Internal Communications Measurement Masterclass & Playbook—Part Two: The Playbook
Many IC teams measure and report on what's easy to count: email open rates, video views, all-hands attendances. Outputs that leadership don’t much care about. They want to know whether communications actually changed anything—whether people understood something important and whether behavior looked different afterward. Leaders want proof of impact, they want to see results. Outputs don't give them that. Outcomes do. Part One of this paper, the Measurement Masterclass, clearly showed why. Here, Part Two gives you the tools to measure outcomes: four templates you can fill in for your own campaigns, plus a full worked example showing all four completed together, so you can see how they fit before you use them yourself. What’s inside: The Know/Feel/Do Framework. Defines what a specific audience needs to know, feel, and do as a result of your communication—specific enough to measure. One template per audience segment. The Outcome/Output/Measurement Plan. For each outcome, sets out the communication tactic you'll use and how you'll measure whether it worked. This is the template you'll use most. The SMART Objectives Worksheet. A short exercise for turning a vague goal into a specific, measurable one, with a number and a deadline attached. The Power/Influence Grid. Maps your audience by power and attitude—champions, supporters, blockers, detractors—so you know where to put your effort. A worked example. All four templates completed end-to-end for a company-wide AI policy rollout, so you can see the whole process applied to one campaign from start to finish. A sample measurement dashboard. A one-page example of how to present outcome data to leadership. Written by Andrew Hubbard, Senior Director of Communications at Poppulo, and Joanna Hall of Afire Consulting.
The AI Toolkit for Internal Communications
Internal communication is under real pressure. IC teams are expected to support leaders, shape culture, and deliver relevant, personalized communication to an increasingly diverse audience—all while operating at greater speed and scale than ever before. AI arrives at the right moment. It doesn’t replace communicators; it elevates them. Applied well, AI sharpens the fundamentals of effective communication: diagnosing issues, shaping the narrative, guiding leaders, and delivering messages that connect people to purpose and progress. At its best, AI accelerates drafting, adapts content for different formats, improves accessibility, and surfaces insights about what’s landing. Without governance, though, it can create noise or risk. The opportunity for IC teams is to bring AI in thoughtfully, with governance and human judgment at the center. This guide shows how to do exactly that. Inside, you’ll find practical guidance on when to use AI, where humans remain essential, how to establish guardrails, how to prompt effectively, and how to scale AI responsibly across channels and teams.