Recruiter Michael Patino on Turnover and Talent Gaps in Corporate Comms

In this bonus episode, Shahar Silbershatz is joined by executive search veteran Michael Patino, founder of Patino Associates, to unpack their latest Global CCO Turnover Study. From turnover trends to succession planning gaps, Mike offers a candid, data-backed view of the evolving corporate communications landscape — and what companies (and aspiring leaders) must do to keep pace.

Drawing on over 25 years in executive search and talent advisory, Mike shares eye-opening stats, regional comparisons, and practical guidance for navigating a fast-changing communications environment shaped by AI and shifting CEO expectations.

🔑 What you’ll learn in this episode

• Why CCO turnover surged post-COVID — and why it’s stabilizing now
• Why 60% of CCO hires are external — and what that says about succession planning
• Why communications leads the way in gender balance at the C-level
• How tenure and turnover differ across the US, UK, Germany, and France — and what cultural and structural factors play a role
• Why AI isn’t replacing CCOs — but those who can use it wisely will stand out
• 📉 Why the “CCO+” trend is overstated — and the real shift is toward strategic advisory, not empire-building

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to AI in Strategic Operations

00:37 Welcome to the Podcast

00:49 Meet Michael Patino

01:16 Mike's Career Journey

01:50 About Patino Associates

03:57 The Global CCO Turnover Report

05:15 Key Trends in CCO Hiring

06:53 Gender Balance in Communications

09:39 External vs. Internal CCO Hires

14:46 Challenges in Succession Planning

24:39 Regional Differences in CCO Turnover

30:36 Impact of AI on the CCO Role

35:49 Future of the CCO Role

38:48 Advice for Aspiring Communicators

41:03 Surprising Findings from the Study

42:26 Conclusion and Farewell

Visit https://patinoassociates.com/ for more.

Music

Alex Guz from Pixabay

To stay current with corporate reputation trends and track perceptions of global companies and industries, visit groupcaliber.com.

Transcript

Mike Patino: What we are starting to see is individuals being able to show how they utilize AI as part of their strategic and operational process, and how that changes their ability to get more out of the personnel that they have in the organization. That is beginning to become attractive and interesting to a CEO and to a leadership team, especially in a resource-constrained environment that we're in right now, or an ambiguous environment where resources are constrained.

Shahar Silbershatz: Welcome back to Always On, the podcast about brand, reputation, and data-driven communications. I'm your host in Copenhagen, Shahar Silbershatz. Today we have a bonus episode, and for that bonus episode, we have a special guest. Mike Patino from Patino Associates is joining us from the US. They recently published a report on global CCO turnover. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about a lot of the other trends that they've covered regarding the CCO role. Very happy to have you with us, Mike, today. 

Mike Patino: Thank you so much for having me, Shahar, and for creating a bonus episode for me. I feel so special.

Shahar Silbershatz: You should. Well, it's great to have you with us. Let's start out with something that we always do. Tell us about yourself. How do you introduce yourself in a cocktail party to people who don't know you? 

Mike Patino: I am an executive recruiter who focuses on corporate communications and public affairs assignments. This is my 25th year in executive recruiting. I spent several years with two of the large global search firms before starting Patino Associates in the depths of the Great Recession in 2008. And over the course of the last 16 years, we have built up two different companies now that focus on recruiting and corporate affairs.

Shahar Silbershatz: Great. So, tell us a little bit more, to those listeners who don't know much about Patino Associates, tell us how you got into that. Tell us a little bit about the background that led you to the career track that you have today. 

Mike Patino: Like a lot of people in executive search, I came in through the back door, which is to say nobody graduates from university and decides that they want to be in executive search. Most people don't even know that it's a world that exists until later on in their careers. 

And so I, through a long story, had an opportunity to follow a former colleague from a different company into one of the large global executive search firms and joined at the beginning of 2001, right at the end of the tech boom, as it was becoming the tech bust, and it worked to my advantage because I worked in a lot of different practice areas with a lot of different partners, which is rare, quite honestly, in executive search. And so I got to see a lot of different ways to do things and kind of find my own way, which led me to create a corporate communications practice for that firm, which they had not had before.

Shahar Silbershatz: And then from that, later on, you started at your own firm? 

Mike Patino: Yes, yes. And so it's been, like I said, just about 16 years now. 

Shahar Silbershatz: And do you particularly focus on the US market, or do you do this globally? 

Mike Patino: We focus primarily on the US market. We do work with global clients and have done work both overseas for US companies. And we've done work in the US for global companies that are headquartered overseas. We did, about three years ago, actually create a Corporate Affairs Search Alliance with five other member firms throughout Europe, all of whom are very much like Patino Associates, all high-quality boutiques, kind of number one or number two within their markets. It is a great group of individuals, and in fact, I'm about to spend two days with them next week while they're all together in Dublin. So I'm looking forward to seeing all my friends again. 

Shahar Silbershatz: Yeah, that sounds like fun. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the report. You recently published a report. Tell us a bit about that. 

Mike Patino: Sure. So we produced our annual Chief Communications Officer Turnover Study. And this is a report that we brought back into existence about two years ago. And the goal in creating the report was really to be able to show the market, both the CCOs themselves, but also the senior executives hiring CCOs, CEOs and boards of directors, and CHROs, kind of what is happening in the market. What are the shifts that are happening in terms of what kinds of people are being hired and why? And to be able to bring that data to the forefront to help people in making the decisions around what they should be looking for in a Chief Communications Officer going forward.

Shahar Silbershatz: And how many years have you been running this global annual study? 

Mike Patino: So this is the third year that we've done it. We did it once many years ago, and then I got too busy with search work. And then we brought it back into existence two years ago. And then that was just in the US, and then last year we did it with our friends at the Corporate Affairs Search Alliance and created more of a global report, which we intend to do going forward as well.

Shahar Silbershatz: Okay, great. And so with your vantage point, spanning quite a number of years in this field, what would you say are some of the key trends or changes that you've observed in the CCO landscape over the years? 

Mike Patino: We went through an incredible supercycle of hiring from really early 2020 through about the end of ‘22, beginning of ‘23. And in large part, that was driven by the response to the pandemic and to some of the cultural and social issues that we saw here, specifically in the United States, but also around the world as well.

And as some people might say, communications had its day in the sun, but there was a significant amount of turnover, a lot of investment hiring that we saw across the board. Inevitably, that's never going to last forever. And so in 2023, there was a lot less turnover. In fact, it was the lowest that we had seen in five years.

And so in 2024 last year, we saw it rise kind of almost back up to the median for the last few years. And we expect, just based on what we've seen in the first quarter of this year, it will be at or above the level of 2024 for this coming year as well. 

Shahar Silbershatz: Okay. So that's a key trend. You're saying it used to be high turnover. Now it's gotten down again. What are some of the other key changes over the years or trends that you've seen when it comes to CCO hiring beyond the turnover itself? 

Mike Patino: Certainly, the gender balance within communications and how different that is relative to what we would find in some other corporate areas. Interestingly enough, if we had had that conversation 10 years ago, I think the answer would've been, candidly, “That's where we hire women into the senior executive team to show balance.” Today, that's absolutely not the issue behind this at all. In fact, the reality is there is an outstanding bench of talent that is female, that is, you know, that is having their opportunity to show what they're capable of doing.

Shahar Silbershatz: So why would you say that there is more gender balance in this function? I mean, I believe more than 50% are women in your study, which is very different from other functions, C-level executives in companies. Why would you think that in this function it's different? 

Mike Patino: A lot of it is driven, if I'm kind of looking back historically, a lot of it is driven by the hiring that's happening at the lower levels, specifically on the agency side.

Agencies are the kind of proving ground for a lot of talents that come in right out of university, and they have that opportunity to kind of gain the skills and come up through the ranks. Inevitably, a large portion of those people decide to leave agency life and go in-house at some point in their career.

And so that's what begins to populate, I'll say, the middle ranks of corporate. And then from there, it's really a meritocracy as to who moves up and not. So if you go and look at the hiring that's happening at the very junior levels within agencies, the balance is almost 70-30 or greater female in most of those cases.

And so, quite honestly, one of the interesting things that we've seen, on the agency side in particular, in some of the lower levels, is how do we actually strive to achieve more balance than they've had in the last few years? Meaning they want to actually bring, you know, more men to the table because they're concerned that it's, well, you know, being overwhelmingly female, and agencies do want a balanced environment. 

Shahar Silbershatz: So that actually starts in university, would you say then? More women than men graduate these types of disciplines, these types of degrees, and then get into agencies? 

Mike Patino: I would say that that's the case. It's been very interesting. I've had some conversations with a number of deans of different programs here in the United States and they are also trying to work on how to address the gender issue within their programs. 

Shahar Silbershatz: Interesting. There's another interesting metric I noticed in your report, and that's the fact that I think about 60% of hires are external hires, which is much, much higher than other positions you mentioned, like CEOs and CFOs. How do you explain that? 

Mike Patino: It's a really interesting dynamic that exists within communications relative to other functions. Specifically, the two issues that create this dynamic are, one, organizations for communications are typically very flat and much smaller, so the opportunity to truly develop someone on your team to be your successor is a lot harder. The challenge of bringing someone in who is running your media relations team, or running your employee communications team and asking them to become the vice president or senior vice president of corporate communications for an organization, is challenging if they've only grown up in one functional area, if they haven't had that opportunity.

It really is a challenge much in the same way that you would find in finance. If you only grew up as an accountant, as a controller, and you had never worked in treasury or investor relations or tax or so on, you would be seen as kind of very two-dimensional candidate, right? Finance has done a better job over the last, I'd say, 20, 30 years of really trying to figure out how to cross-train people throughout their career, so that they will be ready for more of an integrated finance role.

Communications is a little bit further behind on that in large part because of the size of the teams, right? If you have someone who is your head of media relations and they're incredibly good and the CEO trusts them, and you've got them through a crisis, like, the idea of plucking that person out and putting them in internal communications or even switching your internal communications and your external communications person, creates a great deal of anxiety for the chief communications officer, because they know that they're gonna have to go through that rough patch while both sides kind of figure out their new roles and there isn't a lot of room for that downturn, so to speak, in performance.

And so we find that more and more often, individuals are actually creating those opportunities for themselves by moving to other organizations, right? So somebody who's leading media relations in one place says, I want to become a CCO someday. I recognize that I need experience in internal communication or policy communications, or something else, and they're going and seeking that opportunity externally because it's not being offered to them internally. And so that is how candidates are really building their career to be capable candidates for a chief communications officer role.

So when you take all of that into consideration, right, 60%, it is a lot, quite honestly. But what it's really being driven by is, more often than not, CEOs are coming to us and saying, “This is what I want out of the role.” And one of the first questions we ask them is, “Are there any internal candidates?” And sometimes it is, “Yes, I have someone that I want to take a look at. I want to see some candidates matched up against that person and see how my internal candidate really measures up.” But in most cases, they quickly say, “No, we don't believe that anybody on the team is capable of stepping up.”

And I get the risk of sounding silly, a part of me gets a little sad when I hear that because I would love for it to be an internal-external battle at the end of the day, right? I would love to be able to say, “Great, let's really challenge this internal person. Let me go bring three people to the table and see if they've shown up.” I've placed internal candidates before, right? And I'm very happy when that happens. And the client's very happy when that happens because they know that they've gone through a process whereby their best has been challenged by the best externally, and they truly felt like their internal candidate was the right person for the job.

Shahar Silbershatz: And then there's a question, I imagine, of whether that's a perception issue internally, that you don't have any internal candidates, or it's a fact that there isn’t a big enough talent pool internally? 

Mike Patino: It's a little bit of both, unfortunately, right? So I would say, on a case-by-case basis, there are some organizations that I've worked with in the last couple of years where I've been surprised, especially because I know some of the people in those kinds of deputy-level roles.

And I'm surprised that they're not being given a consideration for it. But in a lot of cases, especially because of the size of the teams, the gap is too great between the CCO and their functional leads. And so it is what drives the market in large part. 

Shahar Silbershatz: Do you then sometimes recommend to your clients or companies in general different strategies of how to enhance their internal pipeline of talent, or what to do to have succession planning in a better way?

Mike Patino: You know, it's interesting. That's actually something that we've been developing, both in terms of, I'll say, from a content perspective, but also from a capability perspective, for our client base, because we don't see this issue getting better and we're a little concerned that it could be getting worse. And what I really mean by that is if we go back 20 years ago, or 25 years ago, there were, call it 20 or 30, academy companies that were considered truly best in class in communications. And as recruiters, we stole from them all the time. It was the IBMs, it was the GEs, it was the Pepsis.

It was, I mean, you can see where those, those trees have dropped people along the way. The good news today is that there is outstanding talent in hundreds of companies across the board. However, the number of companies that are being built in the United States and the number of companies that are seeing value in communications in the United States are continuing to grow, and that demand will strain supply at some point.

And in moments of crisis, like what we saw during the pandemic, like what we've seen even in the last 90 days here in the United States, the mettle and capability of the chief communications officers are going to be tested. And unfortunately, some of them will fail in the eyes of their chief CEO.

And the CEO will come to us and say, “We need to make a change because I don't feel like I've got the right person to lead me through this next, you know, choppy set of waters.” 

Shahar Silbershatz: So that's a potential point of crisis for the industry. What you're describing, there's increasing demand on one side, the supply doesn't seem to be growing enough, or growing in a way that places people in line for a potential CCO position. So it sounds like there's a bit of a crunch in the market coming up. 

Mike Patino: Let me be very clear. The crunch is on the supply of high-quality candidates, right? That is the hardest part. And in some ways, the number of companies who have a more mature understanding of communications is increasing, right? There are companies out there who say, “Yes, I need a head of communications.” It's really operating at a director level here in the United States.

It's a mid-level role. It's someone who can, you know, handle a media request, who can churn out a press release. It's, you know, someone who can kind of make sure that the company doesn't get into too much trouble. But they are not providing strategy. They are not aligning the communication strategy against the overall corporate objectives.

They're not delivering on that. They're not helping to drive the business and as CEOs and CFOs and CHROs move from company to company and they come from more mature environments where they're used to having strong communications and they walk into a billion-dollar company that has a director of communications who may be just fine, right? No disrespect to the person who is the director, but now all of a sudden, the expectations have been raised, right? 

And the CEO saying, “Wait a minute, I used to have a vice president or senior vice president level person who was really hip to hip with me, helping me through strategy and aligning communications with our business objectives and helping us to drive our narrative to the success that we want in the business, I don't have that now with this director. I need more than what this director can provide.” Right? And so, again, no disrespect to the director, but we need to go out and find somebody at a different level.

That's what's driving the demand. Right? And so there are a number of, you know, people who are on the sidelines right now and some of them are great. I mean, there are people who are, you know, in between opportunities who are going to find really good jobs very soon, especially if we have anything to say about it. But that demand for truly high-quality individuals is outstripping the supply in some parts of the market and probably will continue to do so.

Shahar Silbershatz: That's very interesting. Let's talk a little bit about the high-level turnover numbers. That's really the main topic of your report. You said before that turnover rates have dropped in the last couple of years. What are the actual rates? Why do you consider them low? How do they compare with other positions?

Mike Patino: In 2021 and 2022, the rates for turnover were 15% in 2021 and 17% in 2022. Compare that against a long-term average of about 11 to 12%, not just for chief communications officers, but for all C-suite positions across the board. That is about the average turnover that one would see in the market over a long period of time.

So in ‘21 and ‘22, you know, you add those two years together, almost a third of the market turned over in two years. That is a significant amount of people, and the reality is, unless companies made bad hiring decisions in those two years, there was naturally going to be a fall-off. And that's exactly what we saw in 2023 when it was down to 8%, which was much lower than we anticipated.

And the market felt that way. There weren't that many senior roles coming online. There were a lot of people who were kind of waiting to see what would come next. As we got into, you know, the end of 2023, really into the beginning of 2024, we started to see things open up. And so we saw the rate in 2024 go up to 10.5%. 

Shahar Silbershatz: And how does that compare? You mentioned that's also the average rate for other positions and functions. Do you have any benchmarks that you look at as well, other C-level positions? 

Mike Patino: Comparatively, in 2024, the CEO turnover rate for the comparable group was 11%. And the CFO rate was 11% as well. Interestingly, if you look at the comparisons for the year prior, at the CEO level, turnover was a little over 9% in 2023. And CFO turnover was actually much higher. It was a little over 16% in 2023. 

Shahar Silbershatz: So they don't always move in tandem, it sounds like. 

Mike Patino: They absolutely do not move in tandem. One of the things that we've noticed over the last, I would say, five years in particular, is the decoupling between the CEO and the CCO. If we were having this conversation 10 years ago, and a CEO left an organization, whether it was willingly or unwillingly, there was pretty much a high correlation that, within 90 days, the first two people out the door were going to be the chief financial officer and the chief communications officer. And that was really because those two people were seen as, you know, his or her people. And what we've seen today is a much lower turnover rate in the early stages of a new CEO's tenure.

Typicall,y what we're seeing now is that that decision is probably coming 12 to 24 months in, and in part it is less about the relationship between the CEO and the CCO personally speaking and more about professionally, “Is this the environment that I want to be in? Is this someone that I can operate and support successfully?” Which is, I think, healthier, quite honestly. I think that the decisions that were made years ago about, you know, “I'm gonna clear out the executive ranks and bring my people in”, create some real challenges and cause a lot more pain and uncertainty within an organization within the first 12 to 24 months of a CEO's tenure.

And so what's really happening more today is CEOs are walking in the door and being more comfortable looking at their leadership and saying, “How do I make it work with people who are arguably incredibly talented?” And the changes that are happening earlier are really more about, “I don't see this person actually being at the level of talent that we need to be part of the C-suite,” rather than “This isn't my person. I want to go bring my person in.” 

Shahar Silbershatz: Right. I guess in a way it's maybe also a testament to the growing strategic nature of the role. So it's no longer the chief of staff, if I leave and they're gonna leave. It's actually a strategic executive in the company that can operate under different strategies, but just align themselves with those strategies.

Mike Patino: Absolutely. That is a huge shift that we have seen over the course of the last decade or so. It is not just the respect according to communications and corporate affairs, but really the expectation that it does operate strategically as part of the C-suite. And so when a new CEO is coming in, the kinds of conversations that are happening are typically, not always, but typically more about, “How do you fit into what I'm trying to do as the CEO strategically? and less about, “How are you going to make me the CEO and the company look good because you run communications?”

Shahar Silbershatz: Now, I also noticed there are a lot of regional differences. You did this study across several countries, and you mentioned the turnover rates being around 11%, which you say is close to the historical average. How does that change across countries? 

Mike Patino: In Europe, we saw a pretty wide disparity. Some of that is because we were using smaller groups of companies than we were here in the US in our first year. But as a zone, the European zone, the turnover was about 12%. So it was pretty consistent.

When you start to get into individual markets, we saw Germany as low as 10%. And we saw the UK as high as 23%. 

Shahar Silbershatz: And how do you explain that? I mean, are there market conditions or circumstances that you think could shed light on that? 

Mike Patino: In certain markets, like Germany and France, there is a much lower rate of turnover across the board in the C-suite. It is more relationship-oriented than what we'd find here in the US, and probably like it was in the US a number of years ago.

CCO turnover was more tied to CEO turnover directly on a one-to-one basis. In the UK, look, from my vantage point here in the US, the UK is an incredibly tough market from a media perspective. CEO turnover has been higher there for the last year or two as well. And the CCO turnover that we're seeing there in part is driven by, I'll say, capability and the success of the communications function, but also in some cases we've seen a little bit of burnout in that market, much as we have in the US as well. 

Shahar Silbershatz: I noticed there were some regional differences across some of the other metrics. For example, tenure seemed to be much bigger in Germany than in some of the other markets. Did you look into the reasons locally of what's driving tenure, market by market? Is that something that you or some of your associates in Europe looked into or found a way to explain? 

Mike Patino: Yes. So the tenure that we saw in the European markets, again, was driven largely by, I'm going to call it, the cultural and operational differences in different European markets. So, you know, again, given the high level of turnover in the UK just in the last year, the average CCO tenure was a little more than three years, whereas in Germany and France, which are much more stable C-suite environments, and in many cases had a small number of companies with a decent amount or decent proportion of the people having been enrolled for more than 10 years each, the average tenure was closer to five years and five and a half years in the case of Germany.

Shahar Silbershatz: So, when you try to explain the differences across regions when it comes to tenure, for example, do you typically look at cultural patterns that might explain that? Or is it mostly organizational reasons or is it a matter of the maturity of the market when it comes to the communication function? Different types of roles in different countries? Or what do you typically look at as potential explanations? 

Mike Patino: It's typically organization to organization rather than, I'll say, cultural at the country level. I do feel like there is some correlation to the maturity of the market itself, right?

So I think some of the markets that we looked at, especially where we're looking at the top 100 or fewer companies, feel like what we saw in the US 15, 20 years ago, where those are truly the academy companies and they retain their talent very tightly, especially at the senior-most levels. And so there's a higher degree of stability.

What will be interesting from my vantage point, and the vantage point of my partners in the Corporate Affairs Search Alliance, is how does that evolve over the course of the next 10 years, right? What happens to, you know, the number two people at Siemens, for example, if they're not going to have the opportunity to get into the senior-most role? Are they going to seek opportunities in other companies, you know, over the course of the next several years? What happens to the diversification of talent in a market like Germany or in a market like France, where you have an increasing supply, quite honestly?

Shahar Silbershatz: So, do you predict that some of those trends that you're seeing now are some of the differences across regions? Do you see those as continuing as they are? Or do you think that they're going to evolve and resemble, with time, more what you're seeing in the US market? 

Mike Patino: What will be interesting about that, Shahar, is what we don't really know yet is, “What is the demand going to look like? How is the demand going to evolve in a country like France?” You know, will there be more companies that are beginning to take communications as a more significant strategic driver of the business? Or will they still see it as a support function to the business? And that really does drive how you utilize communications, how you think about staffing the senior role, and therefore kind of the demand for truly outstanding talent. In the UK, it is far more like the United States, where it really does have a seat at the table. The expectations are incredibly high. The talent has developed pretty rapidly over the course of the last 10 years, and, in some cases, they're actually exporting talent into other markets.

Shahar Silbershatz: Let's talk a little bit about AI. You know, it's very hard to do a podcast episode these days without mentioning AI for better or worse. But I'm sure you have some thoughts about how AI is impacting the role of CCOs today, and definitely probably the skills that CEOs are looking for in a CCO. What are you seeing from your perspective? 

Mike Patino: The most surprising thing that people say comes out of my mouth around AI and CCOs is, from my vantage point, I have yet to have a CEO ask me if a CCO should or does know anything about AI. So part of that is just where we are in the maturity of AI adoption within corporate America, the global corporate environment.

But what we are starting to see is individuals being able to show how they utilize AI as part of their strategic and operational process, and how that changes their ability to get more out of the personnel that they have in the organization. That is beginning to become attractive and interesting to a CEO and to a leadership team, especially in a resource-constrained environment that we're in right now, or an ambiguous environment where resources are constrained, right?

So it's not necessarily that CCO candidates are walking in the door saying, “This is how I'm going to make it better. It's not using the AI as the primary lever, but it is being able to show I can use AI in targeted ways, right? It is not a silver bullet or a panacea to the problem, but I can use it in targeted ways to unlock capacity within my team, which we can then use in more high-quality and greater value ways to benefit the organization.” That really jumps off the page for a CEO and for a leadership team. 

Shahar Silbershatz: Do you think the role itself will change significantly in the coming years because of AI?

Mike Patino: I'm probably gonna sound like a Luddite at this point. I do not believe that AI is going to take over the world and therefore… 

Shahar Silbershatz: Not the world. Just the CCO role. 

Mike Patino: Look, the thing that we haven't seen yet, and time will tell if it happens within my lifetime, is AI's ability to actually utilize judgment. That is what's going to create issues at the senior executive level in any functional area, but communications in particular, right?

We can sit here and we can look at data, we can look at narrative, we can look at assets, we can look at trends, and we can make assumptions based on those trends. But the ability to have judgment because, quite honestly, this function is about communicating with people.

And if we don't understand people and where their individual and collective minds are going and are headed, and might be affected, it will not take us over in that regard, it will not take over CCOs in that regard. 

Shahar Silbershatz: S,o communications might be the last bastion of human interaction in the company, which actually makes a lot of sense because they are responsible for the human side of the company.

Mike Patino: That is absolutely correct, and I think what will be difficult to watch in the transition is, as companies begin to see the value of using AI in certain aspects of communications, their desire to apply it more and more can become challenging, right? So, to use marketing, for example, just by comparison in marketing, there's a lot of work, very good work that's being done around utilizing AI, especially in the analytics side of marketing.

There's also a lot of capability of using AI on the creative side of marketing. However, if you do not speak the language of creativity, either in photography or in film or what have you, your ability to prompt-engineer a fantastic tool to deliver what you want is going to be highly limited at the end of the day, right?

There will always be, in that capacity, a human aspect to the role. And if you can't prompt-engineer, just like with any other tool, if you can't tell it exactly what you want, you're not gonna get exactly what you want back. And that's gonna be the biggest challenge. There will be opportunities, I think, where people will utilize AI to shortcut, for example, a creative process or a judgment process.

And it will inevitably fail because nothing is going to be right all the time. And it will probably reinforce for those individuals and for the broader world at large that the human does need to be part of the loop somewhere along the way. 

Shahar Silbershatz: No, it's great to get your perspective on that. So, how do you see the role evolving over the next few years?

Mike Patino: What we see at this point is a refocusing in some ways on some of the core aspects of communications and corporate affairs. I think what was really interesting in, I would say, 2021 through the beginning of 2024, mid-2024, was that we saw this rise where communicators were beginning to gain more responsibility in certain environments, right? More responsibility outside of communications, or in some cases even outside of traditional corporate affairs. 

They might be getting aspects of marketing. They might be getting human resources. We saw in some cases it could be sustainability, it could be any number of things, and we saw some of the trade press and some of the broader media try to talk about it as a trend, as communications was going to take over the world.

Shahar Silbershatz: The CCO-plus discussion.

Mike Patino: What we saw at the end of the day — the CCO-plus discussion, exactly —what we saw at the end of the day was that great leaders were being recognized and rewarded for being great leaders. We're not seeing, nor had we begun to see, this broader trend, and in fact we looked at that in the turnover study in the US, and we looked at the number of roles that increased in breadth when they changed.

And we looked at the number of roles that decreased in breadth when they changed, and we did not know what to expect when we looked at this. It was exactly the same number. There were the same number of upgrades as there were downgrades in communications last year, and what that told us was it was not a trend; it was really about individual situations more than anything else.

Shahar Silbershatz: So in that sense, when it comes to how the role evolves over the next coming years, you see more around becoming more focused on leadership capabilities of the individuals and  their strategic capabilities? 

Mike Patino: Yeah, I think that what we're going to see is there will be no shortage of opportunities for communicators to demonstrate not only their worth as individuals, but the value of their function in partnership with the other parts of the organization.

And that's a really important distinction. We talked earlier about the idea of communications supporting the business rather than strategically advising or strategically driving the business. We're going to see less and less and less of that support function mentality in a wider variety of corporations.

We'll see that that expectation for what talent is supposed to do in the senior level roles continue to rise. And we'll see if communications can, communications leaders can rise to that challenge in their respective environments. 

Shahar Silbershatz: And given that, what would you recommend or advise a young aspiring communicator who wants to plan their career and reach the higher echelons?

Mike Patino: Development is a really tricky thing, and I said earlier we're looking to help address that as part of our commitment to this community of communicators. There are several programs that are out there already formally, such as Page Up and the Future Leaders Experience that Page offers. IPR’s Elevate and the IPR Next programs are both outstanding as well. So those are some opportunities.

What we say to the younger folks, or the more junior folks in their careers, is to say you need to understand first and foremost that you are responsible for your development. If you stand there and expect that someone else is going to build the development plan and walk you through a development plan and tap you on the shoulder every year and a half and give you a new opportunity, especially in communications, you are sorely mistaken.

So the ability to appropriately advocate for yourself is going to be important. It also means that, as a junior person, you need to begin to understand the breadth of opportunities that may or may not exist within your current environment and how you can position yourself for those things.

Part of that is by communicating to your superiors your level of interest in doing different things, right? One of the challenges is I've watched people go, “Gosh, you know, X person left and went to another company and they're going to take this job in content. And they said it was because they didn't think that they could get the content job in my company. And I thought, well, gosh, if they had just told me that they were interested, I would've moved them into that job a year ago.”
 
Whose fault is that that miscommunication happened? I would argue that it's both sides, even though each would point the finger at the other. And so you know that that responsibility really does fall as much on the junior person as it does on the senior leader.

Shahar Silbershatz: That's good advice. So the last question that I wanted to ask you is, was there anything in the results of the study that surprised you? Or somehow challenged your assumptions that you thought, “This, I didn't expect.” 

Mike Patino: The biggest surprise was what we talked about earlier in terms of the number of upgrades versus upgrades in the function, that CCO-plus trend that we were talking about. That was the thing that really kind of knocked our socks off.

Shahar Silbershatz: The myth-busting.

Mike Patino: I would — yeah, the myth-busting, I would say — because we had not focused on other markets outside of the US before this year. I think there was some really interesting data about tenure and turnover in some of the European markets, and we're very interested to see what those trends start to look like over the course of the next year or two as we continue the study and continue to map it back to the US and also, quite honestly, to increase the number of companies that we're covering in each of those markets to kind of give a bigger comparative factor from one market to the next. Right now, we're looking at typically the top 100 or less in some of the European markets, whereas in the US, we're up to about 750 companies that we're covering, and we intend to expand that even more in the coming year. 

Shahar Silbershatz: That sounds great. Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining us. Super interesting conversation, and definitely an interesting topic that we all want to hear more about. So I appreciate your time. 

Mike Patino: Thank you, Shahar, for having us. It's been a pleasure.

Shahar Silbershatz: Many thanks for listening to this episode of Always On. If you haven't done so already, check out some of the other episodes. They're packed with unique insights from seasoned experts at leading companies. Oh, and if you have any comments or questions about anything you've heard on the pod, we'd love to hear from you. Just drop us a line at podcast@groupcaliber.com. Thanks again for listening. Till next time, take care.