The Comms Leadership Show
A live podcast for communications leaders
Join Hel Reynolds, the Comms Creatives team and communications leaders from across the UK, talking about how to build the best comms teams.
Five Wednesdays in January. Live at 12 noon. Free to join.
The conversations every head of comms and communications manager wishes they had time for.
Book your place in the live audience
For: Communications and marketing professionals
Where: Live on Zoom
(And a video replay sent straight to your inbox later on)
Cost: FREE
The hour you never get
You spend all week thinking about everyone else.
What your CEO needs from you. What your organisation should say. Whether your team has the time and skills to deliver it. What needs signing off. What’s suddenly urgent. What your audiences need. What happened to the campaign you were supposed to be planning before Tuesday went completely off-piste.
Meanwhile, there are bigger questions you’re supposed to be thinking about.
Are we developing the right skills?
What is AI going to change about the people I need and the skills they need?
How do I help good people become more confident, creative and influential?
How do other Heads of Comms get their teams heard at the top?
Where should I invest in my team when budgets are tight?
And are we actually becoming the communications team I want us to be?
The Comms Leadership Show makes a little bit of time for those conversations.
For five Wednesday lunchtimes, we’ll get communications leaders together to talk properly about what it takes to build a happy comms team that makes an impact.
There’ll be research. Stories. Disagreements. Audience questions. Live polls. Interesting guests. Things we’ve learned from working with hundreds of communications teams. Things we’ve got completely wrong. And some unusual ad breaks.
Come and have lunch with us.
Save your place
We can have up to 300 guests in the audience per show – so save your place now and we’ll send you joining details in December, and a reminder a few minutes before each episode.
I(and if you can’t make it live, we’ll send you the replay video and podcast).
Five conversations about leading a comms team
Episode 1. What high-performing comms teams do differently
Wednesday 6 January, 12 noon | 60 minutes
What separates the comms teams that are trusted, ambitious and constantly getting better?
We’ll share what we’ve learned from working with hundreds of teams, reveal what other comms leaders tell us about theirs, and introduce our 5 Cs of Comms Impact: Clarity, Confidence, Creativity, Competence and Capacity.
Episode 2. What AI is actually changing in comms
Wednesday 13 January, 12 noon | 45 minutes
AI can already write the first draft. So what becomes more valuable when everyone can produce more, faster?
We’ll talk about the skills comms teams need now, what we’d happily hand over to AI forever, and what we’d never let it touch.
Episode 3. How to build a team that's brave enough to do brilliant work
Wednesday 20 January, 12 noon | 45 minutes
Your team probably has better ideas than your organisation ever gets to see.
We’ll talk about confidence, creativity, risk and sign-off, including brilliant ideas that flopped, ridiculous ones that worked and how leaders can give people room to try things.
Episode 4. What it looks like when comms has real influence
Wednesday 27 January, 12 noon | 45 minutes
Some comms teams help shape decisions. Others hear about them when somebody needs a press release.
We’ll explore what earns trust, gets comms involved earlier and helps your team confidently advise senior colleagues. Plus the requests that make comms professionals quietly die inside.
Episode 5: How to become the Head of Comms who gets a yes
Wednesday 3 February, 12 noon | 45 minutes
You know what would make your team better. Now you need buy-in, support and someone to pay for it.
We’ll talk about making a convincing case for investing in your people, what CEOs and Finance Directors need to hear, and what comms leaders would do if £10,000 suddenly appeared in their budget.
Meet your host
Hel Reynolds is the founder of Comms Creatives and has spent more than a decade helping communications professionals become braver, more creative and better at what they do.
She’s led comms teams in house, and trained teams at organisations including Cambridge, Eton, the BBC and Cats Protection, worked with hundreds of communications teams across the public, charity and commercial sectors, and has spoken at CommsHero conference for eleven years running.
That means she’s seen a lot of comms teams from the inside.
The brilliant ones. The overwhelmed ones. The ones doing exceptional work with three people and no budget. The ones with good ideas trapped somewhere around Sign-off Version 14 FINAL final2.docx.
Hel will host all five episodes, joined by familiar faces from the Comms Creatives team and special guests.
Expect practical experience, curiosity, strong opinions, ridiculous examples and the occasional diversion caused by something excellent happening in the live chat.
Familiar faces and special guests
A good podcast gets better when you know the people you’re listening to.
So you’ll see some familiar Comms Creatives faces throughout the five weeks, alongside special guests chosen for each conversation.
We’ll hear opinions. Stories. Experiences. Disagreements. Things that worked brilliantly. Things that spectacularly failed.
The conversations you’d have with other comms people if somebody actually gave you 45 minutes to have them.
We’ll announce guests as the series gets closer.
The 5 Cs of Comms Impact
We’ve worked with hundreds of communications teams and use five things to think about what helps them have more impact.
Clarity
Knowing what you’re trying to achieve, who matters and where your team’s effort is best spent.
Confidence
Having the judgement and courage to give good advice, challenge when necessary and make your expertise count.
Creativity
Coming up with communications people notice, understand, remember and act on.
Competence
Having the skills to do the job brilliantly now and keeping those skills fresh as communications changes.
Capacity
Having enough time and headroom to think, learn, plan and do your best work.
You’ll hear us refer to the 5 Cs throughout the series because they give us a useful way to talk about what makes teams better.
Everyone who registers will also get our Comms Impact Scorecard, so you can score your own team across all five.
And when your team needs more than a conversation…
Here at Comms Creatives, our day job is training comms professionals.
Our live masterclasses give your team focused, practical training on individual skills and challenges.
And the Comms Creatives Academy gives your whole communications team professional development throughout the year.
Your internal communicators can develop their internal comms skills.
Your PR and media relations people can get better at finding stories, pitching them and working with journalists.
Your social and digital people can keep up with what’s changing.
Your managers and emerging leaders can develop their leadership skills.
And your whole team can learn more about strategy, creativity, AI, copywriting, behavioural science, measurement and the skills that make someone a really good communications professional.
One membership. Professional development for your whole comms team, all year.
During the show, we’ll tell you about relevant masterclasses when they can help with the thing we’re discussing.
We’ll introduce you to people who are already members of the Academy.
We’ll share stories about what teams have learned and changed.
And we’ll occasionally advertise Academy in creative and occasionally funny/regrettable ways that will keep you entertained.
If one of our conversations makes you think “my team needs help with this”, we’ll show you exactly where you can take it further.
Join the live podcast audience for leadership inspo
And we’ll have some fun together too.