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The unified Corporate Affairs function is gaining ground in most countries but progress is uneven. What’s driving the Corporate Affairs concept, what are the benefits and can we expect one role and one title to prevail?
Corporate Affairs Search Alliance (CASA) members in Europe and the USA reflected recently on the evolution of the role and its purpose.

Those of us with long, pre-Internet memories may recall an apparently simpler age where a company could manage entirely separate relationships. Communication with the media, the workforce, government, regulators and investors might all fall under separate functions, including marketing, HR, finance, and legal. With no-one responsible for the whole set, and each audience seeing little of what others were hearing, inconsistencies could build up over time.

The digital world changed that. What one stakeholder group sees is now readily available to another, internal communication inseparable from public statements. The argument for bringing all channels and audiences under one management umbrella has been strengthened.

Business sense, not just communications sense
“This doesn’t just make communications management sense, but also business sense”, according to Alex Gordon Shute, founder of Ithaca Partners. “Business has never stood apart from broader society: everyone’s customers, workforce and investors are all part of it, voting for governments which in turn drive the regulatory environment.”
Instead of one stakeholder group having a hub-and-spoke relationship with a company, they now freely debate each other’s turf. Unions comment on investment levels and returns, shareholders demand environmental sustainability. Enhanced by the rise of social media, the voices of special-interest groups and individual commentators now have faster, deeper impacts on corporate reputations. Government interventions have become far more material in recent years through lockdowns, bailouts and nationalisations triggered by the coronavirus crisis, followed by energy policy upheavals in response to the Russian assault on Ukraine.
So, on the face of it, there’s every motive for creating coherent, unified narratives. CASA members and their clients are seeing this underlying business need increasingly reflected in the formation of unified Corporate Affairs functions. Francine Rutgers of Dutch search firm Herman Rutgers said: “Companies are being more and more involved in reputation matters which are influenced by politics and regulations. That’s why the roles of public affairs and legal/regulatory can’t be separate functions.”
From the client side, Médard Schoenmaeckers, Head of Corporate Affairs at pharma group Boehringer Ingelheim, has strong views on the benefits of this approach. “Corporate Affairs is not merely a roof over three functions, but a new way of thinking that integrates the offering of the functions into one, globally aligned agenda”, he said. “There are strong connections between our brand positioning, our stakeholder engagement and the management of our policy agenda, so we approach this through one joined-up process.”
But progress is uneven across national boundaries.

Country variations
The role of the Corporate Affairs Director (CAD) is well established in the United Kingdom where Alex Gordon Shute, explained the current state of the art. “It includes the core areas of Internal Comms, External Comms and Public Affairs or Government Relations, and in the UK often includes other areas such as ESG and sustainability or NGO relations: sometimes marketing. Company lawyers are less powerful here than in the USA, so it´s rare for Government Relations to be split off to report to the General Counsel. If the disciplines don’t sit together under the CAD role, it’s often because of internal politics, rather than any lack of logic.”
The greater sway of the legal profession in American boardrooms makes the USA a different case, according to Michael Patino of Patino Associates. “Corporate Affairs is not very well established in our market. We intend to both educate leadership teams on the value of adopting a true Corporate Affairs model and to help develop the new generation of leaders capable of ascending to such a role”, he said.
The role is also fairly new in France, where Kim Johnson of Paris-based Exeter Search sees the greatest appetite in industries which have previously had to campaign the hardest. “The level of development depends on the historic exposure of the business or industry in question, and their response to this in the creation of an integrated role to better mitigate and manage reputational risk and opportunity,” she said.
In Ireland, Susie Farrell of Addison considers the Corporate Affairs function to be less well-developed than in other markets. But progress is being made. “Since Covid, organisations are leaning in on the Corporate Affairs function like never before. I’ve seen serious growth across this function in Ireland in the last few years”, she said.
While the Netherlands may be further along, there is still a long way to go, according to Francine Rutgers: “It is rather a new concept, growing in importance mainly because of the increase of international HQs and roles with an international responsibility in the Netherlands”.
Multi-nationals are certainly leading the pack, with further evidence from Germany. It is perhaps no surprise to see the Corporate Affairs designation in the German headquarters of McDonald’s, L’Oréal, Bristol Myers Squibb, Telefónica or Mars. But it is also now making headway in companies with German roots, including Daimler, Deutsche Bank, Katjes and Rotkäppchen. Philip Müller from PRCC, the German international search boutique adds: “Germany might be at the beginning of a journey, but the need to change the perception of Corporate Affairs is obvious. There will be hurdles along the way to break down established structures and processes as normally seen with change. To break these down, it will take the will and full support of the C-Suite.”

Implications for candidates
What does this mean for CAD candidates and those who appoint them? Médard Schoenmaeckers believes that all-round experience and understanding are key. “It requires a Corporate Affairs head who understands and is genuinely interested in the various disciplines, who can lead, influence and bring the best out of the experts in the various functions,” he said.
Alex Gordon Shute, from a London perspective, advocates for ambition when recruiting Corporate Affairs Directors: “Companies should be demanding more from the role, and therefore a higher level of talent from candidates. They should be equally balanced and equally brilliant in intellectual agility, emotional intelligence (EQ) and practical ‘core’ skills, combined with broad business and commercial acumen.”

Breaking down barriers
What holds companies back is often organisational habit: the tyranny of long-established structures and processes. Commitment from the top was crucial at Boehringer Ingelheim where Médard Schoenmaeckers reported the company “…succeeded in breaking down these barriers because top management expressed an explicit desire for change and fully supported it.”
From Alex Gordon Shute’s London perspective, any lack of boardroom enthusiasm for restructuring may reflect decision-makers not being aware of what they are missing. “Sadly, most CEOs have not seen great examples of Corporate Affairs so far. So there’s a need to educate, provide some models and blueprints, and ultimately empower other executives to judge better the difference between great Corporate Affairs and the mediocre version. The function does not lack talent or ambition – but it needs to be recognised, shown a visible path to better outcomes, and championed and supported to get there.”
Kim Johnson in Paris sees both top leadership and functional specialists as sharing responsibility for progress. “The function often remains underestimated, under-resourced, fragmented and siloed,” she said, “but Corporate Affairs Directors need to do their part in advocating for the access, resources and authority they need.”

The path ahead
Ultimately, the complexity of a company’s business, both geographically and in terms of stakeholder challenges, are likely to drive progress towards unified Corporate Affairs in the short and medium term. “So far, the Head of Corporate Affairs roles show up either in industries that are highly regulated, like utilities, or where the government is a major customer – healthcare, for example,” said Michael Patino from the USA. The majority of these are large scale organisations with significant complexity and resources.
The CASA consensus is that while countries may catch up at different speeds, the move towards the broad Corporate Affairs concept is only going in one direction as companies see the business benefits of greater integration.