Leading through the communications governance gap

The recent IC Index 2026 makes for sobering reading. Trust in CEOs and senior leadership teams has fallen by nine points in a single year. Half of UK employees do not trust their leaders. Employee advocacy is down six points. The proportion rating their organisation’s communication as excellent has dropped nine points. Less than half say their organisation effectively communicates bad news.

My belief is that these are not communication failures. They are governance failures. And internal communications professionals are in a uniquely powerful position to say so – and to do something about it.

Here is the challenge most organisations are facing: finance is governed. Legal risk is governed. People are governed. There are committees, registers, dashboards, audits and named accountabilities for each.

But the levers that shape how the world sees an organisation – reputation, trust, credibility, positioning, stakeholder relations and cultural deployment, are rarely governed with the same rigour. They are treated as execution. A function, not a strategic discipline. This is what I’ve identified as the communications governance gap. And the IC Index data shows, in real numbers, what it costs.

The gap between leadership and reality

When leaders overestimate how well the strategy has been communicated, as the Index shows they consistently do, that is a transparency failure: no mechanism exists to ensure the organisation is speaking with one coherent, credible voice across every level and audience.

When 58 per cent of employees feel unsupported through change, and only 49 per cent agree that the reasons behind change are clearly communicated, the narrative architecture is absent. Leaders speak. Employees hear something different.

The story fractures at every layer of the organisation and we must ask who is accountable for the gap?

The deeper problem is that most organisations don't know this is happening. When just 35 per cent of employees believe their organisation is using AI to solve the right problems, when belief in the strategy has declined six points in a year, when leaders consistently rate their own communication higher than the employees receiving it, these are signals that leadership is making decisions about positioning and engagement without any real intelligence on what stakeholders actually think, believe or feel.

That is an understanding failure: not a gap in what employees know – but a gap in what leadership knows about them.

The truth gap and its consequences

Instinct and assumption are filling the space where evidenced stakeholder insight should be. And when that gap goes unexamined, it becomes something more serious – the say/do gap – where what an organisation communicates externally bears little relation to what employees experience internally. That is a truth failure, and one of the most corrosive forces in organisational credibility.

Risk sits across all of it. The Index is clear that employees in organisations that have made negative news headlines, performed below financial targets or experienced industrial action show the lowest levels of trust and advocacy.

Reputation risk is not theoretical. It compounds. And yet in most organisations, communications risk has no place on the risk register, no named owner, no escalation path.

A framework to build trust

In over 20 years of advising senior leaders across listed companies, multinationals and major charities, I saw this pattern repeat itself with such consistency that I developed the TRUST Framework. It gives organisations a structured methodology for governing the levers that shape reputation, trust and credibility. It also gives communications professionals the language and the evidence base to have that conversation at the most senior level.

The Framework maps five dimensions: Transparency, Risk, Understanding, Story and Truth, not as a checklist, but as an interconnected architecture.

Weak narrative coherence undermines Transparency. Absent stakeholder listening undermines Understanding. A Story that isn't lived internally fails the Truth test. Each pillar depends on the others, and most organisations, when they look honestly, find gaps in more than one.

This is where internal communications professionals must step forward, not as executors of the leadership message, but as what Jennifer Sproul, chief executive of the IOIC, describes as “intelligence units”: the discipline that listens, synthesises, advises and holds the organisation to account on the gap between what it says and what it does.

IC moving from messenger to strategic adviser

The organisations where IC is operating at its best are doing exactly this: building listening strategies that produce real data on stakeholder understanding, developing narrative architectures that hold coherently from the board to the frontline, aligning leadership voices so the organisation sounds like one coherent entity, and stress-testing whether what is said publicly is genuinely lived internally.

The question worth asking is a simple one: in your organisation, which of these gaps exist? Is there consistency of messaging, aligned across leaders? Where is the narrative breaking down? Where is the stakeholder intelligence missing? Where is the say/do gap widening quietly? Where does communications risk sit – and who owns it?

The TRUST Framework was built to help answer those questions quickly and practically. Scored across all five pillars, it gives you an evidenced read of where your organisation is strongest and where it is exposed, and a clear starting point for the governance conversation that follows.

For heads of communications, it is also a tool to take upward: a structured, board-ready way to make the case for why this matters, what the gaps are, and what closing them requires.

The data is already making the case. The professionals that act on it, that step into the intelligence and advisory role this moment demands, are the ones that will define what internal communications becomes.

Take the free TRUST Diagnostic


Debra Sobel is founder of The Purpose Hub and a strategic communications adviser with more than 20 years’ experience helping organisations build trust, engage stakeholders and navigate change. A former BBC producer and director, she brings editorial rigour to board-level communications challenges and is the creator of the TRUST Framework, a governance model for strategic communications, reputation and credibility.