Why can’t internal communicators get a little respect?

We wonder if employee communicators are still the lowest face on the totem pole of organizational communication departments. Plus, a look at what’s wrong with airline communications

A reader who prefers to remain anonymous (for reasons which will soon be obvious) has a question that we can’t answer. She works for a midsize company in California, and her job is about to go to hell. “My boss, the head of internal communications, just left our company,” she writes. “And they are seriously considering replacing him with someone who has absolutely no internal communications experience … and, actually very little external communication experience either!” Ouch. Why is it that we feel we’ve heard this sad tale before? Maybe because we have … unfortunately far too often. You wouldn’t hire a chef to be a lawyer, or a reporter to be a pilot … yet companies still feel they can bring in noncommunicators to head up communications departments.