Eight things I wish I'd known - and one thing you need to understand before you join strategic communications
In total, these are the eight things I wish someone had told me when I was in their position. Eight things that have become obvious only because I've spent fifteen years in this industry.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been interviewing candidates for our Graduate Associate programme. These are bright people, ambitious people, people who’ve chosen to begin their careers in strategic communications. And almost without exception, near the end of each conversation, they ask the same question, “If you had one piece of advice,” they ask, “what would it be?”
I used to find that question flattering. Now I find it unsettling. Because every time someone asks it, I’m not thinking about the person sitting across from me. I’m thinking about Michael White in 2008 - the version of me who was considering entering this industry, who had no idea what he was walking into, who thought communications was about the communications and not about the person doing the communicating.
So I decided to answer them properly. Not with platitudes. Not with motivational LinkedIn rhetoric. In total, these are the eight things I wish someone had told me when I was in their position. Things that have become obvious only because I’ve spent fifteen years in this industry and now find myself on the management team of a global consultancy, contributing to how this entire firm thinks about communications in an age of AI transformation.
If you’re considering joining this industry, or if you’ve just joined and you’re wondering whether you’ve made a terrible mistake(!), read on.
1. You’re only as good as your last piece of work
This is the hardest lesson and the most important. It is the lesson that keeps people honest. In communications, you can speak brilliantly about strategy in a conference room. You can command a meeting. You can have won a dozen awards for work that isn’t yours. And none of it matters the moment you deliver something mediocre, late, or half-baked.
This business doesn’t traffic in potential. It doesn’t care about your university degree, your internships, your connections - though all of those things help you get in the door. What matters is the email you sent yesterday, the deck you built last week, the brief you answered correctly when nobody else could see the angle. Your reputation in this industry is not a personal brand. It’s a work product. Get that wrong, and you’re starting from zero every time.
2. Understand people and their relationships
The industry will tell you it’s about media relations, project management, good writing skills, data analytics - and it is, sort of. But what it’s actually about is watching how people relate to each other and understanding why they do what they do.
You need to know what your client’s CFO wants from the CEO. You need to know why your team’s smartest strategist suddenly becomes quiet in meetings. You need to understand that the journalist who asks a brutal question in the first meeting might become one of your most valuable allies if you treat them with respect. You need to grasp that your colleague who seems invisible has actually watched three senior people fail at the same task and knows exactly where the trap is.
You cannot manage a narrative if you don’t understand the people telling it. You cannot manage a crisis if you don’t understand the psychology of the room trying to solve it.
3. Lean into people’s experience to innovate
You’ll arrive with fresh ideas. They won’t be new. Someone in the room has seen the version of this problem that you’re proposing to solve - maybe not exactly, but close enough.
The temptation is to ignore that. To present your idea as revolutionary. To treat experience like institutional resistance rather than institutional knowledge.
Don’t. Ask the person who’s been here longest what they’ve tried. Ask what failed and why. Then take that and push it further. That’s where innovation lives - not in the blank canvas, but in the willingness to stand on the shoulders of people who’ve already fallen trying.
At the same time, maintain a healthy scepticism of a broad consensus of an idea – if mankind’s ideas required to be agreed upon each time democratically, then our evolutionary desire for safety likely would have stopped progress. Henry Ford put it simply as this, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
4. We’re all struggling with something. Don’t hide it.
A few years ago, I was not delivering my best work. I was forgetting things. I couldn’t process information the way I normally could. I’d sit in a meeting and feel present and completely absent at the same time.
I had just started taking medication for anxiety - connected to depression – and my brain felt like it was re-wiring itself. For a few weeks, I was in a fog.
Very few people knew. I certainly didn’t broadcast it. But looking back, I wish I had said something to the people who needed to know. Because they were probably wondering why I wasn’t myself. And I was probably wondering why they seemed frustrated with me. The gap between us grew because I thought strength meant silence.
It doesn’t. In a fast-paced environment where your intellectual performance is constantly measured, it is essential to recognize that all of us are humans. All of us are struggling with something. That might be anxiety. It might be grief. It might be a health crisis, a relationship falling apart, a mortgage that’s strangling you, a parent in decline, a secret that’s eating you alive.
You can’t build a functional team on the fiction that everyone is fine. You can’t build a client relationship on pretense. The moment someone on your team says, “I’m not okay,” you have a choice: you can pretend you didn’t hear, or you can actually listen.
Choose to listen.
5. This isn’t a job. It’s a way of life.
Strategic communications doesn’t have office hours. A crisis doesn’t wait for your holiday to end. A journalist doesn’t file at 9 a.m. and then call it a day. The news cycle, the social media pulse, the client emergency - none of it respects the boundary between your work and your life.
You need to go into this with your eyes open. This is a way of life. You’ll miss dinners. You’ll check your phone at midnight. You’ll be thinking about a client problem while you’re supposed to be present with your family. You’ll feel like you’re never quite off.
The flip side is this: if you’re the sort of person who loves the work, who genuinely enjoys solving problems under pressure, who gets energy from the chaos - there is almost no better place to be. But you have to know what you’re signing up for. You can’t do this half-heartedly. You can’t view it as a stepping stone and expect to be taken seriously.
6. Treat people as you want to be treated
This sounds like a platitude. It isn’t. It’s a survival strategy.
In communications, you will have power over people - over how they’re perceived, over their stories, over their reputation. You’ll have junior colleagues who want your approval. You’ll have vendors who need your business. You’ll have clients who depend on your competence. You’ll have journalists who might feature you or bury you.
The temptation to use that power loosely is constant. It’s easy to be brief with someone who isn’t useful to you. It’s easy to take credit for work you didn’t do. It’s easy to pretend to listen while you’re already thinking about the next meeting. It’s easy to be kind when someone can help you and distant when they can’t.
Don’t.
7. Rotten people spread amongst rotten people
This is the corollary. It matters because it’s true. Cultures don’t change slowly. They change through contagion.
If you work in an environment where corners are cut, where people take credit that isn’t theirs, where kindness is seen as weakness - you will become that version of yourself. Not because you’re weak. But because proximity to rot is corrosive. You’ll start small. You’ll justify it. You’ll convince yourself it’s necessary. And before you know it, you’re the person you said you’d never be.
During my career, I’ve seen this clash of cultures and values on the frontline. Sometimes it’s working with a client whose own internal way of working clashes with the values of your own team. In the past, it’s also been present when people join your consultancy directly from another, exhibiting behaviours that go against the grain.
This is why choosing where you work matters more than you think. This is why your first consultancy, your first team, your first boss - these are not trivial choices. They’re the choices that shape who you become.
8. Prioritize experience over pay, at least in the beginning
I can say this now because I’ve had the privilege of being paid well. But I came to it honestly. When I entered this industry, I didn’t negotiate for salary. I negotiated for exposure, for variety, for the chance to sit next to people who were better than me.
I was also in a privileged position. My family lived just outside London. I paid nominal rent. I didn’t have a mortgage. I wasn’t supporting anyone. I know that conditions aren’t the same for everyone, and that’s exactly why I support organizations like the Taylor Bennett Foundation - they exist because the path I took isn’t available to everyone, and it shouldn’t have to be.
But if you can afford to choose experience over salary in your early years, do it. Join the firm that’s working on the most interesting problems. Join the team where you’ll learn the most. Join the client where you’ll be pushed to your limits. The connections you make, the skills you develop, the reputation you build - these are currency in this industry. They’re worth infinitely more than a ten percent salary increase at the start of your career.
Because - and this is the thing nobody tells you - the pay comes. Not always fast, not always fairly, not always as much as you deserve. But it comes. It comes as a natural outcome of your experience, your reputation, and your relationships. The people who made different choices early, who prioritized salary over learning? Some of them are fine. Some of them are stuck. The ones who thrived were almost always the ones who understood that the first five years are an investment in themselves, not a paycheque.
The thing you actually need to understand
These eight points matter. But there’s something deeper that matters more.
This industry is transforming faster than any of us can keep up with. AI is rewriting what comms professionals actually do. The media landscape is fragmenting in real time. The relationship between journalists and PRs, between brands and audiences, between truth and narrative - it’s all in flux.
The candidates I interviewed who will thrive aren’t the ones with the cleverest prompts or the sharpest understanding of the latest platform. They’re the ones who understand that in an industry being rebuilt by machines, the only thing that can’t be automated is human judgment, human integrity, and human connection.
Come in with your eyes open. Work harder than anyone else. Be kind, even when it costs you. Build relationships like your career depends on it, because it does. And remember that the people who matter in this industry aren’t the ones shouting the loudest. They’re the ones who’ve kept their word, shown up for their team, and somehow managed to stay human while the whole world was going mad.
Good luck. And then you’re going to need something more than luck: you’re going to need judgment, resilience, and the kind of integrity that makes you someone worth working for.
The industry needs that. You can be that.