Communicators long for “a seat at the table.” In this episode of “On the Same Page,” the internal communications podcast, Shel and Steve share their perspectives on this age-old aspiration and discuss the real ways to be consequential and wield influence with senior executives.

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Raw Transcript

Shel Holtz: So Steve, I have a request. This is something that really rubs me the wrong way. I want the internal communications community to stop asking for the seat at the freaking table.

Steve Crescenzo: Hey, preach, brother, preach.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, you know what they sound like? They sound like the older kids at Thanksgiving. You know, the 13-year-old who says, “Why do I have to sit at the kids’ table? I want to sit at the grown-up table.” You know what? There is no table. There’s never been a table. There’s no one in the C-suite sitting around this polished mahogany slab thinking, “You know what would really make this strategic discussion complete? Having the person who runs the intranet here.” The table has become a metaphor for a participation trophy, and chasing it has made us sound needier than an MBA candidate at a networking happy hour. What we should be asking for isn’t proximity to power, it’s consequence. It’s doing work that’s so useful that the leaders come find you because they can’t make the decision without getting your input first. That’s more important than a seat in a chair that, let’s face it, isn’t all that comfortable and that can be taken away as quickly as it was given to you.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. You know, this table, they treat it like it’s the Knights of the Round Table and Camelot, King Arthur. There’s no table, it’s musical chairs up there. Everyone’s yanking chairs out for everybody. It just bothers me so much, Shel. And you’re right, it makes us sound pathetic—whiny, little, needy people, like we sit here in the basement and write our newsletters and ask why we can’t get up there and sit at the big table. We don’t need a table. We don’t need a seat. You know what we need? We need influence. We need access and we need respect. And you know how you get those? You earn it. You don’t earn it by doing a good newsletter, even. You don’t do it by having great tactics. You do it by speaking truth to power, by letting leadership know that you can provide counsel—that you can tell them their baby’s ugly. “You know what? Your blog is too stiff, it’s too formal, your messages aren’t landing. Why are you doing a nine-minute video when nobody’s watching a nine-minute video?” That’s how you get respect and access and influence. You don’t do it by whining for it or mooching around for it. So yeah, let’s be done with the table.

Shel Holtz: So, Steve, today we’re going to look at how communicators can become consequential and influential. This fits neatly in the consultation segment of the outer ring of the On the Same Page framework. The items in the outer ring are the things that we do every day, all the time, and providing counsel is one of those things. We can provide counsel to departments, to teams, to business units. I have great examples of all of these things, but today let’s hone in on providing counsel to the company’s leadership, the C-suite.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, well, you know, Shel, that’s how you get a seat at the table—just kidding. But it is how you can get influence and access and all the stuff we’re talking about. Be a counselor, which means it’s hard work, Shel. Everyone thinks it’s easy, but it means telling people hard truths sometimes. It means being a reality check for leaders, which they don’t always like. They don’t always like being told stuff, but that’s what we have to be if we want to have that respect.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I mean, helping CEOs and leaders build trust should be at the top of the list that we’re counseling them about. Here’s a data point. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found 70% of respondents saying that CEOs are obligated to help bridge trust divides, but only 44% actually do it well. That’s a 29-point leadership credibility gap. And according to a leadership presence report from Ketchum, executives are two and a half times more likely than frontline employees to trust their CEO to tell the truth about what’s happening within their organizations. So Steve, how do you counsel a CEO who wants to build trust? And how do you counsel a CEO who doesn’t think he needs to?

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, you know what, Shel, it’s a great topic, and I’m glad we’re talking about it. I think one of the biggest mistakes communicators and leadership make is assuming trust is a communications problem. Most trust problems are behavior problems, right? There are very few CEOs—or any kind of leader—who are being as transparent as possible, acting ethically, treating employees the right way, telling them the truth all the time, and explaining why when they can’t say something, and doing all the right things, and still have a trust problem because they sent the wrong email or because their blog isn’t that interesting. If they don’t have trust, it usually comes down to missteps or something that’s happened. So I would say to leaders, and I would say to communicators: where is the trust issue coming from? If the CEO or the leadership are building a culture and paying attention to their values and doing everything they should be doing, trust will flow naturally. If they’re not, it doesn’t matter how much you communicate. You’re just yelling into a well. So I would look back at behaviors—maybe do some focus groups with employees. Not a survey; I think focus groups would be much more effective. Find out where this lack of trust is coming from. It usually doesn’t come down to communication issues. It comes down to missteps, to things they’ve done in the past. It comes down to: you put out these values and this mission statement, and then everything doesn’t align with what you’re doing. You’re not walking the talk, to use a bad cliché. I just don’t think you can communicate your way out of a credibility problem.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think one of those data points that really provides some insight into where trust might come from is the fact that executives trust the leaders in the C-suite more than the front line does. And yeah, if you think about the executives in a company, they have more visibility with those leaders. They’re meeting with them all the time. They’re seeing them in the C-suite, which is a physical place where the leadership sits. There are a lot of leaders who don’t get out and meet face-to-face with employees very often. I remember—this was years and years ago, maybe 35 or 40 years ago—it was a Ragan conference at the Fairmont in Chicago, where they all used to be in those days. They had, I think it was the CEO of Avon, the cosmetics company, as one of the keynote speakers. And he said—

Steve Crescenzo: Those were a time. I remember this.

Shel Holtz: You remember him? Yeah, he said that he used to get out to the factory floor at least once a month to remind himself that these folks were all grown-ups. He would chat with them, and, you know, somebody operating a film machine was also the scoutmaster of a Boy Scout troop, or ran a side business with his spouse, or was the treasurer for the local Elks organization, or whatever it might be. These are smart people, and you didn’t need to treat them like children, which was a habit executives got into. He didn’t mention this, but at the same time, employees were seeing him come out there and talk to them. You’re bound to trust somebody that you see more often than somebody who’s just up there in the C-suite, maybe doing a quarterly video or something like that. That visibility is really important.

Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I think—a tale of two leaders, I can do that. We worked about 20 years ago for a huge defense company, maybe the largest, for one of their divisions. And I interviewed all their executives for the audit, and they were all on the seventh floor, in what the employees called “rug row.” And they never left the seve...