Should GR own all government outreach activities?

Wahiba Sands, Oman. Pic by Ansgar Baums

1. Turf wars, episode III — The revenge of the org chart

Government Relations functions are usually part of a bunch of global support functions that deal with the impact of regulation or standards on a company’s business. As argued in our article on structure, GR functions usually are limited in their vertical expertise and rely on subject-matter experts in the company to deal with technical or very specific regulatory bodies. Shaping a regulatory environment and ensuring a company is compliant is clearly a team effort of more than one global function.

Surprisingly, the question of what exactly GR’s role is in this team effort is often unclear. The specific interaction on a particular topic is often defined by personal relationships or “path dependencies” — it is often not visible in an org chart how specific topics are handled. We would argue that this is not really a problem as long as it works for the company. However, we also feel that it is helpful to set some guidelines for GR functions to clarify some fundamentals.

2. Bottleneck vs. facilitator: What is GRs role?

What we have observed quite often is an underlying assumption that GR functions “own” all government contacts of a company or at least should have “the last word” on such outreach. We think it’s both an unrealistic and unhelpful assumption, mainly because you are deliberately creating a bottleneck that more likely than not will creating a lot of frustration in other parts of the company.

Let’s also be realistic regarding GRs capabilities of steering government relations when it comes to highly specific regulation (how much time do you want to spend on understanding the acronym soup of technical standards?). What is GRs added value here? And how big are the risks if you are not invited to every government meeting? What harm could really be done if Sales or other global functions do meetings?

Here is an alternative: Rather than being a bottleneck, try to be a facilitator: Help other functions to connect at the right point in time, coordinate if necessary, and report up in the right way when needed. Such a facilitation role consists of three elements:

1. Coordinate the process of public policy creation: If there is one process you want to own, it’s the creation of company-wide alignment of policy positions. As we explained in our article on policy briefings, it should be a highly structured “product”, because the questions you need to answer are always the same: What are potential positions we could take? What are risks and benefits? What are our competitors doing? etc.
2. Drive the alignment of corporate function business planning: The annual business planning process deserves your attention. Ideally, all corporate functions and Go to market teams with public sector business would coordinate closely with each other. While this sounds more than obvious, it often does not happen in practice. Once annual business plans are set, it will become difficult to create joint projects, so try to align as early as possible
3. Control the compliance-relevant parts of governmental relations: For some parts, however, GR needs to be a bottleneck. No matter how general government outreach is organized, make sure GR controls all compliance-relevant parts. This might be reporting of lobbying expenses (EU, US) or the management of a “Political Action Committee” in the US. We would also strongly recommend that GR has the last word on any hiring of external political consultants. A robust risk assessment process needs to be diligently executed — regardless of pressure from a go-to-market team keen to hire a “magician” to facilitate sales.

3. Next steps

A little structure helps to put these principles into action. Specifically, we recommend a standing public policy council responsible for reviewing all public policy issues and coordinate the business planning. Naturally, GR should be the project manager of such a public policy council.