Lessons from Marriott on transforming comms into a strategic business partner

If communicators want that “seat at the table” they’re always talking about, they need to transform from a function that takes commands from execs to a true business partner.

At Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference this October at Microsoft HQ in Seattle, Meghann Klein, senior director, strategic communications, revenue and technology group at Marriott International, will share her perspective on how communicators can become trusted advisors rather than order takers.

“A lot of people think, ‘I’m going to graduate from college, be an amazing communicator and sit down in the boardroom where everyone listens to me.’ That’s just not how it works,” Klein said. “You don’t start out and declare yourself a strategist.”

Klein cautioned comms pros to approach the process of earning leadership’s trust with patience.

“There really is a long and winding road,” she said. And that will probably be a little controversial, because we have this TikTok culture where everyone’s an expert overnight. But the truth is building strategic credibility takes time, reflection and delivery. You can’t skip the steps, and that’s OK.”

Reworking the comms team to operate as business advisors

Klein told Ragan Marriott’s internal comms functions were previously siloed off from one another, with communicators helping to support different functions. It covered a wide breadth of responsibilities but prevented the necessary alignment to make comms a strong voice in the mechanisms of the business.

“We were a very disparate service across the corporate landscape,” she said. “Even though we were all internal communicators, we were showing up for different disciplines, different leaders and different projects — and doing it all differently.”

Klein said that while this approach worked at times, it wasn’t maximizing the team’s potential to serve as partners in larger business efforts.

She shared that a restructuring at Marriott provided Klein and her team the opportunity to revamp their methods of working to view every task through the filter of the larger business.“We rebuilt the team to act like strategic generalists all aligned around Marriott’s scorecard.” The Marriott scorecard is a grouping of success metrics that the comms team uses.

A full-day workshop helped the department relaunch stronger.

“We had no processes, no shared ways of working — and we needed to figure out how to be strategic together,” she said.

Klein said that the comms team had to create language guidelines and operating parameters to define the scope of their role after the reorganization.

“We were strategic communicators who didn’t have an organizational strategy — except for the master corporate strategy. We had to build the rest from scratch.”

Tie it all back to the business

With the mountain of tasks that fall on internal communicators, it can be tough to take a step back and consider the why as opposed to the what involved in internal comms work. But Klein said that making that distinction is critical to earning trust from leadership.

“If your work can’t point to the strategy map and clearly show where you’re driving value, you probably shouldn’t be doing that work,” she said. “That’s always been our decision-making lens, especially coming into 2025.”

She added that after the company’s restructure, Marriott’s comms team took a step back and refocused its efforts on working within the scope of the larger business rather than just one or two functions.

“We’re not here to just serve a function or a leader — we serve the business of Marriott,” she said. “So our role is to ask, ‘How does this serve the company?’ If it’s not tied to strategy, we owe it to the business to pause and ask why.”

To learn more tips from Meghann Klein, register for this year’s Internal Communications Conference here.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.