What a policy team does (mission)
What does a policy team do? Why does an organization invest in building up a policy function? One answer to that question is that for any sufficiently complex organization, navigating and shaping the social and political environment is a necessary component for success.
A policy team – with the right structure, mandate and resources – creates political agency for the organization, allowing it to participate in the larger community, inform political debates and shape legislative work.
Political agency, in turn, builds on certain core capabilities that a policy team works to put in place. The easiest way to describe it is to look at what characterizes an organization with strategic political agency, and note that such an organization has the following properties:
- It is informed, and can inform internal stakeholders in turn. the product here is intelligence.
- It is connected, with key decision makers, shaper and informers across industry, civil society and government. The product here is access.
- It is trusted through its responsible engagement and its consistent views and actions. The product here is a mandate.
- It is substantive, and can provide both research, new proposals and a vision for its markets – and this shows what the company wants. The product here is motive.
- It is, and remains, relevant, a key participant in the political community with great timing, local empathy and proven impact. The product here is a voice (and ultimately a vote).
All of this, in turn rests on knowledge about the company and its products, as well as society at large and a clear narrative that underpins the whole work. In a simple picture:
In short, then, an organization has a policy team to ensure that it is the author of its own political destiny and not subject to the whims of competitors, regulators and trends. Now, there are limits to this – of course – but without a policy team an organization is guaranteed to lose control over how it can operate.
It is worth noting what a policy team is not, as well. It is not a lobbying operation. Lobbying is but a small part of political agency, and often a messy process with uncertain outcomes at the very tail end of a political process. A policy team can lobby, for sure, but if it does its job well it rarely needs to engage in the kind of last minute lobbying that is sometimes associated with government affairs. The kind of lobbying that you see reported on is usually a desperate last-ditch attempt to salvage a position, and it is both costly in terms of access and reputation as well as resources – and it is rarely effective.
Key building blocks of a policy team (organization)
When building a policy team it is helpful to have the capabilities listed above in mind. The component parts of the team typically correspond to the capabilities we want.
Intelligence gathering, research and analysis
At the heart of public policy is structured collection and analysis of intelligence – ensuring that the company has line of sight into the political landscape and a diagnosis of what is going on. The intelligence function is also responsible for briefing leadership in an actionable and helpful way – aiming at improving overall decision making by integrating awareness of the political environment into leadership conversations.
Intelligence is collected in several ways – from team members interactions with their stakeholders, consultants and open sources – but it is also consciously sought and produced by a special part of the team, usually referred to as a central team, that is tasked with strategic planning, research and intelligence gathering.
Most companies create a central team function too late, because they prioritize country/market presence and so end up putting people in key markets, but lacking the ability to strategically coordinate efforts or synthesize intelligence and research into a coherent plan (there are many reasons for this – the dominant one is that policy teams that grow organically grow from countries, not capabilities – and that is fine to a point).
| A good policy team has members responsible for different geographies who work hard to collect and integrate intelligence so that they can react appropriately, and feed that intelligence back into the organization.A great policy team builds on a core team responsible for research, intelligence gathering and strategic analysis – creating an awareness that all the work then flows from, as well as a substantive narrative that can be used to engage stakeholders (both internal and external), allowing the team to act and shape the environment.A world-class policy team has 24 month visibility into scenarios and political landscapes, builds strategies that significantly improves chances of mission success through path-breaking research and surprising insights shared with key constituents at the right moment, all the while providing company leadership with high-grade actionable intelligence that routinely improves strategic decisions for the whole organization. |
In-market / In-region teams
If that is the core of the team, the edges are equally important. Policy teams need to know and understand how specific markets work, and should be built with a market focus on the edges. What you typically see in large companies is a head of policy for every market, and smaller companies organize after regions – the most common being US/LatAm/Canada, EMEA, and then some variation on ROW or APAC. These in-market teams start out focusing on just answering the phone and building a presence (finding out what tables they should care about), then invest in a few of them (getting a seat at the table), building their credibility (getting a vote at the table) and finally being able to inform and influence the key groupings (getting a path to a majority vote at the table).
In-market members of the team deal in relationships and connections to different fields of power. Sometimes they need to be divided up (it is an increasingly polarized world) in partisan teams, and they are often built to mirror the environment they are in. A DC team would have a team for the administration and agencies, one for the house, one for the senate and then one for civil society and third parties. A Brussels team would be organized to mirror the European Commission, Parliament and Council – and then third parties. A specific thing with a Brussels team is that it needs to work with in-country teams to be effective: a minimum European game consists of Berlin/Paris/Brussels – and then you usually expand to first Northern Europe, then Southern and last Central and Eastern Europe, building teams there. There is an argument for starting with CEE over Southern Europe, but for business reasons this is often ignored.
This mirroring can be more fine-grained if you have more resources. The older model of organizing in-market teams on key issues has fallen out of favor, since it forced stakeholders to navigate the corporate organizational chart, and that created unnecessary friction.
A sufficiently large organization usually adds a subteam that deals with international organizations, like OECD, WTO, UN, APEC, ASEAN and so on. This team draws on national teams and coordinates them, in different ways.
| A good policy team has an in-country presence in the top markets, and manages things on the ground there. It is represented by people in good standing and with solid networks. A great policy team has a connected set of in-country policy people that interact to create connections between the geographies (especially in Europe), learn across domains and build re-usable outreach programs with the central team. It is represented by established profiles with gravitas, and has in-country respected experts on key issues. A world-class policy team has a coordinated set of country policies that all feed into, and are reflected in regional and international organizations to ensure maximum compounding across all the relevant issues (and plays the European game effortlessly). It is represented by a mix of senior public figures (some as advisors and some as employees) and recognized international experts, balancing relationships and credibility with substance and insights. |
Public engagement
Now in addition to the core and edges, most policy teams have also realized that there is a unique set of skills needed to target an often undervalued group of influencers – grasstops or decision informers. One very simple way to think about it is to say that all decision making can be described in a logarithmic model, like this:
Whereas one person usually makes the decision, and consults a close inner cabinet of decision shapers, there are at least 100 whose views inform the 10 and then the public of 1000+ who need to at least not oppose the decision, but take it. Pure policy teams address the decision maker and decision shapers, but you can have a large force multiplier if you are also able to engage the 100 and the 1000+.
And this is bi-directional. Building a capacity to listen to the decision informers and decision takers, discovering their concerns and worries as well as their hopes, is a source of important intelligence and strategic insight that can then be used by the core team producing the research. This is why most policy teams today have what is termed ”public affairs” or ”campaign”-teams.
These teams also have a unique ability to navigate the kinds of events where decision informers gather with decision shapers and makers – think Davos, but also OECD summits or local conferences. Their contribution to both understanding the landscape and informing in a way that stops short of broad marketing is key to build compound value for the team efforts.
| A good policy team has a public affairs capability to organize, design and reach the right decision shapers through bespoke events that scale and can be repeated. A great policy team has the ability to both channel and listen to a large variety of key groups in society, create sustained narratives through strategic participation in key events – both external and covened by the organization as well as build up the organization’s reputation in collaboration with marketing and PR. A world-class policy team manages a portfolio of sustained narratives jointly with marketing and PR, not just listening but also giving a voice to groups that can inform, support and amplify the core mission of the company. It owns a calendar of events that it uses as a carefully designed instrument to set the overall atmosphere on the issues the organization cares about – always in collaboration with a mix of the most respected partners and new actors that it builds into ecosystem force multipliers, further strengthening the narrative. |
Summing up, then, in a simple picture of concentric circles:
Interfaces with other teams (collaboration)
The effectiveness of a policy team depends on collaboration with other teams, and on how the policy team is situated in the organization over all. Policy teams typically report in two different ways – either into legal, or into a joint lead for public policy and corporate communications (sometimes with marketing added in, often as an awkward add on). There are advantages to both. As long as policy concerns can be discussed at the leadership level, the reporting lines should not matter, albeit it that in very large organizations (think Alphabet vs Microsoft) leadership representation usually is helpful for focus and investment of CEO time in the issues.
The key collaborators for policy teams include: comms, marketing, business engineering — all of the teams that have an external footprint in some way.
Key failure modes
There are a number of ways in which policy teams fail. Among the more common are:
Policy teams are used as ”clean up team”s. The company does something bad and the policy team is told to fix it, often with comms. This does not work – or as a good friend who is a master comms leader noted: ”you cannot talk yourself out of what you behaved yourself into”. Using policy teams to fix messes is not completely ineffective – but it only works if it is an integrated component of a company response.
- Policy issues have no air time at an executive level. While policy issues do not need to be at the core of all leadership discussion – indeed, they probably should not be – there is value in having a standing policy committee that meets monthly to discuss issues / set direction and inform the work from the highest levels.
- Policy teams become disconnected from other teams. This is often the case with, for example, policy and marketing – where there is a natural tension. Some of the greatest problems for policy teams in health tech companies is that the marketing teams want to sell the product, and so market it in ways that policy makers are opposed to (think an e-doctor app that suggested seeking care for colds).
- Policy teams develop an imbalance between issues and relationships. If you do just issues you will become internally facing and ineffective, if you have a lot of lunches but nothing to say you equally will ultimately be seen as shallow and uninteresting.
- Policy teams manage by inbox. It is easy to just answer the phone, reply to emails and occasionally respond to consultations – and think that this is it. But what happens then is that you get stuck on very basic capabilities and you drift with the current and react to policy changes, rather than shape them.
A note on resources and benchmarking
Given this review of how to structure a policy team, it may be worth just mentioning that the different capabilities naturally come with a cost. A world-class policy team as outlined above is not a cheap thing – it needs both people and money, and then quite some coaching and practice to build into that team. A world class team takes time to build, and sometimes – especially if there is great collaboration with other teams and leadership- may even be overkill. The capabilities described as “world-class” can be achieved through close collaboration across the organization as well!
It is also worthwhile noting that the classifications above are for consistent performance. A good team can have world-class moments, but they will require enormous effort – what we aim for is consistent performance over time.
Conclusion
A policy team allows an organisation to navigate and shape the political environment an organisation exists in. Any sufficiently complex organisation is ultimately also a political actor, whether you want it or not. This means that you can choose to be a policy taker or become a policy maker. The choice is not obvious, but it should be made consciously. Some companies prefer to act as if they were apolitical, and hence just accept all the policies that are thrown at them – or they may rely on another set of companies to represent their industry and argue that there is not much asymmetric interest at play — this is a strategy option worth exploring, for sure. Other companies prefer to actively engage in policy matters and to have a voice. This makes them a target, but also gives them agency – and allows them to participate in the longer democratic discussion about business, technology, society and the economy.
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