Poppulo Meets… Drew McMillan, Director of Communications & Engagement at Deloitte.

Welcome to the latest edition of our Poppulo Meets series—conversations with senior communication and people leaders about the work they do and the experiences that shaped them. This time, we’re delighted to be joined by Drew McMillan, Director of Communications & Engagement at Deloitte.

Drew has spent his career in corporate communication, employee engagement, and culture work in large, complex organizations, including key roles at British Airways and Virgin.

Known for his thought leadership in the Communications profession, he has supported organizations through transformations, high-profile crises and political storms. Here, he reflects on the experiences that shaped his approach and the direction he believes the work is moving.

— In conversation with Tim Vaughan, Editorial Director, Poppulo

The moment that set me on the path to the work I do now was about 17 years ago, working in what might be termed ‘classic’ Corporate Comms, I read Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and it was a revelation to me. The foundational importance of trust in enabling commercial success was the bit that resonated.

That’s when I started looking at the wider landscape of employee engagement—which relies so heavily on trust—and the role of effective, strategic communications in enabling and strengthening that trust.

Everybody starting out in their career needs a break, and I got mine in communications when a senior Communications executive in the Mitsui Corporation, Mr Yajima, became the first leader who truly trusted me to fail. He invited me, when I was very ‘green’ at age 25, to project manage the company’s Annual Review.

Bearing in mind this is multi-billion dollar organization employing many tens of thousands of people, the trust he put in me was amazing. I was terrified. Some things went badly wrong, but it was the making of me.

The true worth of Internal Communications is, sometimes, most obvious in times of crisis. We saw this during the pandemic. Much earlier than that, as the Communications Manager at a global engineering consultancy, we tragically lost a group of our people in a boating accident, in Bahrain.

The timeliness, tone and human touch of conveying this awful news to the close-knit employee audience, and the follow-up messaging of support, helped employees to rally together, share their loss, and feel cared for by the company.

Even with the best technology, you’ve got to be able to really read what’s going on with people in an organization on a human level. I do this by listening. Back in the day, it wasn’t just the water cooler moments. It was hearing the chatter in the smoking areas outside the office! Today, a lot of my listening is on social channels. Or in the line at the coffee shop.

People have misconceptions about internal communications, and what I find most frustrating is that it’s seen as a profession for people who like writing. Sure, excellent writing skills are a core competency in the Communicators’ toolkit, but far from the most important these days, I would argue.

Not least because we’re seeing leaps in AI’s copy writing capability. The greatest value we can add as Communications pros is creating clarity from complexity and joining dots that our stakeholders and audiences otherwise could not.

One thing companies often overlook when they talk about employee experience is that it’s a nice to have. It’s not, if that company wishes to remain competitive, by attracting and retaining the best talent. The employee experience is a crucial enabler of organizational success.

We’re living in a time of relentless change and uncertainty, so the capability internal communicators need most these days is the skill, or maybe it’s a mindset, of being comfortable with ambiguity.

The belief about communication I hold onto, even when the pressure is on, is it’s an enabler of successful outcomes. I’d argue that it’s when the pressure is on that this truth becomes especially clear to our stakeholders.

With AI reducing the need to type or read and pushing us toward a “hear and see” world, the future of communication will change. Anyone still holding onto the notion that AI will not change the world of work—including for the Communications professional—is, I suggest, on the wrong side of history.

Soft skills, EQ, stakeholder relationship management and astute judgement will be highly valued in the profession. That’s where opportunity lies, because AI isn’t great at any of these.

A defining moment that stretched me as a leader—and changed how I show up now—was the very first time I had to lead a team through a restructure, which involved compulsory redundancies. These were people I knew well and with whom I enjoyed working, so taking them through the process was far tougher than I’d ever imagined.

I like to think now, having also been made redundant myself from a role I loved, that I approach these things with greater humility and compassion for those affected.

If you asked people to describe my leadership style today compared with when I first stepped into my first leadership role, they’d probably say less idealistic, for sure! I was never much of a pragmatist. There was too much ego and belief in my own sense of being right.

Today, my teams tend to say that I am the one who brings calm and perspective to situations, rather than being hot-headed and adding to the problem.

The person who has had the greatest influence on my career was Andrew Harley. He was Chief People Officer when I worked for the gambling and gaming business, Ladbrokes. Andrew was a true ‘servant leader’—he was always there to enable his team, to encourage our development, and to perfectly balance the need to be directive, at times, whilst also giving people space to go their own way on things.

The documentary film that has had a lasting impact on how I think was Hypernormalisation by Adam Curtis. It had a transformative effect on my world view, in terms of helping me to make sense of what has often felt like the chaos of the last thirty years. Geopolitics, socioeconomics, anthropology, culture wars. It’s all handled brilliantly in the film.

If I could go back and tell my 20-year-old self one thing, it would be to embrace my vulnerabilities, sooner. 

And if I wasn’t doing this work now, I’d probably be putting my energy into providing animal-assisted therapy for vulnerable people. I’ve been doing this with my dogs for a few years. My new pup is a bit young and jumpy to be visiting people in hospitals and hospices just yet, but he’s being trained up and I hope to continue the tradition with him and the Mayhew Therapaws charity.

— In conversation with Tim Vaughan, Poppulo's Editorial Director.

tvaughan@poppulo.com