@HQ Comms: your regional teams are working in the future (and crushing it)

Let's learn from the pros who don't work in silos

Another monthly all-comms department meeting wraps up. Leadership made their annual plea for “better collaboration with our regional teams” and “sharing more global success stories.”

• The usual nods… and note-taking… and promises to do better. (I should set up a calendar reminder to check-in with So-and-So once a month…)

But it’s business as usual at next week’s content planning session—the Argentina office can translate the sustainability announcement whenever they get to it, right?

Meanwhile in Buenos Aires…two comms-rades are quietly doing what they've always done:

• Seamlessly managing the entire comms spectrum for Latin America—from employee newsletters to media relations to executive bylines—and they’re doing it without a moment’s thought about whether something is “internal” or “external.”

Here's what HQ doesn’t get about mixternal communications: your regional teams mastered it forever ago.

• Not because they read about it in Harvard Business Review¹ or attended a workshop on breaking down silos.

• But because they literally had no other choice.

When you're the only comms person within 2,000 miles, antiquated divisions between internal and external comms are about as useful as fax machines.

The irony? While HQ comms teams congratulate themselves on their sophisticated approach to integrated communications, regional teams have been practicing mixternal comms since day one.

💪 And they're crushing it.

---

AI prompt in the footnotes*

🧑‍🏫 Every day regional teams hold a masterclass in mixternal communications.

Take this hypothetical (but realistic) example of a recent event at a Fortune (or FTSE) 100 company: Their Buenos Aires office produced a video showcasing local engineering talent for a recruiting event. Simple enough.

• But the regional comms lead saw bigger potential.

• She added English subtitles, trimmed it for social, and shared it globally.

The result? It became the company’s most engaging Facebook post that quarter, was featured in the global employee newsletter, and got picked up by industry media interested in the company’s technical talent pipeline.

Meanwhile back at HQ, that same initiative would have required five different teams (HR comms, a vendor for translation, the multimedia team, social media, and PR), six meetings, a project brief, and too.many.damn.emails (the emails!) to pull off that cross-channel effort.

This is the mixternal advantage regional teams developed out of necessity.

---

👒 🎩 🧢 🪖 When you wear multiple comms hats—sometimes all the hats—you naturally start seeing content opportunities that transcend artificial channel boundaries.

• You don’t have the luxury of thinking “that’s not my job” or “that’s for the employee comms team to figure out.”

In this article I provide specific lessons HQ can learn from regional teams, including:

• ✅ How regional teams naturally develop a mixternal mindset

• ✅ Examples of regional content success stories that are more onerous under traditional silos

• ✅ 4 ways HQ can tap into and learn from regional mixternal expertise

• ✅ One bonkers idea 🤪

¡Vamos!