Leadership Lessons with Josh Voulters, Corporate Affairs Director at Forvis Mazars

Allyson Kurian, Head of Corporate and Financial at Hanson Search, sat down with Josh Voulters, Corporate Affairs Director at Forvis Mazars. They discuss the evolving demands of corporate affairs leadership, what separates reactive teams from strategic ones and the capabilities that matter most in 2026. 

What trends in 2025 most fundamentally changed how your communications function engages with stakeholders, media and internal audiences? 

There are three trends from previous years that became more acute in 2025. 

Managing how you are perceived in the online environment has become critical. We used to come from a place of managing correct information and messaging. Now that is almost irrelevant. People believe what they believe and being agile enough to interpret how you are perceived matters more than getting the message right. Related to that, reputational risk now comes from far more directions than it once did. Political, regulatory, social media, any stakeholder at any point might have a view about who you are and what you do. And then there are internal audiences. There has been a real shift in how employees think about their employer, the obligations they expect and the values they want to see lived out. It is a constantly evolving dynamic and something that is fascinating to follow. 

All of it comes back to having absolute crystal clarity about who you are and where you engage and then keeping on coming back to that message up and down the business. 

Which reputation or communications trends will separate reactive teams from truly strategic ones in 2026? 

Whereas in the past, a top strategic team would have been a great content factory with its finger on the pulse, that is not what strategic means in a corporate affairs function today. It feels more like a risk management function, speaking the language of enterprise risk rather than generating coverage. Content and media relations are no longer ends in themselves. 

A successful team will need to ask themselves, how are they building that capacity? The answer should be through real horizon scanning on geopolitical issues that impact us as a global firm, and through tight narrative discipline. You must absorb everything going on and boil it down: what are our commercial imperatives, what do we stand for, who are we? And always come back to that without getting distracted.

How have expectations from media evolved and how is your team adapting? 

Journalists will not swallow vague corporate messaging anymore. There always used to be a little leeway for it. The journalists who have survived in this highly competitive environment are sharp and incisive; they push for the tough questions and will call out inconsistency. What that means practically is that someone in a corporate affairs role has to be a proxy journalist before a spokesperson ever sits in front of a real one. You have to ask the hard questions and be brave enough to stick your neck out. That will make you unpopular in the short term and build real trust in the long term. And if you are leaving those difficult questions until formal media training, the job is already lost. 

How is your organisation’s adoption of AI affecting expectations placed on your team? 

This is the most exciting thing to happen to corporate affairs in a very long time. It has raised expectations around the breadth of what we can deliver, and it should. I have asked every member of my team to have at least one annual objective around AI adoption, whether that is a project, a learning commitment or an implementation. In five years, this discipline will look very different, and the people getting ahead of it now will be in a far stronger position. 

In practice we are using it to accelerate drafting, generate insights from large volumes of data and automate repetitive tasks. But gut and instinct remains the key differentiators in whether communications are any good, and it will not replace that. Talking about AI in abstracts is boring. Saying AI is the future does not mean anything. But when you find the specific things it unlocks for you, it becomes genuinely powerful. 

What is the most significant challenge you have faced in aligning communications strategy with broader organisational goals? 

Just over two years ago we became one of the top ten global networks in our field, changed our name, changed our brand, brought in a whole new leadership team for the first time in twelve years and launched a significant evolution of our strategy. An enormous amount of change at once. The challenge was maintaining clarity of message while the organisation itself was still evolving. 

What made it work was having a seat at the table from the start. We built it from the ground up with incoming leadership and our time horizon was never just launch day. Similarly, we brought back town halls across all fourteen offices with executive board members attending each quarter, introduced new monthly communications and new ways of live streaming to the whole team. We do a global people survey and one question asks how well employees understand the strategy and their place within it. Year on year after the launch, we had a 35% increase in positive responses. We are seeing the commercial impact of that in how our teams show up for clients. 

What capability does the modern in-house communications leader absolutely need today that was not critical five years ago? 

Risk judgement. The ability to think through sources of risk in a methodical way and plan for them. I do far more work on planning matrices and crisis playbooks than I ever imagined would be part of this career. Every playbook only gives you a head start when a real crisis hits, but that head start is often the critical bit. It has also changed who my peer group is. I find myself speaking a language much closer to our in-house counsel and chief risk officer than to my colleagues in the marketing team, and that reflects where corporate affairs is now expected to sit. 

If you were mentoring a future Head of Communications, what would you tell them? 

Your job is to help the organisation make sense of the outside world. Be brave enough to hold up the mirror when it is needed, to tell powerful people what you honestly think even when you hold no power over them. Own your decisions and take accountability for the advice you give. In a partnership environment, the one thing that gives you credibility in that room is showing that you have skin in the game too. It is only then that you have the licence to have the difficult conversations and change minds. 

Whether you’re hiring or considering your next career move, our team would be delighted to support you.

Allyson Kurian is Head of Corporate and Financial. Allyson is a specialist headhunter in corporate affairs and financial communications recruitment, focusing on mid-to-senior level roles both agency-side and in-house. 

Hanson Search is a globally recognised, award-winning talent advisory and headhunting consultancy. Our expertise lies in building successful ventures worldwide through our recruitment, interim and executive search in communications, sustainability, public affairs and policy, digital marketing and sales.