There is a version of professional authority that most of us were taught to recognise, and it is loud. It speaks first in meetings, it takes up room, and it treats visibility as evidence of value. Much of the advice given to communications professionals over the past decade has quietly assumed this model, on the reasoning that a function fighting for recognition should learn to assert itself.
In a conversation for our PR Woman of the Month series, Ruth Mthembu described something almost entirely opposite, and the more closely you look at what she said, the more it resembles a coherent theory of how senior practitioners actually acquire influence.
Ruth leads communications within the Climate and Health portfolio at the Africa Health Research Institute in South Africa. She trained as a lawyer, changed direction before practising, and has since built internal communications for a workforce of more than thirty thousand at Mr Price Group, steered marine conservation messaging at the WILDTRUST, and turned a keynote into a documentary selected for the Science Film Festival. She is not a quiet practitioner in the sense of being unaccomplished. She is quiet in a way that turns out to be strategic.
Listening is a competence, not a courtesy
Her account of her own early career is unusually candid. She describes spending more time wanting to be heard, wanting to be seen, and wanting to be taken seriously than she spent listening, and she connects that directly to the quality of her work at the time. When it came to communicating to whichever audience needed reaching, she says, she would often stumble, and the root of the problem was not craft. It was that she had not listened enough to know what she was working with.
Her observation on the profession is sharper still, which is that a great many people want to talk and want their opinions known, while very few want to listen, and that communicators are not exempt from this.
This matters more at senior level than at junior level, not less. A practitioner early in their career is usually being told what to do. A senior practitioner is usually being told what is happening, in fragments, by people with partial views and competing interests, and the ability to assemble those fragments into an accurate picture is entirely dependent on how well they listen. Judgement is downstream of information, and information is downstream of listening.
Tact is the capability the profession undervalues
Ruth builds much of her thinking around a single quality, and she has built a platform on it. Tact, in her definition, is the ability to communicate effectively with emotional intelligence, to be diplomatic, and to make a point without making an enemy.
That last clause deserves attention, because it describes something senior practitioners do constantly and rarely name. The work of advising leadership involves telling people things they would prefer not to hear, in rooms where they hold more institutional power than you do, in a manner that leaves the relationship intact enough to do it again next quarter. Practitioners who can only make the point, or who can only preserve the relationship, are limited in ways that eventually become visible.
She is also clear that this is not a quality one masters. It is one you keep learning until the end of your life, which is an honest thing to say about a skill most professional development treats as either innate or trivial.
Boundaries set early are boundaries that hold
On the persistent assumption that a communications specialist can simply do everything, from taking the photographs to producing a design in five minutes, Ruth is direct. Her response is not to argue in the moment but to establish the terms at the start, because she found that trying to introduce boundaries later, as each request arrives, is considerably harder than setting them when a role begins.
What is striking is her reframing of what that costs. Early in her career she avoided setting boundaries because she worried it would read as rude, which is a calculation many practitioners will recognise. Her position now is that reminding colleagues what you do and do not do is not disrespectful but professional, and that it is what allows the work to function.
Proximity is not the same as understanding
Ruth works alongside climate scientists, and her method is to sit inside their workshops and data-gathering sessions long before any message is drafted, including sessions where the material is difficult and she does not follow it. She treats not understanding as an opportunity to ask, and she is explicit that this is what makes it possible for her to communicate the science credibly afterwards.
That discipline produced her strongest work. A study on how extreme weather affects the mental health of vulnerable populations became a documentary that aired on one of South Africa's largest news channels, which is not a translation exercise. It is what becomes possible when the communicator understood the material well enough to know which part of it mattered.
She is equally clear about the cost of the alternative, having watched organisations exclude communications specialists from decisions and then call them in afterwards to mop up the resulting mess, which in her experience does not work well.
You do not have to keep proving yourself
Her closing argument is the one most likely to stay with senior practitioners, and it is deceptively simple. The first and last time you had to prove yourself as a communications professional, she says, was in the interview for the role you currently hold. You are in that role because you are good enough for it, and the work now is to be effective rather than to keep demonstrating that you deserve to be there.
For a profession that has spent years arguing for its own legitimacy, that is a genuinely different posture. It suggests that the energy spent proving the function's worth might be better spent exercising it.
The through-line
Read together, these are not five pieces of career advice. They describe one thing.
Every capability Ruth names is a form of restraint that produces authority rather than costing it. Listening before speaking. Making the point without making the enemy. Setting the boundary early so it never needs defending. Sitting in the room you do not understand until you do. Declining to spend your working life auditioning for a job you already hold.
None of this looks like assertion, and all of it produces the thing assertion is usually reaching for.
Watch the full interview with Ruth Mthembu on the PRWF YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/VXmhaUigOXM
About PRWF
The Foundation(PRWF) is a global social impact enterprise strengthening the practice, leadership, and economic relevance of public relations by building elite communities, globally mobile talent pipelines, and high-level capability platforms for communications professionals and institutions. The Foundation is deliberately focused on emerging markets, recognising the unique PR and communications practices these economies have evolved to meet their societal and economic contexts. Through its initiatives, the Foundation amplifies the voices and influence of professionals whose contributions have shaped the growth of the global PR profession.
.JPG)
.jpg)
.JPG)
