She has served in high-profile positions on political campaigns and in government, and is one of the few leaders to have been Chief of Staff to governors on both sides of the aisle. She successfully led communications though CLEAR’s IPO process, managed high-profile political crises with national fallout, and oversaw global public affairs at multiple multi-billion dollar startups, including WeWork.
When you tend to get into situations that are high profile, that could be considered crisis, it's usually because there's a perception gap. The biggest vulnerability for anyone, anything, any company is really the distance between what you practice and what you preach. And when that distance grows, it creates room for error. It creates room for criticism.
A lot of my approach is: how do you think about your long term planning? How do you consistently drive a proactive communications calendar from engagement with multiple audiences? And as part of that, how do you really do a comprehensive risk assessment of the place that you're working at to really have a better sense of where there could be vulnerabilities?
Where are there gaps between what you're trying to be, what we were trying to be from a value perspective, and then operationally, what you're actually doing. I think the more that you can understand it from the jump, and the more that you're aware of that as you go through the decision-making process of the things that you do and don't do externally, but also how you inform and advise other members of the C suite or CEO or the principal that you're working for, the better that positions you.
As a communications professional, I think it's really important to be one of the calmest people in the room. There's an instinct to respond immediately. There's an instinct that motion is going to be in progress, that motion is going to be fixing whatever's happening. And I've found through experience that generally is not the case. And so I think as someone in the room who's advising on those moments, it's really important to be calm, to be thoughtful, and to really resist that instinct to respond immediately. And I think that's true even as you think about the longer term.
I'm a big believer in the why before the how. I think you really need to understand the bigger picture, no matter who you're working for, who are you trying to be, what are you trying to say, how are you trying to position whether it's a company, individual, a product, and in the larger market? It's understanding who you're trying to talk to, who are your audiences? And that thinking s really important before you get into tactics. That's not just in a crisis moment, I think it tends to be generally even from a communications moment. And I think you can't really inform the house until you know the why. And I think that's true, particularly in a crisis situation. And that why piece is really key because the moment that you're going to address whatever the issue is, is something that you really can't walk back. So the moment that you go out, from a public perspective, to whatever audiences that you need to be communicating to, it's really hard to walk back what you're doing. So it's really important that you grasp what you're trying to do before you actually do it.
We have to be able to adapt with the difference in how new cycles have shifted the lens through which certain issues are perceived, and then certainly how we're actually doing the tactical piece of it. There's a lot of tactics that were tried and true. There were a lot of approaches that were tried and true for a period of time, but just in a different moment in time, where the media was very different, where there were only certain outlets where the emphasis was not as much on how you were communicating internally, which can be just as important as how you're communicating externally. And we see that companies that fail to appreciate the moment that we're in and the ability of how something can quickly take off, end up being a little bit flat footed. I think sometimes the hardest job that folks in this field have frankly, is actually getting people to think differently or be willing to take a little bit of a risk.
I don't mean when I say this, having just a comms playbook, because I think, again, there's going to be things that are unique to whoever you're working with that you can't just dust off like a playbook that's one size fit all. There are going to be some things that I think are consistent and true, no matter the circumstance. But the truth being that depending on the company, the size, geography, the specific issue, you're going to need to have some flexibility and nuance in terms of how you approach it, which is why I also think it's really important that we take the time. And part of our recommendation is really doing an audit of not just what potentially could be external issues, but looking at however you're trying to position, let's say your company from an external perspective, you know the values or the ways that you're looking for people to respond to it.
How is that in line with how the company actually operates? Are there areas that seem, to no fault necessarily of anyone, but just as you're going through that, are there ways with which the company or the CEO is talking about the company externally that just doesn't match up with how things are being handled internally? You'll see a lot of times this is usually really felt mostly in when we talk about company culture, but this becomes, if you're talking about something external and you're putting a lot of emphasis on reinforcing that to multiple audiences, that's where the press and media and other stakeholders are going to focus, right? If you're really leaning heavily into a specific value, and then that becomes a place where there's noise internally, that something isn't matching that or there becomes something, whether it's anything from transparency to a privacy policy to how you handle the company culture, that's the first place that's going to ultimately be an area that press will focus on and ultimately become a larger issue. And again, it goes back to that idea of your vulnerability is difference between what you practice and what you preach.
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