Can I Offer You Some Feedback? - Episode #71

Show Notes:

This week Sara gives a special Consultant Insights episode you’ll hear from another coach and consultant, who specializes in leadership development and communication strategy. In this episode Sara welcomes, founder and CEO of Minerva’s Legacy , Dani! They dive into the complexities of working with a range of clients as well as the importance of developing a communications strategy with teams. Listen to the full conversation and learn more about developing leaders on your team. Subscribe to this podcast today and so you never miss an episode! 

Episode #71: Consultant Insights: Leadership Development and Communications Strategy

Sara: Welcome to a special episode of Can I Offer You Some Feedback? My name is Sara, and this is the podcast for those who have a complicated relationship with feedback and are looking to hear from real people across levels and industries with their ideas, perspectives, and best practices on feedback. Today, I want to share this special episode where I talk with another coach and consultant who specializes in leadership development and communication strategy.

In this episode, we'll be hearing their insight across their industries and what they wish they could give their clients feedback on. I want to welcome Dani to the podcast today. She's the founder and CEO of Minerva's Legacy. Welcome to the conversation today.

Danielle: Thanks, Sara. Nice to see you.

Sara: Absolutely. I'd like to dive into our conversation with a little bit about your specific experience. Can you share about your primary areas of practice and the type of work that you do?

Danielle: Yeah. My background is actually in nonprofit and advocacy communication. I've been doing that for a little over 15 years now. And I live in Washington DC. Most of my work has been done in DC other than a small portion of time when I worked in venture philanthropy in Chicago. And so a lot of my clients, I do communications and organizational strategy consulting for. I also became a certified leadership coach through the Coactive Training Institute. It's been like 2 years now.

And I love coaching. I find that there's this beautiful kind of combination between equipping leaders with being the best version of themselves and understanding what their purpose is and how they want to show up as leaders in the organization at whatever level, with being able to give folks strategy and organizational guidance around goal setting and how you build your team and how you build trust within your team and how you give feedback.

So that's kind of how I do my work. My mission is basically the idea that everybody is uniquely equipped to change the world. And the more self-awareness you have, the more empathy and compassion you can bring to your work, the better leader you'll be.

Sara: I love that. And I'm sure that you've seen, because you have so many years of experience, both kind of in industry and now outside, I'm curious, what are you noticing that feels different? Maybe post-pandemic, maybe just trends you're observing that are not pandemic-related. But what's maybe an area you've been focusing on or getting more requests for?

Danielle: Oh, that's good. So most of my clients are people of color. Most of them are women, particularly on the coaching side. And I think there's a lot of burnout and at the same time, a lot of desire to be part of the change and part of leading that change. And so how do you balance the need to feel like you're fighting for social justice, fighting for a better world, and also taking care of yourself and taking care of your team, right?

And so that's like a trend I've been seeing a lot. I've also been seeing just a trend in communicators feeling like they're burnt out, right? We're all watching the news on an insane level right now, and as communicators, we don't get to turn that off. Most of us that work in policy and social justice and nonprofit work, we have to be involved in social media. We have to be watching the 24-hour news cycle, and there are not a lot of options to turn your back on what's going on in the world. And that just requires a different kind of self-care and a different kind of self-awareness so that you notice when you're hitting your limit. And if you notice, you have tools and resources in order to support your team and yourself.

And so I'm seeing that a lot and I've been having a lot of conversations with other leaders in the communications world right now when it feels like the world is on fire around how they're not only equipping their CEOs with what to say, how to communicate with your teams, how to communicate organization-wide, but also being brought into conversations much earlier than they used to be.

Because people are seeing that it is important to not only have a communications team that understands the work and has a strategy and can respond to crises, but also to have a diverse communications team that can bring a lot of perspectives when we live in a globalized world where you need different voices at the table to help make sure that you're communicating in a universally empathetic and compassionate and curious way.

Sara: I'm wondering for those clients that either maybe have some baseline awareness or maybe choosing not to see what's going on, what are some ways that you go about helping either the individual or the organization see what you're seeing that they're doing?

Danielle: That's interesting. Obviously, it's just different levels of self-awareness, right? At the core, that's really what it is. And I think what helps people, because we live in a capitalistic society, it's kind of like grounding it in what are your organization's goals and values. And if you don't have goals and values, that's really where you need to start. Because you shouldn't be surprised when somebody asks you what your values are. Whether it's on your website or just written in your employee handbook or whatever, you should have a place where you can go to say, like, if we say something about this, is this in line with our organization's values?

And so I think our immediate instinct in this world of social media and like hot takes and all of that is to be like, we have to say something. And that's not always the case. Sometimes you have to say something internally so that your team knows that you are watching what's going on and that you have support for them, whether that's like you can take PTO, you can donate to these humanitarian causes, you can see somebody for mental health support, like that kind of stuff. But I think we often leap to the, I have to make a public statement.

That's the feedback I've been trying to give a lot of my clients is, you can do things quietly that support your team and support your values and then decide when you want to step out and say something. It's also okay to listen and be curious and not know the answer yet and wait and see what comes out of being curious and doing your due diligence. Because that doesn't just mean you wait and see what other people are doing. It means you wait and see and do some research to see what aligns with where you've said your organization stands on these issues or just on human values in general.

Sara: Yeah. I see it kind of all too often. I don't kind of work in the communication space in the same way you do. But this desire from senior leadership to have a knee-jerk reaction and make a statement or take a stance and not think about the ramifications, not to say that every effect from a cause has a negative implication, but what's the rush to jump to?

I mean, certainly, you need to acknowledge the change or challenge or issues that are occurring, but you're setting some precedent, you're communicating an expectation, and you have to follow through on that. You know, it's easy to say we want transparency in our organization and then not think about what you're really saying. Like, oh, so all the financials are open to everyone? Or all of the documents are accessible, or the pay bans are public? You said transparency, and I think there's kind of as you're seeing the desire to look like you're doing something or to have other people notice what might be going on in a different kind of way.

I'm wondering if you could share an example. You can anonymize it, of course, of a client who you've been working with where you're just really proud of what they're doing. They really seem committed to do the work. Whether it's an individual or an organization where you really see that they're taking it seriously, either around comm strategy or around the development work.

Danielle: Oh, yeah. That's easy. I have a full-time client, actually, who I'm transitioning into being just a part-time consultant for. And I'm very happy to say their name. I hope people look them up and support them. The organization is Advocates for Community Health. And very rarely do you see startups pop up in the association world, right? We all know all of the associations that exist to support all of the different sectors. But this is a startup. They've been around for two years.

The CEO came to me when she was ready to kind of start this organization and was like, "I'd like for you to lead up the comms team and build out the comms team." So I was their first full-time hire and I've never had a job like that where I get to build something from scratch with somebody else who has so much knowledge and understanding. Since I started to now, it's gone from a team of one to a team of almost 10 people.

We've done really great efforts around health equity and supporting community health centers nationwide. And a lot of that is because she was like, "I trust you. You know communications, you know non-profit advocacy. I just want you to do this. Tell me where you would go on the communications side." Our relationship was started with this transparency and trust baseline that allows me to just be very honest with her to really just say like, "Okay, well, I wouldn't do it this way," or "what's our actual goal in doing this," or "as the team has grown, well, we're going to need some processes." All of those things where, to be honest, CEOs don't always need to understand that.

Usually, and I think that's like some of the guidance that I've been really grateful to have her allow me to nudge her into is, once you start hiring other people, even if you are a CEO that's used to doing all of the things, you have to release some of it so that you can do the CEO level stuff. The whole point is that you are bringing on people you trust to do the work that they can do, and especially in a startup, in a small org, you're hoping that they can take autonomy, that they can take some risks. You have to create some safety nets there where it's like, I will allow you to do something and it's okay if you fail, and we will figure it out together if that happens.

We had a new hire recently send me a text just being like, "You guys are so patient about things. I just love that when I make a mistake, people are like, it's okay. We'll figure it out." And we're all coming from kind of toxic environments. A lot of grind work happens in social justice and nonprofit spaces. So even if you love the job, you probably are exhausted and don't feel like you can raise your hand and say, "I need to take some time," or "I'm not giving you my best work because I'm overwhelmed with the way the world is, and also just this job," but we try to allow that.

I think when you can say that out loud, I was able to respond to that person and be like, "I'm glad you said that." And we actively are trying not to create a toxic workspace, knowing that the work is busy. There's a lot of work to be done. It doesn't stop. We work directly with Congress, and if you're watching the news you know. That's not an easy job to do, to get anybody to do anything in our government right now. And so it's exhausting and is psychologically wearing on you.

And so if you don't have a team that you feel like you can be honest with, that you can say, "I woke up this morning, I have a headache, I'm going to take the day. You guys, I trust what you... There are other things that we need to do today." Work and prosper. I don't know. I think that's my long-winded way of saying a lot of us believe that we're the only ones that can do things.

And I think all of us are, like I said, uniquely equipped to change the world and it is okay to take a beat or to rest or to trust somebody else to do the work and to delegate. And I spend a lot of time working with one-on-one clients and leaders and recognizing when that moment is, like what their difficulty, what the stumble or the hurdle is from like them releasing some things and letting other people do it.

Sara: And having the trust, taking the chance to trust someone else with a task is very hard if you've come from a very toxic place, which, as you said, many of us have. And that can be extremely challenging and a large exercise in like, here I go again, potentially. Or taking a risk, a gamble, a chance on that. I'm curious to know, what is something that you wish people understood or better understood about the importance or the impact of having a very clear kind of calm strategy, thinking about developing their leaders, building in that time. What's something that you think folks either miss or just don't get?

Danielle: I'm sorry. My dog is barking in the background. I'm sure you can hear that. I think that people think of comms and PR, whatever you want to call it because they're different, right? Communication is different than marketing, which is different than PR. But they're all under kind of the same umbrella industry. But I think people think of those things as support functions often, right? Like they're things that you bring in after you've created the strategy or you know what you want to do, you've created this goal and now you're going to circle back and give the heads up to the comms team or the marketing team or the graphic design team or whatever, whoever it is that does the execution of that work.

And I just encourage people to remember that that is a strategic function. It is not a supportive function. It is a strategic vertical that should be layered into all the other verticals that you have in your organization, and we all have worked in places where you're siloed, right? It's very easy, especially in larger organizations for you to get super siloed and for people to not recognize what other folks are doing on the team, what other initiatives are happening. Communicators are the ones that see it all.

And so if you don't have a communications team that's integrated into your work, that has a direct line to the leadership that is either like in leadership or has the ear of a CEO or a C-suite person, you're often overlooking this really great fabric that happens within your organization. They are the people that are sitting in on all the meetings about all the initiatives even if the folks doing the initiatives are talking to each other.

I have learned that over time, which has led me into doing a little bit more of strategic planning and organizational strategy in my consulting, is that I just naturally kind of became curious about what other people in the organization were doing. I asked questions because I needed to know to do my job. And then I would be like, "Did you know that competing priority is happening on the team in this other vertical?" Like, "Did you know that at the same time you want to do this campaign, so and so was doing the same campaign but with different words and kind of different branding in this other field office?" We're the ones that notice that because it's our jobs. It's like we're supposed to notice. And sometimes I think that gets taken for granted.

Sara: Especially, I think you mentioned those are the folks that are in the meetings hearing all of the pieces and parts assuming that the org lets them in the meeting, right?

Danielle: Exactly.

Sara: Because sometimes that doesn't happen and then it's like, how comes no one knows what anyone is doing? Well, it's by design, right? It's been designed that way. So I think that acknowledging there's a separation that does happen, so silos that you're mentioning and we have this function because it's important. It needs to be at the table because it's important, and how do we kind of keep that centered mind?

Danielle: Yeah. I've noticed as I'm transitioning from this full time client and onboarding new people to take those roles, onboarding should include comms people. When you're bringing on a new person on your team, they should understand your talking points, your branding, how you set up spokespeople because they are now an ambassador for your organization.

And so if you're leaving communicators out of any of those processes from HR all the way to the actual on the ground initiatives, you're missing this opportunity to have somebody who can easily train your spokespeople, who can easily create cohesiveness or cohesion across your organization with like, this is the brand, these are our talking points, these are our style guides, these are the ways that we communicate and engage with community.

I think all of those things are things comms people are seeing. They're always part of that even if it's at the end where we shouldn't be. Even if it's at the endpoint, we're always somehow absorbing that. And so bringing us into a larger strategy of how you want to incorporate your team and empower your staff changes everything.

Sara: It always surprises me when organizations forget that candidates are a part of their experience. If you're spending all this time and energy communicating to the public, working about your public face, and then just ignore recruitment, ignore the candidate experience, ignore onboarding. These are people that are wanting to interact with you, applying to come work with you. And even if they don't get the job, they could still be ambassadors for your mission if you treat them the way you want to treat. There's such a missed opportunity there really engaging in like, regardless of who interacts with "our brand", what's the experience we want folks to have when they work with us?

And so absolutely, whether it's an onboarding and recruitment, exiting, folks who are volunteering, folks who are partnering with us as stakeholders, there's a whole bunch of different opportunities to think about what's the experience we want them to have. And it's often missed when you're so focused on the end receiver of the services or the purchaser of your products or whatever it is that you're selling. But for our last question in our time together, Dani, can I offer you some feedback?

Danielle: Sure.

Sara: Well, I wanted to acknowledge, I know we've had an interesting relationship over quite a big span of years. But I've really had the opportunity I'd say in the past few years to appreciate and understand more of how you are bringing your variety of experiences to your client base, and that it is also a different set of clients, right? Depending on whether you're doing individual work with coaching clients, doing some of this strategy or communications or marketing or PR work on the organizational side, I'm loving that I'm seeing all of the kind of core qualities that I knew about you back when we were teenagers, kind of manifesting in your service delivery.

I've always appreciated your ability to just like 100% commit to dive in, to do the work, to really jump in, and explore a topic or an area, or as you said, get curious about what's going on in an entity. And I think it's that authenticity, that intentionality that folks you have worked with and will work with get to see. So I love that I'm seeing that. I hope folks are also seeing that and continue to kind of benefit from the range of your experience, but also, all that you can kind of bring them in the way that you work with them. I wanted to say thank you for that.

Danielle: Thank you. This is like a mini Laurel reunion, right? We've known each other since, what? Like, 8th grade?

Sara: Yeah. Long time.

Danielle: Yeah! And so, I love that I get to see other people that I grew up with still committing to everything we were taught when we were in school, which is that we have the power to change the world. We are women who have voices and talents and tools. Similarly to what you do, Sara, is I like being able to empower people to recognize what those talents are. Like, how can you apply those and how can you be proud of them and acknowledge them? I guess use them in your job, but you can also just use them at home.

Sara: Right. No, absolutely. Well, Dani, thank you so much for your time today and taking the time to speak to me. And thanks to you for joining us in a special episode of Can I Offer You Some Feedback? You can reach me at podcast@mod.network. We would love to hear from you on your thoughts on feedback or any other perspectives you'd like to hear from next. As always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend. And I'm hoping that tomorrow, you take a chance and offer some feedback when it's needed most.