by Caroline Leach | Sep 5, 2018 | Careers, Change, Leadership, Social Media
Sometimes strategic procrastination can be a good thing.
Except in my case, it wasn’t fully strategic. At all.
Wrapping up several years in the corporate world, launching my own business, getting my children settled into a new school year and doing right by my community commitments didn’t leave much time for one very important detail …
… naming my new company.
Sure, I looked at a few articles. Jotted down some ideas. But a name is critically important. And I didn’t have one yet.
Suddenly I found myself with one day to go before my self-imposed deadline to rebrand my social media accounts.
And that one day was Labor Day.
Holidays carry a lot of symbolism for me. My husband and I got engaged on New Year’s Eve. While our April wedding didn’t fall on Easter, many of our anniversaries have. Our daughter was born on a holiday and our son was born on the first day of a new season.
Our daughter was baptized on Valentine’s Day. By comparison, our son’s September baptism date seemed nondescript. Until 9/11 happened.
His baptism was the Sunday after the world changed forever. My out-of-town family members couldn’t come because … no planes were flying. I wondered if it would be a bad idea to proceed in light of the national tragedy. But I decided to move forward.
The church was packed, with people seeking solace and answers to something that has no answers. Through tears, a few people sought me out after the service to thank me for bringing my infant son to be baptized. They said it gave them hope for new beginnings.
Fast forward to 2015. I launched a blog on New Year’s Day. As a VP of corporate communications, I began it as an exploration of the future of the field.
Later that year, the company was acquired. I had the opportunity to move into marketing analytics. So I pivoted my blog as well into a learning experience in the new field.
But that wasn’t something I ultimately found myself wanting to spend hours of my weekend and evening time on. But what about how people learn new skills? That was interesting to me. So I explored learning in my blog for a while.
Then I attended a women’s leadership conference two Septembers ago at Fullscreen, a media company for creators and brands. The actor/producer/entrepreneur Reese Witherspoon was a surprise guest speaker.
A comment she made changed my life. When she was asked about her success in social media, she talked about being authentic. And she mentioned a big white space in the area, helping people shape their images and reputations through social media.
It was an a-ha moment for me. That’s what I wanted to do.
So two years ago, I began writing, researching and speaking about how professionals can build and boost their careers through social media. It’s a labor of love I did on the side in early mornings and evenings and weekends.
It’s a dream for me to start my own business in this area. And I am very fortunate to be able to do that this fall.
But a name. A name. I needed a name. Not to mention I needed a catchphrase that my upcoming book editor Cat Spydell recommended. (And creating a catchphrase is next up on my list.)
So I started doodling ideas. I analyzed tech company names. I looked at PR company names. Ad agencies. Podcasts. Hashtags. Even multi-hyphenate lives, also known as a “slash generation” with portfolio careers.
For further inspiration, I put all the descriptive words about me in the farewell notes from colleagues into an Excel spreadsheet. Then I made them into a word cloud, thanks to wordclouds.com. Here it is:
Traits that describe me, thanks to my colleagues and wordclouds.com
But in the end, it turned out to be a variation on a placeholder my husband Kevin put into his business plan. He’s opening a South Bay, California steakhouse with a seasoned restaurant veteran in the coming months. He asked me to manage the PR and social media. And he noted Carelle Communications would lead the work.
It’s an amalgamation of my name, Caroline Elizabeth Leach.
Yet alas, there’s already a Carelle fine jeweler.
But what about Carrelle with two r’s?
It’s been used as a baby name on rare occasions. Of English and German origin, it has wide-ranging meanings – farmer, strong, courageous, melody and song.
Strong and courageous spoke to me immediately. Initially I was puzzled by farmer. But a farmer equates to cultivation and growth. Perfect. How about melody and song? That speaks to my joy in writing, researching, consulting and speaking.
What are the other reasons I like The Carrelle Company?
- It’s a takeoff of my name, which is my brand in a way … as our names are now our personal brands
- It’s alliterative with the repeated “C’s.” I changed “communications” to “company” to keep the possibilities open for the future
- The initial letters are evocative of “careers,” which I help to fuel through my work
- There’s a slight link with the C-words related to what I do – communication, community, collaboration, consulting, critical thinking, connection
- The “car” evokes an automobile with motion, acceleration, speed and freedom
- It sounds elegant and classic … and slightly French, my chosen language of study as a teen (which comes in slightly handy now as I struggle to learn Spanish)
- It’s strong and it’s feminine with the “elle”
- It’s unique … who else but me could use this name?!?
And then there may be the name-letter effect in my dedication to the field of communications. According to research by Dr. Brett Pelham, a psychologist, people “disproportionately choose careers whose labels resemble their names.”
So just as “people named Dennis or Denise are overrepresented among dentists,” this could partly explain why I, as a Caroline, am attracted to communications.
And perhaps why, in my Google search of people named Carrelle, the two I found work in communications on other continents.
So that’s the story of how The Carrelle Company came to be.
And now it’s on to the business of writing, researching, consulting and speaking. I’m helping people grow their careers and business owners grow their companies through digital branding in social media.
by Caroline Leach | Dec 26, 2016 | Change, Corporate Communications, Learning
What does the future hold for PR and communications? Check out the Relevance Report.
New from the USC Center for Public Relations this month, it’s full of innovative ideas on what’s ahead.
Global. Mobile. Video. Data. Emotion. These are just a few of the trend areas accelerating in the year ahead.
The biggest learning for me? It’s the parallel and seemingly paradoxical rise of data and emotion as drivers of influence. Data drives better decision making, while emotion is a prime influencer of people’s opinions and behaviors.
Find out more in my latest blog post on the USC Annenberg Alumni website.
It’s about what you’ll learn in this insightful report, with nuggets of wisdom from Annenberg’s Bob Feldman and Heather Rim as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Friedman.
The post is part of being a proud Annenberg Alumni Ambassador this school year. It’s a thrill to share the best of this distinguished school for communication and journalism.
The Relevance Report gives timely insight into trends that will impact society, business and communications. It features thought pieces from communications leaders who identify the issues, ideas and innovations that will be relevant to the communications industry in 2017.
by Caroline Leach | Oct 22, 2016 | Corporate Communications, Work/Life
Stories bring people together in powerful ways.
I was reminded of this at a recent leadership offsite.
Following a day of focusing on the future and identifying imperatives for the coming year, we gathered around the dinner table.
The talk turned to people’s stories, their families and the paths to where they are today.
We heard about teachers, farmers and ranchers. We heard about people who were the first in their family to attend college. We heard about struggles and triumphs. We heard about hard work and dedication.
It was an inspiring slice of largely American history. One especially sage colleague remarked about how far each of our families had come in just a few generations.
It’s easy to lose sight of that in our fast-paced, always-on 21st-century world.
I wonder what life was like for my great-grandfather, Neils Peter Larsen. Born in Denmark in the late 1800s, he was the youngest of 9 children.
With little economic opportunity on the Danish isle of Laeso, he left his country as a young teen. As a cabin boy, he sailed around Cape Horn to San Francisco.
Some years later, he became the captain of his own ship, the St. Katherine. My grandmother and sister share her name and adventurous spirit.
That’s the ship pictured above, temporarily stuck in the ice in the Bering Sea in the early 1900s. How cold must it have been that day? How likely was it the ship would break apart as the ice moved? How scary was it to walk across the waves?
Or maybe it was just business as usual in that line of work.
According to the San Francisco-based Pacific Telephone Magazine where my mom was featured as an employee in the 1960s, “Captain Larsen made history with voyages to Alaska during the Yukon gold rush and later with the Alaskan fisheries.”
I can only imagine what those experiences were like today, as I gaze at my family’s framed sea charts from California, Hawaii and Japan that line my walls.
It’s absolutely incredible to think how far sea navigation has come in little over 100 years – from large paper charts to electronic navigation systems. What amazing advancements will the next century hold?
My great-grandparents honeymooned by sailing around the coast of China. That chart hangs in my parents’ house in Connecticut, complete with pencil markings of an uncharted island my ancestors discovered on their journey.
These stories and the ones I heard from my colleagues remind me of the hard work and determination that are the hallmarks of our country.
They remind me that when things get tough, there’s always a way through – or around or over.
They remind me that the future is exciting and that we’re each creating it, one day at a time.
We have what it takes. We got this.
As I contemplate a visit to Denmark, I’m inspired by the serendipitous family reunion that the multi-talented photographer Denice Duff experienced on a magical trip to Italy.
While looking for her great-grandmother’s house in Sicily, she had the unexpected good fortune to meet family members she never knew she had.
This heartwarming story may be one of the reasons I recently picked up a book called The Storyteller’s Secret.
In this captivating read, Carmine Gallo says that, “since the next decade will see the most change our civilization has ever known, your story will radically transform your business, your life and the lives of those you touch.”
Why is this important? Because “ideas that catch on are wrapped in a story,” he says.
Stories connect us, inform us and inspire us.
That’s undoubtedly one of the reasons behind the golden age of television, with so many compelling shows. This is why it’s so exciting to work in an industry at the intersection of entertainment and technology.
This is where great stories are told that entertain us, help us make sense of the world and prompt us to think about our own stories and the difference we’re making.
(And this is where I remind readers that opinions are my own.)
Speaking of stories, I can’t wait to hear from the speakers at next week’s TEDWomen 2016 conference. Fittingly for me, it’s in San Francisco, close to where I was born and where my daughter is attending college.
What’s your story? How are you writing it every day?
by Caroline Leach | Apr 30, 2016 | Change, Learning, Work/Life
At the beginning of this month, I started an April adventure. What was it? To complete each of my daily dozen tasks every day for an entire month.
Why did I do it? To experiment. To create change. To get more done. To make decisions. To enjoy life more.
Here’s what I learned. Most of it was from blogging every day for a month, the one activity I did faithfully every day.
1. It’s easier doing things on most days, rather than every day. Sometimes the day’s schedule precluded doing everything on my list. And some activities shouldn’t be done daily, like lifting weights.
Days when I traveled called for extra creativity. For exercise, that meant getting in some steps while waiting at the airport. It also meant packing lighter “athletic” shoes that would fit in my bag so I could use the hotel fitness center.
They were a pair of slip-on Keds that took up a sliver of space in my bag compared with my usual workout shoes. A podiatrist might disagree, but they worked for 30 minutes of walking on the treadmill. The longer-term solution? When I replace my current workout shoes, I’ll get a smaller, lighter pair.
The benefit of doing an activity every day is that you don’t have to think about it. That makes it easier to do on a consistent basis. But once it’s become a habit, it’s easier to do it on most days of the week, rather than every day.
2. To make a new habit stick, focus on just one each month. Some days had a breathless quality of racing through activities to check them off the list. Some were already automatic, like taking vitamins. But others required chunks of time, like blogging, reading, exercising and sleeping. Even doubling up on activities didn’t fully do the trick.
What will work better? Focusing on one area each month. That’s inspired by Gretchen Rubin‘s year-long happiness project. She focused on one area of life each month for a year. In the final month, she combined all of her newly established habits and rituals.
So I’ll take my daily dozen, with a few tweaks, and assign each to a month over the coming year. The month of May? It’s a tossup between healthy eating and sleep.
Four years ago, on Mother’s Day, I became a lifetime member of Weight Watchers after losing nearly 50 pounds. And while thankfully I’m not the person who regained all of the weight and more, I would not keep my membership (within 2 pounds of goal) if I went to a weigh-in today.
It’s a struggle, this constant vigilance and self-care. The words of a Weight Watchers leaders still ring in my ears, “It ain’t over ’til you’re over.” How true.
So this May will be the month of healthy eating. Back to the healthful simplicity of the “power foods” – fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nonfat dairy and lean protein.
3. Clarify what you most enjoy by analyzing how you spend your time. What do you most love to do? One of mine is writing. It’s usually a guaranteed flow state, every time.
My April adventure clarified this because blogging was the one activity I did daily (other than taking vitamins, which I’m choosing not to count because it was already a well-established habit and takes only a minute to complete).
Whether it’s writing a report a work, or an inspiration for a community charity organization or this blog, I love to write. So I’ll focus on areas where I can do more than that.
4. Celebrate progress. One of my purposes in blogging daily was to clarify the focus of this blog. It began as an exploration of the future of corporate communications. Then it evolved into a learning journey, with a focus on the data analytics aspect of a career pivot.
And while I didn’t fully crystallize the focus of this blog, I did make progress. I know what I can take off the list. While I’ll still devote learning time to reading blogs and books about data analytics, along with some online courses, that specifically won’t be the focus of this blog.
I’ll continue to write about learning in general. It’s something we’ll all need to do throughout our lives, regardless of the the specific subject.
In my work, I’m intrigued by the intersection between data science and communication. As I find a way to link the two in an interesting way, that may be the subject of some future blog posts.
5. The more effortless you make your goals, the easier is it to accomplish them. With WordPress on my MacBook, iPad and iPhone, I could draft and post to my blog wherever I was. My Spanish is app is the same – all I need is 10 minutes and I can do my lesson for the day. My library is with me all the time with my Kindle app. And so on.
This is where I was especially proud of my employer and the vision to connect people with their world, everywhere they live and work. (Opinions on this blog are mine.) This is a great enabler – perhaps the great enabler – of what’s the most important in each of our lives.
Other enablers? Keeping my yoga mat and workout gear in my car. Having my PFD (personal floatation device) stacked beside that for standup paddle boarding sessions.
6. Complimentary activities help you get the most out of your day. For me it’s walking on the treadmill and reading (or streaming favorite TV shows on my DIRECTV app).
Thinking about 3 things I’m grateful for in the last 24 hours while brushing my teeth (thank you, Shawn Achor).
Maximizing family interactions by sitting in the dining room while I’m reading or writing or whatever so when my teens stroll by and want to engage (yes, they can be like cats), I’m there. This works in an office environment with colleagues, too.
7. Don’t try to do too much. Yet doubling up on activities only works to a point. Sometimes I struggle with enjoying the present moment. Being fully there. Not racing ahead to the next thing that I feel needs to be done.
By consciously limiting the number of things and activities I commit to, I know I’ll do better in that smaller set of activities. Given my goal to blog daily, I feel the quality of my posts wasn’t always what I wanted it to be. I didn’t have time for research, for reflection and for revising.
But I did learn some helpful strategies. When I finished one post, I’d start a new draft post and jot down my ideas in a brief outline. Then when I re-opened it to start writing, the initial thinking was already done.
This goes back to the principle of taking small steps. It also relates to my Spanish studies. While I’m not devoting big chunks of time to it, I can spend a few minutes a day. Studies are showing this goes for exercise too.
8. If something isn’t working for you, let it go. I don’t have to do everything. If something isn’t a fit, I can let it go.
This is one of the reasons I’m excited to read Angela Duckworth‘s book on Grit when the pre-order downloads to my Kindle app on May 3. This guru of tenacity and perseverance says it can be okay to quit. Just not on your hardest day.
One of my daily dozen was 2 minutes of power posing, inspired by Amy Cuddy‘s book on Presence. I’d like to think it made me stand up and sit up straighter during the day, and to take up more space. Why? To feel more confident and live life more fearlessly.
But I don’t need to do it every day. I can save it for times when I have to give a big presentation or otherwise tackle a tough challenge.
9. Relationships with people are more important than checking tasks off a list. When my daughter or son wants to talk with me, I stop what I’m doing (as hard as that can sometimes be) and I listen and chat.
Here I’m inspired by Shonda Rhimes and her Year of Yes. Whenever her daughters asked her to play, she’d stop what she was doing to spend time with them. It doesn’t take long. But it means so much.
My daughter and I have had lots of chats this month – on the road and at home as she’s been choosing her college. It’s been a learning experience. Sometimes you don’t end up where you expected, but there can be a whole new world of possibilities. It all depends on your perspective.
10. Intense activity can’t solve all of your problems – or the world’s problems. There are still sad moments. Anxious moments. Frustrating moments. We live in a world that seemingly gets crazier and more unpredictable every day – with events that are beyond our control.
Keeping busy all the time won’t solve those problems. But it will help you make progress in your own life. And that’s what makes us happy.
11. We can still control an awful lot in our lives. Our minds – with thanks to Carol Dweck and her growth mindset concept. What we do – or don’t do – every day. How we show up and share our gifts. What we choose to do and who we do it with. Being clear about what we can control and what we can’t.
12. Love is all there is. My sister Katie shared this with my last year during a very sad time her family’s life. This was a favorite saying of her mother-in-law Sylvia, who was unexpectedly near the end of her life. It makes me smile through tears to think of Sylvia, Katie and the rest of the family.
But in the end, what could be more true? Love really is all there is.
As someone who’s all about achieving goals – sometimes with a relentless zeal that my immediate family enjoys teasing me about – this one made me stop and think. Especially this month as I figured out how to cram a lot in every day.
Life truly is about the people and the relationships.
And there’s always something to love about others. No matter who they are. It helps to remember that everyone is carrying a heavy load and traveling a difficult path, even if their life appears perfect on their Instagram feed. I’ve learned to be kinder to myself and to others.
Because love is all there is.
by Caroline Leach | Mar 29, 2015 | Corporate Communications
What’s the best name for what we do as communications leaders?
As the shapers of corporate reputation, developers of corporate narrative and engager of employees, consumers, investors and communities?
Is it Communications? Corporate Communications? Corporate Affairs? Corporate Relations? Public Relations? Public Affairs?
Other corporate functions have simply translatable, one-word descriptors. Human Resources is about people. Marketing is about products. Finance is about money.
What is the one word that describes communications?
A look at the past, present and future may shed some light on it.
Looking at the past, “communication” comes from the Latin verb “to share.” And sharing certainly is at the heart of what happens in any communication. Yet there’s so much more.
Looking at the present, some of my colleagues in the field recently shared the names of their corporate functions. To my surprise, Corporate Affairs appeared twice as often as Communications.
Perhaps that has to do with the wide variety of functions captured under the corporate umbrella. They can include public relations, employee communications, investor relations, government relations, corporate events and trade shows, and corporate social responsibility, to give a few examples.
Looking at the future, one definition of corporate affairs that appeals to me is its focus on “future changes because they guide companies through industry trends.”
A future orientation is imperative in our rapidly changing world. And that requirement is mainly about our mindset.
The bigger determinant of a functional name is clarity. This takes on even more importance as humans are tasked to process more and more information in less and less time.
If “corporate affairs is essentially about communication,” as several sources stated, then the function should be called what it is. Communications.
One thing I find counterintuitive in the communications field is how much jargon can creep in. The Urban Dictionary defines jargon as “speech or writing having unusual or pretentious vocabulary, convoluted phrasing and vague meaning.”
How often to you come across jargon during your work day? Or in the space of one meting, email or conversation?
It reminds me of a teacher I had in elementary school. When we were learning about verbs, she would ask us to come to the front of the room to demonstrate the action of the verb – for example, crawl, walk or run. If we couldn’t physically show the verb’s action, she said, it probably wasn’t a verb.
That’s a good proof point for jargon. If you – or the speaker – can’t describe the action or the idea in simple, straightforward words, there isn’t enough concrete substance.
Hypothesizing that Corporate Affairs could fall into the jargon category, I conducted a one-day experiment. It had two questions. What do you think someone in Corporate Communications does? What do you think someone in Corporate Affairs does?
Who did I ask? A variety of college-educated people I came in contact with during one weekend day.
For Communications, I heard the words connect, network, brainstorm, innovate and deliver a message. Not bad for people who don’t work in the field.
For Corporate Affairs, I heard silence. I got puzzled looks.
I heard responses like, “I don’t know exactly what the functions are,” and “maybe it has to do with promoting a company’s interests and doing things that help the company behind the scenes.”
So I would advocate calling the function what it is – Communications. Or Corporate Communications.
And what defines the Communications function?
In a word: reputation.
A reputation for being a great place to work. A reputation for providing desirable products and services. A reputation for being an attractive investment. A reputation for being socially and environmentally responsible.
And that reputation must be backed by reality. The organization has to deliver on its promise – on its consumer brand about what the product or service delivers and on its employer brand about what the work experience delivers.
And those brands must be mutually reinforcing. One of the reasons an employer brand will attract the kind of top talent an organization needs is because of the strength and desirability of the consumer brand. And employees are the people who will deliver on the promise of the consumer brand.
These were the powerful learnings in creating an employer brand a few years ago, in partnership with Mark Schumann, author of two books on employer branding, and Michael Ambrozewicz, a communications leader on my team.
Our work led to the creation of an employer brand statement, an underlying strategy and a book that outlined its use for talent acquisition and employee communications.
Today it’s woven through the fabric of our organization and informs everything we do, as we entertain the future.
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