by Caroline Leach | Mar 15, 2015 | Corporate Communications, Leadership, Learning, Social Media
What are the questions – asked and unasked – you’ll encounter in an interview for a corporate communications job? Here are mine.
Can you write? This really means, “can you think?” As acclaimed historian David McCullough said, “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That is why it’s so hard.”
Good writing is the price of admission to corporate comms. That’s why I’m often surprised by the number of people in the field who aren’t strong writers.
How do you become a good writer? Read voraciously. Write frequently. Edit liberally.
Are you smart? While you don’t have to be Mensa material, you need to have common sense. You need to possess a pragmatic, practical intelligence to navigate our VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous – world.
How do you solve problems? This is where I ask people to tell me about a train wreck. A project gone wrong. A major mess-up.
I want to see what early-warning indicators they observe. How they take accountability. How they turn things around. And how they analyze and fix the root cause so it won’t happen again.
Essentially, can they figure it out?
Do you have grit? Psychologist Angela Duckworth says grit is the key to success.
What is grit? It’s “passion and perseverance for very long-term goals . . . having stamina . . . and living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
It’s never giving up. And according to Duckworth, it’s more important than talent or IQ.
This is why I’m looking for candidates with passion and dedication. People with a relentless commitment to making something happen, whatever it takes.
Will you thrive in this culture? Every company has a distinct culture, or the way work gets done. Is it formal or informal? More structured or less structured? Conservative or innovative?
I ask candidates to tell me about the environment they most enjoy working in. Then I’ll ask why and for a few examples. As they speak, I picture how they might interact at a meeting or with various leaders at the company.
Are you savvy? This isn’t a question I’ll ask directly, but I’ll listen for signs that someone knows how to navigate an organization. That they know how to articulate their point of view appropriately, at the same time that they’ll listen to and consider their colleagues’ points of view. That they know how to resolve conflicts with professionalism and poise.
Will you add a diverse perspective and skill set to our team? The more diverse the team, the more effective it will be. Research bears this out.
I’m looking for people with a different take, a fresh perspective or a novel twist on doing things. This is part of always striving to improve and get better.
How flexible and agile are you? Can you quickly see when change is needed? And if so, can you pivot? Do you remain calm and unruffled when the best-laid plans need to be scrapped or redirected?
Are you social? A communicator has to be active in at least a few social media platforms. This is no longer optional. It’s a requirement.
When I’m preparing to interview a candidate, I start with a Google search and the person’s LinkedIn profile. Then I see what they’re tweeting. And how they’re communicating visually with pictures, videos, infographics and more.
Great story: A candidate flying in for an interview with my team tweeted about the great DIRECTV service on his flight, complete with a screenshot. We hired him.
Bad story: A candidate who tweeted “nailed it” after an interview. A fellow USC Annenberg alum shared this on a career panel we were on last year. That tweet ended the person’s candidacy.
What kind of a leader are you? In one word, how would your team describe your leadership style?
Here I’m inspired by my DIRECTV colleague Jen Jaffe who leads talent development. We were recently on a leadership panel at our company’s Young Professionals Network. She asked her team for input on her leadership style, so I did the same.
It’s an instant 360 feedback activity. Try it with your colleagues sometime.
How much upside career potential do you have? As candidates tell me about themselves, I’m listening through the filter of our leadership competencies.
Are they a strategic thinker? Someone who can innovate? Lead change? Deliver results? Build talent and teamwork? Establish productive relationships? Act with integrity? And build a deep understanding of corporate communications, our business and our industry?
What are you looking for in your next career gig? Life is too short to work in a job where you aren’t learning, contributing and making progress toward your most important goals.
That’s why I’m eager to learn what the candidate wants to get out of the job. It has to be a great fit for the company and the candidate as we work together to transform TV and entertain the future.
And lastly, one of my favorite bloggers, Penelope Trunk, offers a great course on reaching your goals by blogging. She advises people in each post to “write and write until something surprises you.”
My aha moment was seeing the relationship between heading off a train wreck and acting with grit. The Little Engine That Could did exactly that.
And it’s what each of us needs to do every day. Because we’re all capable of far more than we think we are.
by Caroline Leach | Mar 7, 2015 | Corporate Communications, Social Media
A 
= 1K wds
And ampersands are awesome in company names. P&G. H&M. A&E.
Not so much in copy.
Unless you’re trying to fit a complete thought into a 140-character tweet. Or about 100, to leave space for a retweet.
When you’re trying to economize on “spaces” (a shorter word than “characters”), using the ampersand symbol “&” saves 2 spaces over “and”
So “and” becomes “&” – “for” becomes “4” – and “creative” becomes “cr8v”
And sayings become acronyms. LOL. OMG. IDK.
Or emojis. 
Need guidance on using these “picture letters” that originated in Japan? If you have teens in the house, you already know. Otherwise, check out Emojipedia.
And who needs punctuation? That period at the end of a complete thought becomes extraneous. It might even be the character that puts you over the limit.
Conversely, as the NYT recently reported, “punctuation on steroids” could be just what you need in place of actual words!!!!!
And in my quest for brevity as I substitute “calm” for “serene” or “luck” for “serendipity,” I wonder if longer words will fade away over time. They take up too much space in our world of limited character counts and attention spans.
Yet this would be a huge loss for the human experience. Words have nuance. They spark emotions. And tug on us in different ways.
That’s why my well-worn copy of the Dictionary of Synonyms is just as important as my dictionary.com app.
And speaking of limited attention spans, while I was linking to the app, I noticed 7 Words the Internet Reinvented.
It also made me wonder if some of the most beautiful words in English could be facing extinction.
What about serendipity, mellifluous and effervescent? Or insouciance, labyrinthine and denouement? Are they just too long in our evanescent and ephemeral environment?
Yet there’s upside to all of this. My fervent hope is that jargon-like words such as “utilize” will fade away, and we’ll simply say “use.” Maybe Strunk and White will finally get their wish to see “prestigious” truly become “an adjective of last resort.”
Parts of this are difficult for someone who prefers clean and clear copy, free of abbreviations and other affronts to the eye. To someone who has a hard time with the AP Style convention of abbreviating states – Calif., Colo. and Conn. There’s much more majesty in California, Colorado and Connecticut.
Like everything in life, it’s a balance. And it’s about your audience. Whom are you writing for? Whom do you want to influence? What form of the language do you need to speak to do that?
IDK, wht do u thnk ?!?!? . . .
by Caroline Leach | Mar 2, 2015 | Corporate Communications, Leadership, Learning, Social Media, Work/Life
Photography was never my strong suit.
Yet we live in a visual world. And as a “word” person, I need to keep learning about visual ways to communicate.
Enter Instagram.
Setting goals. My reason for being on Instagram is to develop my photography skills and the eye for the visual. I began with beautiful scenery, and my next area of focus is people.
My audience is a mashup of personal and professional contacts. I’m not strictly focused on a business-related goal. Yet.
That said, great resources for using the platform for business to “share your brand’s point of view” can be found right on the Instagram site.
Getting started. A James Dean quote inspired me one weekend while I was out and about. “Dream as if you will live forever. Live as if you will die today,” caught my eye. It was so powerful and timeless that I wanted to share it. And thus began my Instagram posts a year ago this month.
Set your goals and then just start. Learn and adjust as you go. Explore your passions as they evolve. Connect with interesting people and brands. “Like” and comment on others’ posts. Have fun with the experience.
After all, isn’t that what life is all about?
Finding people and organizations to follow. Starting with my employer, I’m proud to follow @DIRECTV, @DTVBlimp and @DIRECTVCareers.
Working in entertainment, I enjoy following major events like the @GoldenGlobes and @TheAcademy. Plus favorite TV shows @DowntonAbbey, @TheGoodWife and @BetterCallSaul. And an amazing documentary about “ordinary women doing extraordinary things,” @EmpowermentDocu.
Then there’s the mashup of work colleagues, community friends and family members. You never know where inspiration is going to strike.
Creating compelling content. Instagram is my online, real-time photography class. I keep an eye out for compelling images in the everyday world. I practice taking different shots from different angles, with different lighting. I experiment with the fun filters available on Instagram. I try cropping images in different ways.
On the topic of photos, I take a counter-intuitive approach to bio photos across social media platforms. Most of the great advice about building social media profiles says you should use the same photo across all platforms to build your personal brand.
However, I use different photos for different reasons. My LinkedIn profile has the professional bio shot provided by my employer. This matches my employer’s corporate bio for me.
My Twitter profile has a bio shot that I had done independently. And since I’m not tweeting in an official capacity for my employer, a professional photo not associated with my employer made better sense to me.
My Instagram profile has the same photo as my Facebook profile. Since my purpose for being on Instagram is more informal, I felt something with a more casual feel would work better.
Fitting it into daily life. Wherever I go, I’m on the lookout for visually appealing images. The blue trees above were from the @DIRECTV holiday celebration event at our Southern California headquarters. As I was heading home, I was struck by the colorful vibrancy our amazing Corporate Events team led by Kerin Lau had created. A quick snap of a picture and a comment mentioning DIRECTV was all it took to capture and share the moment.
And many of my pictures are taken while I’m out exercising. So I’m taking steps for my health and my Fitbit at the same time as I’m creating content. The added benefit is I find I’m more attuned to and aware of my surroundings. This creates more mindfulness in my life in general, plus deep gratitude for the natural beauty of our planet. All good things for a healthy and productive life.
Finding adjunct uses. Everything interconnects, I shared in How to Be Social.
This blog requires a variety of images, so the photos I snap for Instagram also become part of my personal photo library. There’s no copyright to worry about or payment for the images, since I’m the photographer.
And over the holidays visiting family in New England, I followed my nephews and niece in Instagram (and somewhat surprisingly, they followed me back). And I helped my mom set up an account, so she can follow us and feel more connected to our lives across the country.
My teen daughter and son are great coaches. They help me through the “how do I . . .?” moments. And I heed their advice to post no more than two images on any given day. That keeps the quality up and hopefully means followers look forward to seeing more, rather than wishing to see fewer, posts.
What are your best Instagram tips?
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