Can You Hear Me Now: Jennifer Harrison Of Pando Public Relations On Five Strategies Leaders Use to Diminish Distractions & Win in the Attention Economy
An interview with Karen Mangia
Use stories — Put a face on every important message. Relay a story or explain the outcomes needed not in terms of what you or the company needs but rather on what the customer or audience needs.
We are all competing in an attention economy. From pings and dings to blinks and rings, companies and content constantly compete for our limited time and attention. How do great leaders turn down the noise and tune in to the messages that matter most? What does it take to be heard above the noise? And how do we create communication that cultivates community and connectedness in a distributed, distracted world? To address these questions, we started an interview series called “Can You Hear Me Now?: Top Five Strategies Leaders Use to Diminish Distractions & Win in the Attention Economy.” As a part of this interview series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jennifer Harrison.
Jennifer Harrison, the founder and CEO of Pando Public Relations, works with EdTech companies in K-12 education, higher education, and the workforce development/training markets. Additionally, she is highly regarded for her work with companies bringing AI products to market.
Global companies and startups alike have benefitted from her work in securing placements in top tier media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Fast Company, Inc., and Forbes. She has also placed hundreds of stories and opinion pieces by executives and educators, some of the most notable being in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Education Week, Hechinger Report, Inside Higher Ed, THE Journal, University Business, and Chalkbeat.
Thank you for making time to visit with us. Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What is one of your most memorable moments, and what made it memorable?
My career has been dedicated to public relations for EdTech and AI companies in education and corporate training partly because the work is so rewarding, but also because it is dynamic and exciting. I love the adrenaline rush of working in a fast-paced industry. One of the most memorable moments of working in this space occurred at my son’s seventh grade back-to-school night. I walked into the classroom and on the whiteboard, the teacher had written all the learning tools they would be using that year. Every one was either a current client or had been a client in my career. Among the list were some of the biggest companies in the space including Holt McDougal, Scantron, Schoology, and PowerSchool.
While that was a very distinct moment for me, every week I feel great pride when my team and I land a feature for our clients. Writing an opinion piece or shaping a story and pitching it successfully to publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Fast Company, Inc., and outlets of that stature never fails to be thrilling.
What is the most unexpected twist in your career story, and what did you discover from your detour?
I’m one of the legions of people who attended college planning one path but ultimately taking a completely different one.
At the University of California, Davis, I studied animal science and genetics which is basically a pre-vet program. My original plan was to go to grad school or vet school. After graduating with my bachelor’s degree, though, I started working with the California Farm Bureau in the education division and immediately gravitated towards public relations and communications. Within a short time, I had little interest in pursuing vet school or grad school and instead started working on a master’s degree in public relations.
Now, I am the CEO of my own PR firm.
According to a recent Harvard Business School study, the most essential communication skill for leaders is the ability to adapt their communication style. How do you adapt your communication style?
The underlying reason for needing to adapt a communication style is to be effective, which requires knowing your specific audience. Adapting a communication style to fit that audience isn’t always the right tack. Qualities like tone and cadence, and non-verbal cues like pauses and hand movements define a speaker’s persona and should not change. They are their recognizable hallmarks. Think of the speaker like a brand. We pick branding elements that resonate with the audience, but we don’t change the branding just to appeal to an audience.
Instead, to be effective with specific audiences, when speaking choose the words more carefully. Use the audience’s lingo and terminology and use terms that convey you understand the audience’s needs and wants. If the written or spoken messages appeal to the audience’s needs rather than the speaker’s, there is a much better chance at success.
Clarity is critical as well. What lessons have you learned about how to communicate with clarity in our distributed world of work?
Multi-modal communication improves clarity. Taking notes on a shared agenda is the most basic of these tactics. Follow up emails and assigning task items during the meeting helps, too.
Equally important is to specifically ask people questions they can answer when you are in a meeting — especially in a virtual meeting. Don’t use jargon so quickly that individuals might feel they are the only person in the room who doesn’t understand. They’ll just nod along and be vague in their response to avoid looking lost. Do not confuse speed with efficiency. Instead, simplify the process, the language, and the outcomes to improve efficiency and clarity.
We often discover what works by experiencing what doesn’t. Tell us about a time when your communication didn’t lead to the desired results and what you learned from the experience.
In one particularly difficult situation using a new freelance writer, I asked the writer to produce a 2,000-word summarization of several white papers. The outcome was not ideal and required hours of rewrites and edits.
The biggest lesson for me was to use examples, marked up with as much detail as possible about what was needed right down to the voice — active or passive — and point of reference. Now, I also have several checkpoints, especially for new writers. On a 2,000 word piece, that might be at 500 words and again at 1,000 words just to get a read on progress.
Transferring this experience to broader management practices, the key lessons are to show concrete examples of the desired outcome and to have frequent, clearly defined check-in points (for example, stages in a project or dates in a project timeline).
What advice would you offer to other leaders who are struggling to have their messages heard and actioned?
You cannot relay your message to a broad audience using the shorthand and lingo spoken in a small room. Equally important is translating your desired outcome into terms and metrics your end-point audience cares about.
It is easy for messages to be lost among other agendas and urgencies. Mitigate this by addressing the needed action in terms of the audience’s perspective. From a public relations strategy, we work to reach audiences — the readership/listenership of a news outlet — going through gatekeepers — the reporters, editors, podcasters, and broadcasters who report the stories. For a CEO driving organizational change, the gatekeepers are the managers who have to enact new policies and procedures or, perhaps more dramatically, layoff staff. The end-point audience are the line workers, sales force, production people, and others who make the business run. These folks need to hear the message very differently from the boardroom-speak of ROI and business metrics.
Translating that to public relations, if you want to pitch a story to a reporter, not only can you NOT use internal company-speak to convince them your story has merit, you have to DEFINE the story the reporter’s audience cares about. Always speak to gatekeepers in a way that conveys understanding that they have an audience. This is a universal truth for nearly any application.
Leading a distributed team requires a different communication cadence and style from leading a team in person. What are five strategies any leader can deploy to improve communication and clarity when leading a distributed workforce?
1. Lead by example — A distributed workforce will undoubtedly see the leadership team speaking in video presentations, which means they must be effective in conveying information this way. Use the communications team to train those company leaders so that they model the professionalism desired throughout the company.
2. Lead with heart — Empathy is a powerful motivator and can mitigate many missteps, but only when it is genuine. At my company, deal with the media and know that they are extremely sophisticated in sniffing out fakes. The very best communicators I’ve worked with are those who put the reporter at ease by making a personal connection. Leaders who can do this also tend to lead well and inspire people to do great work.
3. Hold on to authority — Having heart does not come at the expense of authority. In fact, having authority can make “heart” even more significant and powerful. Virtual meetings can diminish that sense of authority because “presence” — the command someone immediately secures when they walk into a room — is not as easy to feel. For distributed teams then, they need to witness authority from leaders as the ability to express heart while also being able to jump back to the business at hand. This is effective code-switching at its very best: being able to moderate voice, presence, and demeanor without losing the audience.
4. Use stories — Put a face on every important message. Relay a story or explain the outcomes needed not in terms of what you or the company needs but rather on what the customer or audience needs.
5. Employ routines — We lose time in our effort to be responsive, so I counsel people to use patterns and routines. Not every email requires immediate response, so practice checking and responding to emails in increments, either every half hour or upon switching tasks. Have a routine for non-essential tasks. In my case, bookkeeping always waits till Fridays. Macro calendaring occurs on Mondays. Setting tasks occurs after each meeting.
Mention the process you use to colleagues and consequently, respect your colleagues when they also state their routines and workflow. Of course, we all know that the pace of business often preempts even the best of intentions. It is interesting, though, to see how your team starts to follow those same patterns, which brings everything into sync and improves efficiency.
What are the three most effective strategies to diminish distractions when there is so much competing for attention?
Most of the strategies in the list above are effective in diminishing distractions. Additionally, think about building upon an existing and proven model rather than creating new channels of communication. An example is when teams use Asana, Slack, and lists at the same time.
Learn to simplify communication so that the reader gets the point quickly and easily. Use fewer words. Vary sentence length. Leaders who master this in speaking as well as writing are more likely to hold their audience’s attention.
What is one skill you would advise every leader to invest in to become a better communicator?
Be comfortable with silence.
A pause conveys thoughtfulness. The ability to be silent can prevent an interview with a reporter from becoming boring, or worse yet, damaging.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Let’s ban gasoline engine automobiles and motorcycles. Doing so would potentially save the planet. I realize that not every country in the globe has the infrastructure to support all-electric, but many do, and we know that the technology exists.
How can our readers stay connected with you?
I’m a fan of LinkedIn and respond to messages and requests for new contacts. Reach me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jharrisonpr/
Thank you for these great insights! We wish you continued success.
About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
