Communications in Critical Times, With Pfizer's Sally Susman

Veteran communicator Sally Susman , who has held leadership positions at American Express, The Estée Lauder Companies, and now 辉瑞 , sat down with World 50 to reflect on her rich career. The high point: leading the corporate affairs function during the Covid-19 pandemic, as the company made the impossible, possible.?

Communications is often mistaken as a soft skill

Susman believes that stakeholder activism today, coupled with the ubiquitous nature of digital and social media, means there is no longer a “back room” safe space for companies. Virtually every corporate interaction is public and open to interpretation. Communication skills are no longer a soft skill; they are a “rock hard competency as important to an executive’s success as finance, sales, or accounting expertise,” she says.

Knowing when to speak out is another core competency. To help her CEO and team navigate the nuances of when and how to take a public stand, Susman developed her own framework—a set of five questions to help determine appropriate action.

1. Does it relate to our purpose? If a company speaks out on everything, it loses its agency, Susman believes. Take a stand on issues that are most aligned with your company’s values.?
2. How does it impact our most important stakeholders? This can involve both internal and external actions, depending on how personal, or political, the issue is, says Susman. For example, in the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, Pfizer chose to speak directly to colleagues, providing increased health care benefits, coupled with a safe space for colleague conversations. However, in response to the recent debate over the abortion pill ruling in Texas, Pfizer took a public stance, joining 400 of the pharmaceutical industry’s most prominent companies in issuing a statement condemning the ruling as a threat to the critical independence of the FDA.
3. How does the question at hand intersect with our values? For Pfizer, whose values are courage, excellence, equity, and joy, Susman says that an event that incites any of these can stir the company to action.
4. What are my choices here? As public companies, we are often too reactive, Susman believes. An effective way to get ahead of a story is to proactively craft the company’s narrative on a topic and circulate it externally (more on this below).
5. What is the price of silence? Increasingly, “the cost of saying nothing can be too deafening,” says Susman. George Floyd’s murder and the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, were situations where Pfizer felt compelled to condemn the violence and racism affecting our communities.

Own your own narrative

A mistake many leaders make is allowing a reporter on deadline, or government pressure, to force a rushed, defensive response. Susman’s favorite tool for going on the offensive is to post a letter from the CEO or a top leader on the company website, stating the company’s stand, in its own words, on its own timetable.?

Susman used this approach effectively during the 2020 U.S. elections, when the company was receiving political pressure to discover a vaccine. When President Trump used the presidential debates to claim that Pfizer was going to deliver a vaccine by Election Day, Susman and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla crafted a letter explaining that the company “would move at the speed of science” and not politics. Though Susman initially tried to pitch the letter to traditional media, no one was interested. She ended up posting a letter to employees on Pfizer’s website. It went viral, and all the major media outlets covered it.

Social media can’t be ignored—but it must be carefully curated

Susman believes social media can be “dangerous and challenging” and carefully chooses which social media channels to have a presence in. At the time we spoke to her, she had pulled Pfizer’s paid advertising from Twitter. One of her favorite sites is LinkedIn, because it gives her “a huge audience in an environment in which you can have a civil conversation.”

Supporting employees’ social media activity is important, as employees are often the most credible representatives of a company. One way Susman does this is through an initiative called “Conversation Leaders,” a platform for Pfizer employees that includes bite-sized bits of social media content that she hopes they will share with their networks. To encourage reposting, she strives to make the content compelling, inspirational, fun, and relevant.?

Apprenticeship is key to building communication skills

Unlike business, finance, or law, there is no singular advanced degree that teaches a person what they need to know to become an effective communications/corporate affairs executive. Susman, who has been in the field for 40 years, believes the profession is learned through apprenticeship and on-the-job experiences rather than by earning a degree alone. Even deciding when and how to speak out requires judgment and experience. Who are the victims? Were laws broken??Sometimes there is no rulebook.

Susman learned her craft by working with nine different CEOs. She found that three—Ken Chenault at AmEx, Leonard Lauder at The Estée Lauder Companies, and Albert Bourla at Pfizer—had qualities that made them exceptional, which included the ability to express a vision, open minds, and move hearts.?

When Susman moved to the biopharmaceutical industry with Pfizer in 2007, the sector ranked at the bottom of nearly all reputation rankings, alongside tobacco, oil, and gas. She had a naive view of what she saw as an unfairly maligned industry that was in the business of creating life-saving medicines and vaccines. Susman says she made little progress over 10 years, questioning her career and purpose, and avoided the question “What do you do for work?” to prevent having to defend herself and her company from haters. Then came the pandemic.

Albert Bourla, who became Pfizer CEO in January 2019, reinvigorated Susman’s enthusiasm for her job through his passion to “change the world” in developing a vaccine and treatment for Covid-19. Susman, whom Bourla referred to as his “secretary of state,” is proud of how the team at Pfizer created a safe and effective vaccine in record time, which helped her achieve her goal of improving Big Pharma’s reputation.

Susman finds the current societal climate polarizing and believes that seeking harmony is an increasingly important goal. “Be open to the possibility that others are right,” she says. This played out intensely during the recent vaccine turmoil.

Susman’s leadership principles

Working with many leaders over decades, Susman discovered 10 principles that she believes define leadership today. These are explained in greater depth in her recent bestseller, Breaking Through:

1. Channel your intention. When the pandemic hit, Susman mobilized her team with the goal of supporting Pfizer’s quest for a vaccine, communicating its purpose to stakeholders, and reinforcing its mission every step of the way.
2. Muster the courage for candor. Susman believes there is power in being authentic and standing up for things that matter to you.
3. Stay curious. Be creative. Live life as an eternal novice.
4. Don’t underestimate the strength of being gracious and kind. Manners matter.
5. Take time to pause and prepare. Have a crisis checklist to use when issues arise.
6. Perfect your pitch. Rise to the moment during pivotal times and communicate from the heart.
7. Disarm with humility. Empower with truth. During the pandemic, Susman learned the power of sharing the limelight with the team that was creating the vaccine and using those experts to go out and educate the world.
8. Delight with humor. Used correctly, it can be a brilliant communications technique.
9. Reflect and honor. Regrouping on big achievements as a team helps define the company’s legacy.

10.?Seek harmony. Connect with empathy.

About Sally Susman

Sally Susman is EVP and chief corporate affairs officer at Pfizer. She is vice chair of the Pfizer Foundation and co-chair of Pfizer’s Political Action Committee.

Susman leads engagement with all of Pfizer’s external stakeholders overseeing communications, corporate responsibility, global policy, government relations, investor relations, and patient advocacy. Before joining Pfizer in 2007, Sally held several senior communications and government relations roles at The Estée Lauder Companies and American Express. Earlier in her career, she spent eight years in government service focused on international trade issues.

Susman serves on the board of UL Solutions, a global leader in applied safety science, and as co-chair of the board of The International Rescue Committee, one of the world's largest humanitarian aid organizations. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Accelerate the Impact of Your Leaders With NEXT

The NEXT platform is a collaboration of experiential executive development programs by World 50. Led by former and sitting Global 1000 CEOs, officers, and board directors, the NEXT platform is grounded in the realities of today’s business environment—harnessing actionable insights from executives currently living the roles to accelerate the readiness of tomorrow’s leaders. Learn more?here.