CWC: Comms with Purpose

How’d you find your way into comms?

In college at Boston University, I studied journalism and after graduating there were a lot of questions around the future of print journalism. I landed a role at a network down in DC, and the role evaporated right after I moved there.? I had to pivot, and I sent out over 75 resumes. This was in, you know, the mid, mid 2000s and it was such a dark, low point for me. What I learned from that was that your path is not linear, and that really solidified that quote around it's not how many times you fall down, but it's how many times you get back up.

I ended up landing a role in public affairs at the Pentagon and that launched my entire career in comms. And you know, since then I’ve realized there are always pros and cons about every place you work, every company you work, for, every boss, every leader, and so I feel like as soon as I was able to sort of relax and understand that my journey was going to have bumps, there will be ups and downs, but that I was building this skill set that was robust was super valuable.

What has been a pivotal experience in your life that relates to what you’re doing today?

Travel. I spent some time in the early 2000s abroad, living in Amman, Jordan during the Iraq War, which was a really interesting time to be in the Middle East, and has also given me such an interesting perspective today.

I got to travel a lot in high school, which was such a privilege. I spent some time in Jordan, but also Panama, as well as Switzerland and Mexico.?? I saw the value of storytelling and bringing people together early on. I did a lot of journaling, a lot of writing, and then became the correspondent for my local, very small town newspaper The Valley Reporter. I worked for the newspaper for a couple years, writing a column during my travels and eventually pitching them on a new column focused on bridging the gap between the teens at our local high school and the?broader community.

Growing up in Vermont, it was very quintessential and a lovely place to grow up and to live, but there is actually a lot of disparity between the haves and the have-nots. I soon came to realize the role that journalism played as a powerful tool across subcultures and generations. Without fully realizing it, storytelling became a theme in my life.

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Tell me about a tough career decision you’ve made.

I think my default most of my career decisions have been hard – or, rather, they are never easy. One of the things I’ve learned to do is to be honest with myself, listen to my gut, and understand that this is the most important factor when it comes to labeling an experience as a “success” or a “failure.” This is where how you navigate something is equally as important as what you do. Every role I’ve held has been important in my evolution and growth, but not all have been my dream job. I also think I’ve taken some calculated risks in my career, leaning into discomfort and trusting that being a little scared is a good thing: it means your're leveling up!

I’ve gone from working at big tech companies to smaller startups and back again. Each time, choosing to part ways with a big tech company that represents a huge amount of stability is hard. I left Meta in 2021 during the pandemic, jumping back into the workforce month before my maternity leave was up. I did that for many reasons, but mostly because I met great founders at Cityblock Health who had a mission serving the Medicaid population that was both compelling and action oriented. For me, it felt like a concrete story that deserved to be told and at the end of the day, I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I was ready to dive back into healthcare and build a comms team from the ground up. I also wanted to help prove that there was a way to radically change the model of care delivery that would actually listen to people and address their needs in a way that was sustainable. I think we spin our wheels on a lot of things as a society and when it comes to healthcare, we can’t afford to get it wrong anymore.

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Tell me about your most recent role as CCO for Cityblock.

One of the things that has been solidified in the last three years at Cityblock has been really understanding the different ways in which a chief communications officer, or the top comms role can help shape the business. I know we talk about how comms should always be tied to business goals in theory, but in reality, that hasn't always been the case. Everything you do should track towards moving the needle on those goals, and, sometimes, it's up to comms to ask questions if the goals need to evolve? And so, you’re just so intricately woven into the fabric of a startup, and you have to have a permanent seat at the table.

?As communicators we're tasked with asking the hard questions behind closed doors. You’re one of the most important thought partners to the CEO and COO and the rest of the executive team, in determining where to be leaning in and where to be pulling back at any given point in time. That’s what I would probably say is the most important part of my job is to have that bird's eye view, but also to know when to dial in and sweat the details. This approach allows you to identify a strategic opportunity and act in the moment Importantly. It’s also critical to understand your business and your executives themselves. Not just who they are, but how they lead. You need to understand the business landscape in which you're operating, understand the trends, the headwinds, the tailwinds of your industry, but also of the economy both domestically and globally. So basically, comms leaders need to be sponges, absorbing information ongoing, then applying their skil lsets and business knowledge to analyze, pull out the nuggets of value and translate to their strategy, tweaking or modifying to optimize daily. And this is necessary because dynamics are always changing. If we’ve learned one thing these past five years, it’s that everything that happens in the world impacts our business - in big and small ways. And we must be ready for it.

The last three, four years have really brought communications leaders together, because we are all facing some of the same scenarios, and the factors play out differently in each of our businesses, with each of our brands, but they're all in many ways the same. I think it's a great equalizer, but it's also a unifier. And I’m here for it!

How did you build a knowledge base of the Cityblock’s business over the past few years to understand it to the depth that you mentioned?

The business of risk sharing in Medicaid and just value-based care in general is really complex. I credit my colleagues within the operations, policy, product, legal and clinical teams for helping educate us ongoing about the space. I don't pretend to be the expert on this and, often, that’s my approach regardless of the industry within which I work. And for the most part, that serves me well, because it allows me to ask enough questions that I’m able to simplify a concept by reading something back to one of the subject matter experts on my team, and saying, “Does this sound accurate? Is this what you're saying to me?” If I can do this, I know that I can build messaging that has pull-through across our key audiences (no matter how clinically trained or tech savvy they are).

When you’re building a knowledge base and corporate narrative, nomenclature is really important. Often, people are talking from different playbooks about the same concept, and it results in duplicative efforts, inefficiencies, and a whole lot of frustration. I would say our job is to translate and connect the dots both internally and externally, to ensure clarity of message, and the ability to land a narrative with impact and drive key results.

Another big piece of delivering on the business is understanding the culture, especially when you're at a startup. At high-growth startups, you're often moving from a place of operating as a small? “family” at the beginning and then quickly expanding and needing to mature as a business organization. That’s not an easy feat and I’ve been many businesses really struggle here. From a brand perspective, you don’t want to ever lose the “secret sauce,” what makes you unique and differentiated, but you have to deliver on your business goals and show a path to profitability. Those two things can feel inherently contrary to each other, but in my experience, there is always a path forward.?? From the early days, comms took an inside out approach, which I think shows the high importance placed on the employee audience and allows for one consistent narrative that will serve you well at later stages.

I’m really pleased by the communications function we built at Cityblock. The team was top notch and just some of the best people to work with – they became dear friends and folks I deeply respect and admire. I will say that building a comms team at a startup is the most humbling experience (second only to postpartum in my mind!) You have to constantly approach things with a mindset of curiosity and multiple lenses. Not just thinking about your subject matter expertise, but also what the company needs in that moment in time.? I had to pause and reassess about a year into my tenure, because there were some things that just simply weren’t? working; we put some really exciting proactive pieces on hold and went back to the basics in few areas that were important culture drivers. So, knowing your business in terms of what you're delivering (B2B or B2C) is key, but also understanding where the business is at, its growth stage, and what employees need is, sometimes, more important.

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Since internal and external comms were under your remit what's your view on how they intersect or relate to one another?

My perspective on internal comms has evolved in a big way. I don’t think I always gave it the credit it deserved and I had a lot to understand it.? In so many ways, your employees are your brand. They are your most important audience. Your employees are the ones who are showing up, not just in their work capacity, but in their day-to-day lives, and representing who you are and what you do out in the community.

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With our current media climate and with elections on the horizon, how do you filter what you should lean in on when it comes to those hot-button issues where we’ve seen the expectations rise for how CEOs and spokespeople show up? ??

That’s a great question. Every comms team needs a rubric that is unique to your brand that outlines the issues that are relevant to your business and determines the criteria for the company to decide to take a stand on something publicly across audiences.

Many companies hadn’t thought too much about this pre-pandemic, but there’s been a phenomenon going for quite some time around employees increasing their trust in their employer and holding them accountable for issues that may be beyond their scope (Edelman’s Trust Barometer is a great reference here). This makes it that much more important to think about these things in advance - walk through key scenarios, just like you might plan on the crisis side, and determine what you are uniquely positioned to speak to and where you will support others in being the authority on a matter. This is not easy.?

As a mission-driven startup in Medicaid, there were so many moments where it made sense for us to chime in and advocate on behalf of underserved communities that were disproportionately impacted by legislation, but we had to be intentional about pulling back and preserving our voice for the key moments when we could move the needle the most – and in a space that was squarely in our wheelhouse. Otherwise, we’d be taking on alot of risk just chiming in on everything, pulling a lot of resources away from the more defined business goals that we were mapping towards.?

Shifting gears a bit, can you tell me about your journey with motherhood and work?

I feel like I've always had to not just work hard but fight for my career and for opportunities that I've been very privileged to land. As I worked hard into my 30s, I just put off having kids. I had learned early on that it was tricky to have both a career and a family and I wasn’t interested. My husband was very understanding. We married quite young, but we waited a long time because I just kept thinking, not yet… not now. I simply was not willing to make the sacrifices that I was seeing my friends make around me.

When we finally got to the point where we wanted kids it was almost too late. I ended up starting IVF right as the pandemic hit and had a very high-risk pregnancy that landed me 10 weeks of bedrest. I had to stop working, and it was one of the hardest things. Fast forward, we ended up having very healthy babies, thank goodness, but did 72 days in the NICU, and then postpartum hit me like a brick wall. I feel like as a society, we've done such a horrible job educating everyone (not just the birthing parent) on postpartum. It’s a beautiful time, but it’s also super challenging and can rock you to your core.? Eventually, I had to acknowledge the fact that you can't do it all, and I had to let go. This was the hardest, but best thing and I look back (not too long ago) and see that motherhood has been a really positive thing for me. I think it's allowed me to be more efficient and productive, even though I'm not nearly as, ironically, type A about it.

I'm really latched on to this concept that Glennon Doyle talks about in her podcast, We Can Do Hard Things. She says she hears over and over from working moms this dismay that if you really count all the hours you're away from your child, you're spending far more time in the workplace with your colleagues. But she said, time is an interesting thing if you can have a new perspective on it, and you can say yes, there's kronos time that ticks with the clock, and there's 24 hours in a day. Then, there’s kairos time. That focuses on quality moments. What? if there was a higher value placed on those really intimate minutes reading a bedtime story or helping with homework, where you are 100% present with your child? It may represent less time net net, but the quality of that time is invaluable. That’s my philosophy with parenting. My kids are still young, so we’ll see how it goes!

One thing that's always on my mind when I talk to a chief communications officer is, why doesn't every company have one?

I know, right? I would say every company has somebody doing the role of a chief comms officer. Do they have the title? Are they appropriately compensated?? Is it consolidated? Optimized? Maybe, maybe not. But they should have someone exclusively focused on managing their brand reputation and narrative. They can’t afford not to.

What’s hard about comms??

Comms is hard because a lot of the strategic advice comes from years of experience, combined with strong executive relationships and good judgment. It’s not nearly as straightforward as finance or coding where there’s a right way and a wrong way. Either the numbers work or they don’t.

Instead, comms is quite nuanced and always changing. What works today, might not work tomorrow. On that note, one of the hardest calls is when to push back on your executive. There are many times where you should need to disagree and commit, but it's equally as risky to acquiesce prematurely, when you haven’t fully informed them of all of the facts.? So, you have to know when you've done that enough, without crossing a line or being too pushy, but also to feel like you've done your due diligence. You can't just be a yes person.

What’s capturing your attention in tech these days?

I will say, I’m really fascinated by the evolution of AI and the positive impact on our lives in the not too distant future.? I think AI has the potential to accelerate innovation in some of the more highly regulated industries like healthcare. I happen to have a big passion for the space and do some advising and investing in women’s health tech, so I definitely have a bias, but I think AI’s role in reducing barriers to care, accelerating the discovery of new ways to treat chronic conditions, cure cancer, uncover new vaccines to fight global pandemic, and so many other things… it’s mind-boggling and super exciting! I’m a pragmatic optimist. As a comms gal, by default, I have to think about all the risks and plan for them. In healthcare, specifically, we can’t afford to get it wrong. That’s one of the reasons I’m keeping a close eye on the space – I’d like to be part of the solution and see us realize those benefits without the typical setbacks you tend to see with new innovation. We cannot afford to get it wrong.?I also recently took a new role in communications at Anthropic, so more to come on the topic of AI. ??

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??Quickfire??

Coffee, cocktail, or mocktail?

Coffee with a ton of cream, like, super creamy. Or an oatmilk latte.

Favorite publication?

I really like both the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. I’m also a regular consumer of podcasts and highly recommend The Daily, the Ezra Klein Show, Hard Fork and NPR One.

How would your family and friends describe you?

Forward-thinking, ambitious, tireless?

Do you have a favorite season?

Yes, I love winter. I grew up in Vermont, and nothing makes me happier than being cold and bundling up.

What's something outside of comms that you're passionate about?

Women’s reproductive health in general, which really includes women and men and all genders. In December I joined the board of our local Planned Parenthood affiliate, which is my first board seat. This summer, I invested in a company called Yuzi focused on reimagining the postpartum experience for birthing parents; I’m helping get their nonprofit arm up and running. I’m also two years into my journey as an investor and advisor to a fertility company Doveras, focusing on building a non-IVF solution for conception.

In my personal life, I’m a connector. I love hosting, I love creating community. I really enjoy dinner parties and bringing good people together for an evening. I also enjoy a night alone reading a good book (not that this happens very often these days!)?

Oxford comma, yay or nay?

Yep, 1,000%

What is an underrated skill in comms?

I think it's that spidey sense, that gut instinct, I guess, more broadly good judgment or a robust cringe barometer

Do you have a comms ick?

I don't like it when journalists or comms people, either side, rants about the other. I think we all have really difficult jobs to do. We have to help each other, be mature about it and play nice.