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16 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | W I N T E R 2 0 2 3 W O M E N W H O L E A D MARION: Whenever I work on a weak point and turn it into a strength. Until recently I was not a good caretaker of plants. No joke, I have accidentally killed a mint plant. Leaning heavily on YouTube, books, a class about pruning, and a few mistakes along the way, I am now a proud custodian of two pluot trees, a peach tree, a key lime tree, a lemon tree, and a few blackberry bushes. Not only are they still alive, but they're also producing fruit! What life lessons has your work taught you? NICKI: Be bold, courageous, and ready to change. Try new things and be ready to receive feedback as a "generous listener", defend a sound strategy and approach that is based in data and people-centric feedback/anecdotes, and then be agile enough to accept change on the front foot. Change is unprecedented these days; communications must adjust to their changing audience, industry, and global paradigm shifts. Keep people as the focus – the "people effect" in my first podcast (publishing soon) – write for them, ask for their ratings/feedback, honor it with appropriate adjustments, use their stories to add context and color to your supporting data, and remember your communications strategy is of, for, and by your readers! MARION: I appreciate how different people are in their goals, concerns, and perspectives. When there's friction on a project or when progress feels harder than we want it to be, it's often because the same project looks and feels different to different people. Taking a step back to understand where everyone is coming from and what they're hoping to accomplish can help you identify creative solutions and lead to better outcomes for everyone involved. Any favorite stories from your work life? NICKI: There are so many good experiences to recount, but I think my having gone through an exhaustive and productive communications audit with a third-party consultant really motivated me to take "good to great" and reach for more! For example: I worked with a communications company that audits, reviews, and supports a wide range of organizations (outside of legal industry) to help their clients create, execute, and measure effective communications at their organizations. The owners are highly knowledgeable and expert communications professionals with years of experience working in communications and assisting organizations with their communication campaigns. In the audit, I provided them various messaging campaigns for them to read, review, and critique not only for grammar, structure, and format but also for creativity and impact. They provide constructive feedback to elevate communications to the next level and helped to actually measure impact with sophisticated data analysis. It was a really rewarding experience and I enjoyed working with this auditor. What qualities make a good leader? NICKI: Agility, empathy, and "provocative competence." Leaders need to be ready for change and comfortable with learning from mistakes – "noble failures" and gleaning lessons to constantly raise the stakes - all without losing sight of the human side of things – recognizing that change may be exponential, but that human beings have their limits, their concerns, and their reasons to resist (and it might just be due to fatigue, not just being contrarian). Remembering that people are multi-dimensional, can fall on a wide range of change interest or readiness, and that they can be reached in different ways takes empathy. Agility and empathy must be intentional and go hand-in-hand in order to drive change in useful ways. And in the role of a communications leader, it also incumbent upon us to NOT further add to the "noise", which leads to, and compounds burnout. If we care about our readers as people, we can't just send communications that "shout over each other" – instead we have to be careful in crafting and executing our messaging – identifying what constitutes essential messaging – to reduce noise and help reduce burnout for our readers. Provocative competence is a practice of learning eagerness that transcends ego, title, and self. Leaders are part of a "band" – tuning into what others are saying and letting their ideas lead. A lot can be learned in this type of engagement with others on our teams and in our organizations. MARION: Curiosity, empathy, creativity, and flexibility. Curiosity and empathy help us understand what a project or initiative means to everyone involved: what they hope to achieve, what their concerns are, and what their unique perspective is. For example, if you discuss document automation with partners, associates, paralegals, secretaries, and the IT department, each of those groups will have different goals, needs, questions, and insights.

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