💿 Brand and Communications Convener: Sean Garrett
Founder and Convener at Mixing Board
In This Edition
🗳️ Take the opportunities to be involved in history
📝 Learn from experts with adjacent skills
🪴 Build communities around you, everywhere you go
About Sean
I like reimagining comms and working to increase the value of the work and those who do it. It's why I created Mixing Board — a unique expert community of 200 comms and brand marketing experts who share knowledge with each other and organizations looking to gain diverse perspective and access to a collective network that otherwise couldn’t be found in any one place.
Mixing Board is the third new model organization that I conceived and helped create. It is an evolution of my eight years of experience as co-founder of Pramana Collective — the cutting-edge consultancy of brilliant former heads of comms — that helped organizations navigate big inflection points. And, in 2003, I co-founded the industry's first tech policy communications firm that bridged the gap between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C..
I've also consistently been at the edge of technology industry trends. I helped found the first CEO tech industry policy organization; I was an early employee and head of comms at the seminal online music start-up Listen.com; and I was also early at Twitter as the company's first comms and marketing hire.
I also did things like be a VP and run big teams at top tech comms agencies, run statewide California political campaigns, help a Lithuanian political party run their campaign during the first free Parliamentary election since WWII; and, work in the California governor's office as a kid right out of school.
What sparked your path into communications?
As a kid, I dreamed of being Press Secretary for the President. I’m not sure how many kids dream of this at ten years old, but I did as I sat reading the newspaper every morning, from start to finish.
In college, I was reading five newspapers a day — the print editions as web didn’t exist back then. I majored in Political Science with a focus on Communications. I actually missed my college graduation from UCLA because I drove from Los Angeles to Sacramento to go work on a political campaign, which is how I got started in the field of communications.
What was one pivotal project early in your career that had a profound impact on you?
At 24 years old, I was working in the California Governor's Office. It was a cool job, and I loved every minute of it — the energy, the people and the projects. But, on a lark, I decided that I wanted to go work in Eastern Europe. It was 1992 and a very fascinating time in the region after the fall of the Soviet Union. I connected with a non-profit that offered me this wild opportunity to go to Lithuania to work on their first Parliamentary election since independence if I could get there in three weeks!
I dropped everything, left my job and friends, and flew to Lithuania not knowing much, other than feeling a connection to the country by coincidence — my birth mother was from Lithuania. I was adopted, and here I was on a plane headed back to the place where my mother left. It was a profound feeling.
The political situation was fascinating — there had been one previous Communist party, and now there were 27 parties running for Parliament! I worked for the one party that was the most democratic in ethos, helping them think through their messaging and story. I did everything from giving a speech on national television to firing up a big crowd of young people at a rock concert on behalf of the party. It was a crazy moment in time. My unsolicited advice is that if you can be involved in history, do it! That moment will never exist again — you can’t replicate that.
Later in your career, you dropped everything again and hopped on a plane for another historical opportunity. Can you tell us about that experience?
At the end of 2014, I received a crazy phone call from a 202 area code. It turned out to be from the switchboard at The White House. It felt like a scene from Mission Impossible when the person on the phone asked me if I could assemble a team and soon be at the White House to help enhance the digital strategy for the President during the last two years of his administration.
Fast forward a month, and after a red-eye flight to Washington, D.C., I was in the Roosevelt Room with the President, his team and some of the smartest people I've ever worked with on a project. After two weeks of working almost straight, we delivered a presentation and a path to create new strategies for communications in the Chief of Staff’s office on a snowy Saturday morning.
One of the brilliant people on our team ended up becoming the first Chief Digital Officer for The White House. From this experience, I learned how powerful it was to learn from other experts with adjacent skills while doing real work together. I realized that you learn not just by listening, but it’s also about coming up with new ideas and seeing others create these ideas in action together.
How have you brought many of your unique experiences together to tap into the power of community to connect communicators?
After The White House experience, I started thinking a lot about other ways to bring together experts like this. That’s what inspired Mixing Board — the idea of creating a community of experts in communications and brand marketing and elevating them with the intention of sharing their work and helping others. My hope is not to make it an exclusive, fancy club, but it’s to have it really serve as a vessel leading, improving and elevating the entire industry over time.
For me, community is not just a passive project of having people in the same room, it's really about how you get them in the same room, connecting them with each other and elevating the interaction. The intent is to raise the value of the industry and those who work in it. That’s my Northstar of bringing people together.
So much of community, whether it's physical or digital, is about human psychology. As Mixing Board brings together people, I think all the time about what is motivating to people and what drives them with limited time in a day. It’s my job to try to find ways to present opportunities in the most useful way possible in the amount of time that they have and make those experiences memorable. It’s super critical to have people who can provide insights and feedback — who can show what happens when you contribute to it. The hope is that the community feels like time well spent.
I’m trying to extend this community value to as many people as possible in the comms world by also running Comm(s)unity. It is mostly a Slack channel, which was a happy accident born out of the pandemic, with now many hundreds of great mid-to-senior-level people in it. The way to join is by having a member vouch that someone will be a great contributor to conversations.
What are the skills that are most important for succeeding in communications?
First, it’s the ability to ask a good question and second, it’s the ability to listen to it. Listening is the secret sauce. When you're working with someone, you have to get to a place with them where you’re on par with being a great therapist — you need to know how they tick, how they think and be able to call them out. That doesn't come overnight, it comes with lots of trust and conversations.
The way to get trust is by learning to ask the right questions and not being afraid to make people uncomfortable. Then, it’s listening and hearing signals. Over time, you can pattern map signals — phrases and code words carry different meanings. Once you dig deeper with the right questions, people realize that they’ve never thought about a topic in that way and you can get to the real answers.
The role of the communicator is breaking through this fourth wall that we exist in at work. It’s a lot like theater, but a good communicator can accept the theater, find the human in the actor, discover the core of a story that makes it interesting, and play it out to make it even more real for other audiences.
Many communicators take great notes, but they don't go beyond the transcript to find the opportunity to actually shape, drive and build the story by pushing harder and through it versus recording it.
How do you continue learning?
As that kid who read five newspapers a day, I was trained from a young age to find what is resonating from the noise. I learn by observation, listening and being curious. I'm always trying out new tools. I drive my kids crazy because I often find new apps before them. But, I learn a lot from them at the dinner table in our conversations.
I'm a voracious music person. I've become very in tune with discovering new music. I’ve created my own way of curation and that’s how I learn about other topics as well to read a lot and find the signal from the noise.
I also surround myself with smart people. The teams that I built at Twitter, Pramana Collective and now Mixing Board all share one thing in common — really smart people from lots of different places with lots of diversity of thought, capabilities and perspectives. If you surround yourself with people who look like you or sound like you and have the same exact experiences as you, your ability to learn is greatly diminished. That’s why it’s so important to actively curate amazing people around you, at all times.
Author Note: I participate in both Mixing Board and Comm(s)unity, and I’m grateful for the communications communities that Sean convenes.
Thank you for reading The Switchboard. ☎️ Every edition is personally written by me — Julia Levy. Learn more about why I write. Review the Index of past posts.
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