📰 24 Inspiring Quotes from Women Leaders featured on The Switchboard
Celebrating International Women's Month
Women are the muses for The Switchboard’s brand — the telephone operators of the past transformed communications in daily conversations at work and at historical moments. For International Women’s Month, I took a look back at 24 incredible women of today who I’ve had the honor of featuring in this newsletter.
From communications leaders to community-builders to founders, their powerful quotes share insights and experiences on important topics, ranging from championing kindness to choosing joy to investing in yourself. Join me in celebrating their impact by sharing this post, giving it a heart or forwarding to a friend.
❤️ Champion Kindness
Our mission [at Sesame Street] is to help children grow smarter, stronger, and kinder. We have always focused on a whole child curriculum — not only the academic basics, but the social and emotional skills children need to thrive…kinder is focused on empathy and understanding our differences. These are the most powerful lessons one can hope for as an adult or child.
🐝 Embrace Curiosity
In communications, I really like that we get to learn about so many different topics. I often tell people that my job is to “ask smart people dumb questions.”I also half-joke that my ignorance is part of the value I add. If something doesn't make sense to me – as a comms person who lives and breathes our story – then it’s not going to make sense to the outside world.
Your goal is to become encyclopedic about your customers, the business, your product and key metrics. You need to be eager to discover root causes, never settle for the first answer, and know how to think in systems and see all of the parts connect. Curiosity is key.
😸 Choose Joy
Joy keeps people coming back. This can take many shapes. Joy can surface as a source of inspiration — playing games together, taking a field trip, inviting employees to share a weekend highlight at the start of a meeting…Joy is also about celebration. It's very easy to jump from project to project, but we need to make sure we also take time to stop and recognize the contributions that everyone's making.
When I started Sprinkles, I knew I wanted to approach my company's culture differently and instill a sense of camaraderie and caring among my team. Company culture starts first with the hiring process.
🥅 Be a Goal-Supporter
Executive coaching is a way of gaining strong self awareness of how you can both double down on strengths and how you can work on things that are challenging or holding you back to unlock your potential. I think of executive coaching as being a thought-partner to people. The people who I work with hold the content of their goals and challenges. I bring the right questions, frameworks and tools to help them achieve their goals.
It’s important to be a swiss-army knife. I have used a lot of my past event production experiences to design successful Town Halls. My media experience helps me to develop creative and compelling content. Also, it’s about having fun! You need to understand that we are all people with our own experiences. That approach can really go a long way.
🖊️ Invest in Yourself
Commit to continuously improving your writing skills and pushing out of your comfort zone. Oftentimes, you are ghostwriting for different executives or demonstrating the value of organizational changes to different audiences so it’s really important to be adaptive.
Careers often aren’t linear. Some of the best communications professionals I have worked with started out in non-communications roles. Those people brought a critically important perspective and viewpoint. Embrace new opportunities and roles that you enjoy versus looking at your career as a series of lock-step jobs. I also think there is a lot of value to being a tri-sector athlete and collecting experiences in the public, non-profit and private sectors.
💙 Give Empathy
Anyone can be a Chief Heart Officer! If you have the heart to help and really know how to put your judgment aside, show up for someone and hold space for them, then I encourage you to make it happen. I created this role based on what Gary [Vaynerchuck] deemed to be a success and my personality. My only job description is to touch every single human being and infuse the agency with empathy.
It’s about emotional intelligence — knowing how to read the room and have the judgment to know if now is the time to push or the time to back off a request…Finally, the empathy piece is huge. You have to truly put yourself in the shoes of others in the organization to craft communications that really help.
👑 Empower Your People
To be a successful internal communications professional, you can’t just sit at your desk and write, you’ve got to pick up the phone, ask questions, have virtual coffees now, to find out about their department. It might not be until months later that you tap into that relationship but keep in touch to be able to reach out when the time is right.
Your employees really are the most important ambassadors. They should be empowered, comfortable and happy talking about what your organization is doing. Because I've always worked at purpose-driven places, there's an appetite for people to be around the table and be excited as part of the process.
🎭 Consider Your Audience
By spending a few minutes upfront to frame your ideas and empathize with your reader, you can be much more persuasive and advocate for your ideas more effectively. For example, try reducing cognitive load for your reader. Don’t make them decipher what you mean. I keep this top of mind at all times. And most importantly, make your pitch 90% about the other person. Why does it benefit them?
We have our objectives and intentions as we go into conversations. Talking points on their own mean nothing unless they hook into what will emotionally resonate with the person you are writing for. Your job is to write something that is so close to what they would have written that they can bring energy and empathy naturally. People don’t remember what you say, they remember how you made them feel. Someone much smarter than me said this long ago; it was the incomparable Maya Angelou.
🤝 Embrace Collaboration
One thing I really love about executive communications is that it feels like a true partnership as you understand the spokesperson’s strengths, challenges, and goals. From there, it becomes a collaboration with the spokesperson to set realistic expectations, find their distinctive voice in the marketplace, and further tell the company’s business story.
Internal Communications is culture in practice. Your culture is how your people talk to each other and how your leaders talk to the rest of the company. It's the level of transparency that you are striving for within your organization—are you a criticism-heavy or praise-heavy organization? It is the most tangible part of your culture.
📣 Champion Each Other
As a kid, I was a goalkeeper in soccer for over 15 years and I was also the editor-in-chief of my high school yearbook. If you put these two together, I think you get internal communications! There’s a love of being a protector and a supporter with a storyteller twist. I saw a 360-degree view of the field and was the champion of moments.
I like to think that internal communicators play air traffic control (airline speaking) in any organization on a daily basis. They know what event is happening and when it’s happening, or when a communication is scheduled to go out and who is sending it on what platform. They know what’s coming and what needs to be planned. When you understand how your business operates, you’re able to think strategically and be a better partner to the executive team, and in turn, keep employees informed and the company marching forward.
🌉 Build Bridges
Great communications empowers you to be the translator between the community and the company. You always need to be thinking about your audience, what they care about and ways to turn what the community is saying into a compelling story internally to accomplish work cross-functionally.
Relationship building. Since we are the information fire-hose — taking in everything and trying to make meaning from it — it means we speak with a lot of people across Mozilla. This is because it’s not a broadcast job, it’s a collaborative job — we’re trying to work with the organization so we can all improve it together, co-creating it with everyone.
💬 Be a Connector
Internal communications serve as the arteries of our culture, ensuring the heart of our organization beats in sync. My role involves conceptualizing and disseminating weekly content drops within our Culture & Growth Content Hub. I also facilitate open dialogue through meetings like our weekly all-company "Come Together,” which focuses on connection and inspiration. We spend time together to get to know each other beyond the surface level.
When you are in internal communications, you have a 360-degree view of the company — if you are talking to HR about a new benefits package, Finance about a corporate project and a business division that’s restructuring and reorganizing, you have to be able to make those connections so that the overall story of all those changes can start to make sense for employees and the business.
You need to have an extremely high EQ — emotional intelligence. While you have projects and priorities, ultimately, your job is about the people who you work with, getting to know them, collaborating with them, coaching them and supporting them.
Thank you for reading The Switchboard. ☎️ Every interview edition is based on a live conversation and personally written by me — Julia Levy. Learn more about why I write. Review the Index of past posts.
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Inspiring indeed! An amazing array of talented women, Julia!
What an inspiring collection!