🧱 Internal Communications Introductions: Nathan Fisher
Director of Internal Communications at Databricks
In This Edition
📚 Finding your professional path by pursuing curiosity
🚗 Launching a mobile app for Tesla employees
📸 Following the lead of product to obsess over customers
About Nathan
Nathan Fisher leads internal communications for Databricks, a high-growth data & AI company. His prior experience includes communications roles at Google and Tesla, as well as working as an English language arts teacher at a charter middle school. Nathan went to graduate school and has lived most of his adult life in California but is stubbornly raising his 10-year-old as a Boston sports fan.
Nathan (right) with his dad, a retired professor of organizational communication
What sparked your professional path into Internal Communications?
I suppose I was born into the job. My dad was a professor of organizational communication, and I remember, as a kid, sitting in the basement flipping through his books, mainly to see if my name was in the acknowledgments section.
Before returning to the family profession, I tried a few other paths. I enjoyed teaching English to middle schoolers and then, in business school, I also tried out management consulting and investment management. During my second year of b-school, a company came on-campus recruiting for organizational development and internal communications for their HR org, and after exploring a handful of other career options, it felt like just the right fit for me. As time went on, I began gravitating even more toward the story-telling, creative projects and exec coaching integral to internal comms work, and I feel super fortunate to be able to make a living doing this job.
What projects are you particularly proud to have accomplished over the years?
I probably get the biggest thrill out of producing live events, whether that’s bringing hundreds or thousands of people together in a room or now the hybrid and virtual events that we’ve been planning throughout COVID. With events, you're creating an organizational moment from a blank slate. But, no matter how much work you do leading up to it, you just don't know how it will land — it could flop or be a momentous culture-shifting experience. I guess it’s the closest my job comes to being Keanu Reeves in Speed.
But you asked about a specific project and one that stands out was a mobile app we launched for Tesla employees. This project started with a few challenges. First, I discovered multiple competing intranets when I arrived at the company, and I wanted to create a common digital front door and a single source of truth for our employees. Second, we needed to make that digital experience much more accessible to the many employees who were busy building products on our factory floors.
Third, we needed a better way to bring our internal stories to life, so that, for example, the team selling Teslas in Oslo, Norway and the folks building batteries in Sparks, NV could hear about the engineer who made a homemade cannon in LA to hurl rocks at windshields. We had all the great content to start a podcast, but no simple way to deliver it. All of this converged into a mobile-first intranet platform that gave us a way to provide easy access to reliable info, a way to make that information relevant and accessible to a diverse workforce, and a platform for bringing internal stories to life.
What are the skills that are most important for someone to succeed in Communications/Internal Communications?
OK, I’m stealing (borrowing?) from a couple past Switchboard interviewees (and former colleagues) by saying that the number one skill is writing. When you interviewed Emily Singer Mandel, she said that it’s an uphill battle if writing doesn’t come easy to you, and I couldn’t agree more. Second, Pamela Yoon mentioned listening. Being a really great listener, especially in executive communications, means listening to what your leaders have said previously in order to become fluent in their voice and then listening carefully to the intention behind what they want to say going forward.
I’ll add two more skills to that list: empathy and humor. Empathy is so important, with both leaders and employees. For the leaders of the company, you need to understand what they're trying to accomplish and how they want to show up. At the same time, you have to empathize with the audience, which sometimes means serving as an advocate for them with the leadership team. Just as product people obsess about external customers, internal communicators should obsess over our internal customers and especially challenge ourselves to understand the perceptions of employees coming from different backgrounds than our own.
The other skill that I’ll emphasize is humor, although this time I’m stealing from you, since your book report convinced me to read Humor Seriously. Part of why I enjoy this work so much is that I get the chance to help leaders use humor to show up in a way that’s relatable, to infuse joy into the content my teams and I create and, ideally, to invite everyone in the org to tap into their funny bones and their creativity to do their best work.
How do you partner with Communications as Internal Communications?
As Emily Singer Mandel mentioned in her interview, these days there's less of a delineation between internal and external communications. Anything that’s sent out or said inside the walls of our company can instantly show up externally, whether on Twitter or in The New York Times. By the same token, employees will see any industry press, Reddit threads, or Glassdoor posts, etc in real-time, so if you don’t have an internal component to an external comms plans, you’ll probably be adding something reactively. But knowing The Switchboard readers, I’m probably preaching to the choir.
How do you continue learning about the field of Communications/Internal Communications?
Books and networking, mostly. For work-related reading, I gravitate towards behavioral psych, since it’s so relevant to internal comms, and Adam Grant is a favorite. I also dig that research specific to employee comms continues to improve. The Forrester Wave is a good read, as is Nielsen Norman’s annual report on top intranets. I use both of those to source vendors and companies to reach out to, and sometimes I get lucky and those conversations lead to big ah-ha moments.
Finally, I maintain my external network of internal communicators. I recently left Google, which has an amazing alumni community. The people who have gone off to work at other companies have an incredible network and face similar questions as they build out a function at a new company or simply miss the snacks.
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This post is based on a live interview conversation and edited for publication. Learn more about why I write.