📸 What Creators Can Teach us About Communicating at Work
5 Lessons Learned from Inspiring Influencers
📸 Photo and 🥧 Pie by: Steph Hockersmith | @PieLadyBooks Pasta Grannies invite you to discover family recipes in Italian home kitchens. Kat Norton showcases spreadsheet skills to song and dance as Miss Excel. Positively Present illustrates inspiring messages of resilience. Raegan Doodle spreads “pawsitivity” with cute outfits, fancy footwork and education about adoption as well as foster care. Pie Lady Books decorates beautiful book covers as artistic pies.
These creators craft unique content — from classes to dances to skits — ultimately teaching, inspiring and encouraging their communities while pursuing their passions professionally. They are part of a transformational economic movement. There’s a lot we can learn from creators to apply to communicating at work.
Here are five lessons learned and ways we can apply them below:
🍝 Be Your Authentic Self
📈 Elevate Content Experts
🎠 Foster Communities Not Audiences
🐶 Be Kind and Have Fun
🥧 Embrace Creativity
🍝 #1 Be Your Authentic Self
There’s something special in the sauce of Pasta Grannies whose mission is “finding and filming women who still make pasta by hand — a tradition that is disappearing in Italy” according to its founder Vicky Bennison.
This video and photography series showcases grandmothers —100-year-old Annunziata, 101-year-old Rosina, 100-year-old Giuseppa and hundreds more — from all over Italy making pasta by hand or with rolling pins. Dressed in classic aprons, they are authentic — cooking in their kitchens without modern makeovers and sharing family recipes.
📘 Apply This Lesson
From these grandmothers, we learn the importance of being your authentic self. This is true for all team members but in particular leaders. These pasta matriarchs are their family’s CCO — Chief Culinary Officer. CEOs take note — consider sharing your family stories at All Hands meetings or talk about how your heritage matters to you as Ancestry’s CEO Deb Liu writes in her newsletter Perspectives, “Memories through Food: How Taste Passes on Culture:”
“I remember summers in the humid heat of Hong Kong, when my grandmother taught me to cook. One of my favorite memories was of her teaching me to make a fun gor (粉果), a translucent steamed dumpling with cooked filling. I watched as she took boiling water and poured it over tapioca and cornstarch. We then kneaded the hot dough on the marble tabletop together. I remember her laughing at me as I struggled to roll out one single wrapper without tearing it.”
While you can’t invite everyone to travel with you to your Grandmother’s house or into your home kitchen to experience your family’s food, there are some serious brownie points when leaders like Notion’s CEO Ivan Zhao hosted a recognition event for the recruiting team.
📸 Photo by Kathleen Kiang, Recruiting at Notion | Posted on LinkedIn 📈 #2 Elevate Content Experts
There’s a lot more to Excel than adding columns, freezing rows and filtering content. But, it takes commitment to learn the tips and tricks that make Excel a powerful tool in business. Add in song and dance and Miss Excel (real name: Kat Norton) has a way of making learning formulas and pivot tables surprisingly fun. The origin story of her creating Miss Excel is a lesson in itself as Scot Nover wrote in this Quartz at Work article: “Kat Norton’s spiritual journey to becoming a Microsoft Excel influencer”
“When the pandemic hit in March 2020, she found herself at home, sleeping in her childhood bedroom, with extra time on her hands. She decided she needed a change. She needed to find her “life’s purpose,” she says. She liked her employer and her colleagues but didn’t love the work. So she embarked on a spiritual journey to figure out her priorities.”
While working as a consultant, she started creating an Excel training course in her free time which led to her becoming a “spreadsheet influencer.”
📘 Apply This Lesson
Elevate your content experts! Internal communications intersects with every department and offers a unique view into who excels at what — and not just Excel. Find those talented people by asking questions when you chat with them and offer ways to elevate them internally — as teachers of internal courses, facilitators of meetings, leaders of employee groups and much more.
🎠 #3 Foster Communities Not Audiences
While we think in terms of employee audiences — managers or individual contributors and different teams (engineers, product, recruiting and more) — we should be going deeper by treating our colleagues as communities. Let’s not just share information, but engage employees in conversations.
Positively Present engages her community through inspiring illustrations with messages of resilience. I published this feature on the ways her art can motivate Internal Communications. When her community comments, she responds. She listens to what’s happening in the world and offers comfort and resources during difficult times.
📘 Apply This Lesson
We can learn from her responses and engagement to remember these principles when interacting with our communities of colleagues. Encourage groups to form outside of daily responsibilities. Connect with those communities and different organizations in meaningful ways with dialogue, Q and A’s, events and more. Don’t just wait until survey results, check on your peers and address what’s top of mind in a timely manner.
🐶 #4 Be Kind and Have Fun
Australian Labradoodle Reagan doodle first captured many online hearts in 2016 when he rose to creator fame wearing matching outfits with his foster brother, Little Buddy. Sandi Swiridoff, Reagan’s mom, put a spotlight on supporting foster care and adoption while showcasing the bond between dog and toddler. As a dog-lebrity, Raegan is “spreading pawsitivity” with cute costumes, fancy tricks and sweet moments all while having an impact. In this interview with the Today show, they share:
“Swiridoff has published three children’s books inspired by Reagan and her grandchildren, and her annual calendar has raised more than $60,000 to help children in foster care.”
📘 Apply This Lesson
Reagan Doodle reminds us to treat each other with kindness, an important quality for how we communicate at work. The videos of fun and funny moments encourage us to ensure work has a positive culture as if Mary Poppins was your Chief Culture Officer. To facilitate some fun, consider a howl-i-day pet show for moments of joy, laughter, barks, meows and maybe even a few snorts into everyone’s day with photos of people’s pets.
🥧 #5 Embrace Creativity
There’s an old phrase — "don't judge a book by its cover." But, in the case of Pie Lady Books, you definitely should. Steph Hockersmith recreates beautiful book covers as artistic pies that look almost too beautiful to eat. Her mission is “creating a love of books, one pie at a time!” After scrolling through her decadent photographs, I want to read every book and taste every pie too!
I admire Steph’s creativity and baking skills. Combining these two passions is an incredibly unique idea. She also reviews the books, adding intellectual stimulation to the beautiful designs and confections.
📘 Apply This Lesson
Think differently in how we approach our work. Consider a creative angle! Don’t just send the same newsletter because you’ve been writing it that way for months. Incorporate art and beauty into our work with the design of your work to be thoughtful and engaging. When Design and Internal Communications meet, there can literally be beautiful moments at work.
🎨 Who is a creator that can teach us about how we communicate at work? Comment below with your ideas or share this article with your network to find out who they would add to this list.
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Love this! “Spread Sheet Influencer!” What a time to be alive!
So many foodie examples so of course I had to love this one, Julia! Pasta Grannies is on my list! Just looking at the joyful granny in pearls and red polka dots is enough reason to check it out!🤗