Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
A rendering of Spaceflight’s Sherpa-FX vehicle. Image courtesy of Spaceflight Inc.
In mid-July, our client Spaceflight Inc., the leading satellite rideshare and mission management provider, announced its plans to launch its next generation orbital transfer vehicle, Sherpa-FX, on a fully dedicated rideshare mission with SpaceX. Spaceflight’s Sherpa-FX is the first innovative orbital transfer vehicle and will be the debut vehicle in the company’s Sherpa-NG (next generation) program. The vehicle can execute multiple deployments, providing independent and detailed deployment telemetry, and flexible interfaces, all at a low cost.
In early August, the company published two more announcements. One focused on a variety of new initiatives that will continue to improve the company’s ability to offer an unprecedented amount of flexibility to its customers. The second announcement revealed an exclusive partnership agreement that will enable propulsion capabilities for a later generation Sherpa vehicle.
In our work with Spaceflight this year, we have been focused on demonstrating how the company uniquely provides launch flexibility through its comprehensive offering of launch services. In addition to speaking opportunities and pitches, announcements play a key role in our public relations strategy. These announcements demonstrate key steps Spaceflight is taking to further its ability to create launch flexibility. The innovative solutions and partnerships revealed through the releases provide key proof points that clearly illustrate how Spaceflight is tackling one of the industry’s biggest problems (delays and schedule changes) and delivering on its promise to enable launch flexibility.
The announcements garnered coverage in key industry and technology publications. Below are a handful of articles that resulted from the announcements. Congratulations to the Spaceflight team on the impressive momentum it is generating around its new initiatives, capabilities and services.
Spaceflight Coverage
- Spaceflight Inc. debuts new orbital transfer vehicle for satellite rideshare rocket launches – TechCrunch
- Spaceflight Reveals Sherpa-FX Vehicle to Fly Aboard SpaceX Mission – Via Satellite
- Sending Something to Space? Book Your Launch Now in Spaceflight Inc. and Avail Their Latest Offers – The Science Times
- Satnews Perspectives Video Interview with Curt Blake, CEO, Spaceflight – Satnews
- Benchmark to provide propulsion for Spaceflight’s Sherpa-NG – Space News
- Benchmark Space Systems Merges Tech with Tesseract, Signs Green Propulsion Deal with Spaceflight – Via Satellite
- Spaceflight reveals array of launch initiatives for smallsat customers – Satellite Pro
For many organizations worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we work. We’re more reliant on collaboration technologies than ever before.
The pandemic has forced an abrupt dislocation of how employees work, how customers behave, how supply chains function and even what ultimately constitutes busines performance. With a sudden shift to a remote workforce a new era of leadership is emerging.
One of the most important skills leaders have to develop is facilitating interactions to succeed in a changing environment. Findings from a McKinsey & Company report indicate that continuous learning in the workplace must become the new norm and that leaders need to work on “enabling the best in their people, rather than commanding it from them.”
This shift requires leaders to move away from telling their teams what to do and instead empowering employees to be self-organized.
A recent Forbes article highlights takeaways from the McKinsey report and four practices that will help leaders become more agile: connect, attend, respect and empower.
Connect during crisis
With the turbulence of today and the uncertainty of tomorrow, leaders have a unique role to play in alleviating fears and demonstrating care while maintaining a connection to purpose. Connection reduces stress, increases the sense of purpose and drives innovation.
Defining what the purpose of your team is can help employees connect their actions to that purpose, beyond being profitable. Checking in with your team frequently to see how each of them feels they are contributing to it can help spur active engagement and intent.
Communicating with your staff regularly and consistently, will both provide routine and ensure a safe space. To increase engagement, the Forbes article suggests leaders should reduce meetings to 30 minutes or less and invite every single member to speak up.
At Communiqué PR we have a daily, 30-minute morning meeting where everyone briefly reports on their action items for the day, we collaborate on projects and, when time allows, we even manage to quickly check in on personal activities. While some people may see this as a painful exercise, I personally look forward to it. It helps me get organized for the day and provides a much-needed sense of connection with my team – who I miss dearly and have not seen in person for more than five months.
Actively attend to your clients and your employees
Feeling safe is a basic human need, and a crisis will challenge this need, especially if there is a lack of communication. Leaders must embrace the role of an observer and help coach team members. While communicating critical updates is crucial, active listening is even more important.
As leaders, we must balance our intensity and desire to perform with compassionate attention to our employees’ needs. Being more mindful of another’s stress and their tension points before they impact the business requires us to boost our emotional intelligence.
The Forbes article encourages leaders to create a safe place to make mistakes and to establish an environment where employees feel comfortable asking questions.
Respect: Every employee matters
A leader’s job is not to cheer up their team or tell them what to do. The focus is more on building trust, providing support and offering flexible options to accommodate different needs. Now more than ever, empathizing with employees helps leaders determine how to best assist them.
These actions can be simple. Some companies that used to provide snacks and beverages at the office are sending care packages to employees’ houses. Other companies are providing flexible schedules.
Another tactic is to do more frequent one-on-one meetings instead of, or in addition to, regular team meetings. Especially when work is remote, feedback through email or, even worse, no feedback at all can damage employees’ motivation. The Forbes article suggests that concrete positive reinforcement has to be continuous, while negative feedback has to be straightforward and provided sooner than later.
Empower teams and unleash their strengths
After several months of working remotely, some employees have honed the ability to collaborate and be successful virtually while others may still be struggling. During challenging times, some leaders immediately gravitate to a micro-management style. However, the Forbes article encourages leaders to empower employees instead.
Encouraging associates to set up goals and to be owners of their own work can empower and inspire employees to take a more active role in their decision making and ultimately their success. When leaders empower their employees, they will become sensors to help detect and independently deal with issues in the future more quickly than if you had to do it all by yourself.
A new leadership era
In the age of continuous evolution, as cited in the Forbes article, leaders need to learn new skills: “Connect with them and their purpose more intentionally. Attend more actively than ever to detect unforeseen issues. Respect and value their skills, their personal needs and also their differences. And last but not least, empower them to decide how to do their work remotely with less supervision. It is just the beginning of a new way of leading.”
It was a tale of two Washingtons, and a tale of two teams.
On July 23, two professional sports franchises launched significant branding announcements. One was a temporary rebrand of Washington, D.C.’s NFL franchise, the now-monikered “Washington Football Team,” for the 2020 football season. The other was the launch of Seattle’s new NHL team, the Seattle Kraken, which will debut in 2021.
Shortly after each announcement, feedback poured in from media members and sports fans across the internet. Below, we take a look at what was well received with these unveilings and where there may have been room for improvement.
The Seattle Kraken
Let’s start with the positive. After nearly two years of research, the NHL Seattle ownership group boldly moved forward and selected the Kraken – a mythical, tentacled sea-monster – as its team name and mascot. With the announcement, the group unveiled the Kraken’s branding, logo and story behind the name.
It was a daring and risky move, although, for the most part, the Kraken name was warmly received. A Seattle Times poll showed 61% of respondents loved the name. NBC Sports Washington and SB Nation each published glowing reviews. There were detractors, as some felt the mythical creature didn’t provide strong ties to the Pacific Northwest. Seattle Times columnist Larry Stone admitted he didn’t care for the name, though added he loves the logo, color scheme and uniforms.
However, there was a thorough process behind the name selection, which is what warrants the most praise. The NHL Seattle group solicited input from its 32,000 fans, conducting 50 “listening sessions” and sifting through more than 1,200 potential names. In addition, the name was selected with a sense of place in mind. Seattle has a maritime history, and the Kraken brand aims to “honor the Puget Sound waters.” The primary “S” logo that will adorn the Kraken jersey serves as tribute to Seattle’s last professional hockey team, the Seattle Metropolitans.
The NHL Seattle group certainly went big and bold in naming the 32nd NHL franchise with a moniker that is nautical and captures a mystique. The name is undoubtedly unique and interesting, and many Seattle fans eagerly await the day to jubilantly shout “RELEASE THE KRAKEN!” at home contests.
The Washington Football Team
Now for the challenging. The decisionmakers for the Washington Football Team had their work cut out for them for the rebrand of their franchise, formerly known as the Washington Redskins. For years, there were calls from Native American groups and community members for the team to change its nickname, citing racist undertones. But it wasn’t until several key sponsors – including FedEx, PepsiCo, Bank of America and Nike – recently requested the team change its name or they would pull sponsorship that a branding change materialized. Following these developments, the response was swift and a temporary rebrand was announced, with a permanent rebrand expected to follow.
The rebrand as the Washington Football Team was met with approval by many longtime critics. The Washington Post reported several politicians who had criticized the prior nickname voiced their support of the change, as did the advocacy group Rebrand Washington Football. Many fans on social media, however, were less than enthused, with some calling the interim name “rushed and generic.” An opportunity may have been missed, as sportswriter Frank Isola commented on Twitter, by not adopting the moniker “Washington F.C.”
It’s certainly an unenviable position to be in, with no shortage of critics. Fortunately, fans can look forward to the permanent rebrand of Washington’s Football Team, and there are models for what works in naming a franchise and appeasing a fanbase. We can only wait to see how the permanent branding process unfolds. Until then, those of us in Seattle will eagerly await to “Release the Kraken!”
On the heels of LGBTQ+ Pride Month and amid the continuing Black Lives Matter movement, it is important to take a look into the power our language has to either include or exclude others. Understanding and using inclusive language is essential to creating spaces that support a more diverse workforce. Inclusive language better recognizes humanity and respect for our colleagues and allows them to bring their full authentic selves to the workplace.
In her article, “How to Use & Promote Inclusive Language at Your Organization,” Caroline Forsey, a staff writer for HubSpot’s marketing blog, defines inclusive language as language that “avoids biases, slang, or expressions that discriminate against groups of people based on race, gender, or socioeconomic status. Inclusive language allows you to resonate with more audiences by speaking and writing in more impartial ways.”
Often our implicit biases enter the workplace and manifest in the ways that we talk about people. Learning about inclusive language shines a light onto these biases as we learn the ways that our language creates a barrier to the success of others.
Here are five ways you can make your language more inclusive:
- Refer to a theoretical person as “they” instead of “he” or “she” – This is a best practice to begin to disassociate gender from traditionally gendered professions such as doctors and engineers. In addition, this is particularly important when speaking to colleagues about their romantic partners to avoid assuming their sexuality.
- Ask individuals for their pronouns to avoid guessing – Misgendering, or placing the incorrect gender on a colleague, can make the workplace feel like a hostile environment. Asking everyone, including cisgender people (whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth), to share their pronouns helps to create a more welcoming space for non-cisgender coworkers.
- Use people first language – People first language addresses the humanity of an individual before the other qualities about them. Examples of people first language are, “people with autism,” “people experiencing homelessness” and “people of color.” “People should be referred to as people as often as possible,” says Cristi Hegranes.
- Stop using mental illness as an adjective – Mental health should be regarded seriously, and not downplayed as a descriptor for weather that changes rapidly or the urge you have to clean everything in your office. Applying mental health in this way trivializes these diseases.
- Do not tell women and non-white coworkers they are “well-spoken” or “articulate” – While you may be impressed with their job performance or public speaking abilities, these adjectives perpetuate misogynistic and racist stereotypes of these colleagues as less educated than white men.
As we move to make changes in the ways we address and talk about others, it is important to recognize missteps and act to quickly correct them. This list of five changes to language only scratches the surface on the ways we can make our language more inclusive to people of different identities.
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with a staggering 690 million users. By providing an easy solution for networking, while also acting as an outlet for content publishing and sharing, LinkedIn has become the eminent social media platform for business professionals. According to Ogilvy, LinkedIn is a fast and flexible medium with high-impact effects, making it an important element to consider in communications plans.
Considering the strengths of LinkedIn, it’s not surprising that Betsy Hindman, the author of “Why CEOs use LinkedIn during Crises” praised the common use of LinkedIn during the COVID-19 pandemic. She argued that LinkedIn posts, when used thoughtfully and intentionally, are an ideal medium for CEOs and other spokespeople to address crises with messaging to assure and inform. People tend to trust other people more than faceless organizations, so the humanized message from a leadership position comes off as more personal and sympathetic. The public nature of the post allows for the message to spread beyond the confines of an organization’s stakeholders or customer base, potentially even going viral. A widely shared statement on important issues, such as COVID-19, is crucial because when people’s expectations for communication are not met, the company appears silent on the issue. In some cases, silence is not acceptable. In the absence of a message, people will fill the communication void by drawing their own conclusions about the company’s true position and the meaning of the silence.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn cannot immediately be a perfect outlet for an organizations’ messaging because the audience must know, appreciate, and trust an individual’s profile as a source of information. Without dedicated followers and interaction opportunities, a post is unlikely to garner the reach and engagement necessary. To create a LinkedIn presence capable of amplifying announcements and driving interactions, here are a few steps to take:
- Optimize the profile. This includes filling in as much thoughtful, relevant information as possible, using a professional and flattering image, providing access to previous work and accomplishments, and adding skills and endorsements.
- Grow your audience. To do this, invite everyone in your existing community, ideally with personalized connection requests, then ask your network to introduce you to people they know that would be helpful to connect with on LinkedIn.
- Publish and share content. You can share your work, including blogs and bylines, as posts to your page, or write an article on LinkedIn Publisher. Share content relevant to your industry, company, life, or interests, and make sure to use tags to allow people to find your posts.
- Engage with your community. To help ensure that other people interact with your content and your profile, actively engage with posts in and outside of your network. Endorse the skills of your connections and constructively participate in groups. By building reciprocal relationships with your network, your profile and content will spark more conversations and grow your audience.
LinkedIn can be a powerful tool in your crisis communications plan, so start building a strong network and establishing trust. In the process, you will gain an online community, a platform for crisis messaging, and discover the strength that can come with professional networks.
In a recent episode of The New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast, Counting the Infected, the team discussed how the newspaper handled tracking and analyzing data related to COVID-19 cases and deaths.
Beginning in early March, the Times formed a dedicated COVID-19 data team. This group of reporters and researchers were tasked with aggregating case and death data from a number of sources around the country. As the team evaluated the data they had on hand, they ran into a few roadblocks that highlight the great potential and serious limitations of data.
Taking a step back outside of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to recognize that data can be used in multiple ways. It can help tell and strengthen stories by providing detail and specific metrics to the situation at hand. Data can also be used as a source, similar to how reporters work with corporate spokespeople to ask questions about a topic or product. Depending on the data, it can be sliced and diced to provide more insight for broader education. If someone or some company has access to strong or unique data, they are in a unique position to be able to help tell a story that will educate others.
The Times used this same lens when viewing their COVID-19 data, which is when they realized their data was having shortcomings. Because they were tracking cases and deaths by location, they did not have too many details beyond those figures. Just like when interviewing a subject matter expert, they could only look at the data in so many ways to answer the many questions at hand (i.e., age, gender, race, profession, etc.).
While they were able to create a hive of data, they knew they needed more details that could help uncover the who, why and when of positive cases and deaths. After requesting data from the CDC with slow movement, The Times’ legal team sued the organization arguing that the newspaper was working to educate the public and this data would provide the general public with the valuable insights they needed to safely live and make decisions during this time. The New York Times won the suit and secured access to data on 1.5 million cases, which meant they had enhanced data on nearly 88 percent of cases reported in May. After reviewing the data, the Times was able to uncover key trends and patterns. An overarching trend was just how pervasive racial disparities are within nearly every aspect of the pandemic – specifically infection rates, working conditions and age. I highly recommend listening to the episode to learn more about the patterns and how the virus has impacted populations differently.
As marketing and communication professionals, securing compelling and unique data can feel like winning the lottery. Data can define truths and shed light on topics that can help demonstrate thought leadership and build credibility for an organization. However, data does not always have all the answers, especially when human error or ambiguity is present when asking questions and gathering the results.
When creating future campaigns that have the potential to leverage data, it is important to be grounded in knowing how to determine what stories are best told through data. While data can help make a topic more compelling, not all stories need the metrics. Knowing how to tell the difference will help prevent the misuse of data or losing a story to the lack of it.
Lastly, if a company has access to data, test its strength by asking questions. The best data can answer the tough questions and help tell a story in a new light. After the data has been analyzed and it is clear how it will shape the overall story, it can be shared with the greater public with confidence it will help educate effectively.