Leadership, at its essence, is about driving change through people other than yourself.
Doing this at greater degrees of scale is extraordinarily challenging because it requires getting people to act differently on their terms, not yours. The more people you want to impact, inspire and influence to shift their behavior toward a shared vision, the more you must concede control.
In addition to managing your own natural tendencies around control vs. empowering when leading, there is the complex dilemma of capturing the attention and motivation of others. These days they must compete for the mindshare and emotional connection to stakeholders against a noisy ecosystem of other employers/leaders, social media, and technology that makes it easier to stay in one’s bubble.
But there is hope for leaders who want and need to build genuine followership around a mission, whether across their organization or among society at large.
And it comes in the form of a new book released this week by Sally Susman, Executive Vice President and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer of Pfizer, entitled Breaking Through (Harvard Business Review Press).
In Breaking Through, Sally provides ten principles that have proved to help executives like her and other leaders across varied domains from government, media, entertainment and more, excel in capturing the attention of wide audiences while still fostering the deep connection needed to move forward together.
Sally knows both the challenges and the opportunities in this work intimately through firsthand experience. She not only built a successful career starting as a political appointee in the Clinton Administration and continued to lead corporate communications for two iconic global companies (American Express and Estee Lauder Companies).
Since 2007, she has been with Pfizer where today she leads teams that must engage and inspire a dizzying scope of external stakeholders and are responsible for not just communications but corporate responsibility, global policy, government relations, investor relations, and patient advocacy.
As the world reflects on 3 years this month since the pandemic started, Sally’s personal and professional experience in navigating Pfizer’s development and distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine is sobering and educational.
At a time when little was known about how to respond to a worldwide pandemic, followed by extensive debate about proper action steps, Pfizer’s leadership teams and employees were thrust on the world stage and had to rise to the occasion, no matter how uncertain they felt.
After all, it’s one thing to lead your teams through volatility within the confines of your company and communicating with key customers. It’s quite another to have to manage doubts and criticism knowing how you respond will affect humanity around the world.
I sat down with Sally to discuss her book and the many lessons she provides based on experience during the pandemic as well as through her storied career leading others and developing future leaders.
The book is a must-read for leaders and has far too much wisdom to outline in this article, but here are some highlights from our conversation around my six favorite takeaways.
Breaking through is about more than just communications.
Sally is one of the most distinguished corporate communications experts in the world with a decades-long track record of advising CEOs and organizations through crises, public and investor relationships and effective messaging between leaders and employees.
But she wrote Breaking Through to help more than those who are current or aspiring communications leaders. It’s a book for anyone looking to change their behavior and those of others, in order to effect new outcomes.
Sally Susman, Executive Vice President and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Pfizer
As she told me, “I’ve always wanted this to speak to real leaders with real problems and real challenges.
“Yes, I’m going to be teaching it in communications graduate programs, and yes, I’m speaking to departments like the one I run at Pfizer and other companies,” but the aperture of applicability for this book and applying it is wide open.
Intentionality is a game changer.
The first of Sally’s ten principles for breaking through is about starting with intention and getting clear about what you are really trying to say and achieve.
And as an executive coach to CEOs and C-suite leaders, I’ve seen many of my clients miss this step. They work with the customer in mind and seek to add value, but often have not clarified within themselves what values they objectively and personally want to honor.
In not doing so, leaders can diminish their sense of personal agency, and limit the clarity and conviction their customers, employees, or anyone else around them need to hear.
For Sally and Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla, plus their many colleagues navigating vaccine development during the pandemic, it was vital to be intentional and clear about their vision.
But this also meant being ready for criticism from stakeholders. They had to prepare to face a public that disagreed with certain decisions, while staying ahead of competing forces in the race for solutions. And they had to take action when most everyone had limited information on which to base those critical decisions.
Nonetheless, as difficult as “focused intention” is, it is worth the diligence and patience to truly unpack what it is you’re trying to convey – whether as a leader, an employee, an entrepreneur, a parent, anyone amid navigating uncertainty.
An avid yoga practitioner, Sally provides the analogy about how practicing the tree pose, for instance helps her notice what it’s like to slowly settle into a deeper, steady purpose.
It doesn’t mean it’s easy to hold that level of concentration forever. But being willing to keep returning to that focus enables a stillness from which so much more meaningful insights and actions can emerge.
As she told me, “If leaders can walk away from worrying about the credit tally and be focused on the objective outcome, the result is very powerful.
“[During the pandemic] my CEO Albert Bourla declared, ‘The only enemy is the virus,’ and that was really true. When you can lay down your guard, your need for turf, and all that, this kind of focus leads to great things.”
Courage is a thread sewn in and out of life at different times.
As much as Breaking Through is a valuable resource on management and messaging, it’s also a deeply personal book about Sally’s life and pivotal experiences that shaped her.
I was interested in her relationship to courage and how she found it during so many episodes where it may have been more tempting to avoid rocking the boat or take the path of least resistance.
I asked her to expand on how she decides when to be courageous, for example, during the time she decided to come out to her parents, which she writes about in her book.
Sally shared with me: “I think, like many people, the courage thread is sewn in and out of life at different times.
“It would be wonderful if we could all muster courage all day every day. Your question is so provoking and interesting. It leads me to think that most of us find courage in the moments hopefully when it’s really needed.
“So, for me, I was in my early 20s, beginning my adult life, and I had to step up to this plate or I would, I don’t know, be living some false life, living in the closet, not being with the person who I love, not conducting my life in the way I wanted to. It took me a lot to get there.
“As I said in the book, I thought about it for years. I rehearsed it in my head for years. We have to identify the moments and this was mine. I had just graduated from college setting sail on my life, and I needed to be able to navigate a course of honesty and clarity, and I had to step up. I mean, I literally did pass out on the plane on the way home because I was so scared.”
Years later, the pandemic required courage at the highest level.
She continued, “[Covid-19] gave Pfizer and its leaders the moment that we’d all [have to step up to]. I mean, you certainly never anticipate a once-a-century global pandemic.
“What we believed is that we are here to make breakthroughs that will change patients’ lives. And that’s when you have this moment where you have to put up or shut up.
“Are you going to do that? Are you going to really stand firm? Are you going to place a bet on a new technology? Are you going to not take the government’s money because you want your autonomy?
“I think courage really happens when the rough sea and the strong captain come together in a moment and find each other.”
Find your own voice.
So much of success in leadership and acting decisively in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) environment is knowing when to take a beat and wait to gather/challenge given information, or drive urgency and strike while the iron’s hot.
In her book, Sally shares a vivid anecdote about the time when President Trump happened to mention Pfizer in the televised debates for the 2020 election. Sally and her colleagues knew that some kind of response was necessary. Not because of any political bias or view, but because employees who were just as surprised as them to be mentioned, would rightfully ask questions about it.
Yet when her team reached out to media, they were dissuaded from sticking to their values and core messaging and encouraged to be salacious. Basically, they were told “we won’t print it unless you’re going to do some mud-slinging.”
Sally and her team didn’t believe in “going low” just to get press, and recognized their employees needed to hear from them, before a journalist or blogger.
Breaking Through (Harvard Business Review Press)
They quickly decided to focus on messaging their employees directly, rather than pitching to media. This would be the best way to respond: in clear, purposeful terms that supported their employees and removed any confusion about what was said in that event.
Sally told me,
“Timing is a big part of this exercise. I make most of my mistakes if I rush. You don’t want to rush headlong into something. You want to understand it, analyze it, but you do need to act with real urgency when something like that happens. And you need to correct the record immediately.
“I know it can be cliche, but finding your own voice is powerful. I love the tool of a letter to employees because it’s not about a reporter on deadline or somebody pushing a petition into your face saying, ‘Sign this,’ and you have until 5:00 to review it and they call you at 4:45.
“Take the pen back, take the microphone back, and say what you want to say in your own way on your own time. Don’t dally, don’t waste time, don’t rush, but move with real clarity.”
Know yourself and trust what feels right….
For those readers who are early on in their career, I wondered whether Sally could provide any wisdom based on her longstanding success.
She shared,
“Well, everything looks clear in hindsight. I’ve worked in three very different industries: financial services, personal care products, biopharmaceuticals, and I’ve worked for three companies that I really love.
“Part of it is when you’re interviewing, really allow yourself to try to hear the music that’s playing in the background. I mean, not literally but metaphorically.
“Do you feel comfortable talking to these people?
“Do you like them?
“Often when I’ve been interviewing or other people are interviewing with me, you can see people are just narrowly focused on what is the job level or what’s the salary.
“I think those things are ultimately less important over time than is this a place where I will not only survive but thrive. Do I get them – and do they get me?”
I told Sally that a theme I noticed across most, if not all, of the principles in her book was that whenever you can turn being reactive to proactive, you’re on the right track.
Instead of chasing the validation, start with asking yourself, “What are my values?” “What can we control?” and “How does this decision relate back to our company’s purpose as opposed to just trying to pander to anybody else?”
Basically, it seemed she was telling us that we need to know ourselves first and then we’re going to start from that point before we decide how to engage and connect.
Sally replied, “You said it, I think, better than I said it. And I’ll add that somebody asked me recently, what advice would you have given yourself when you were younger?
“And I basically said to worry less. I was so worried. Looking in the rearview mirror, I went to government first because I thought that’s where I could do the best and the most good.
“I left government, tried New York, went back when President Clinton won, then went back to New York. There were some zigs and zags in the trajectory.
“But the more experienced I became and the more confident I became, the more choosy I became about what I do with my time, who I want to work with and for, and how I want to spend my energies.
“And that’s why I’m very honored to have this role at Pfizer and really excited to put this book out into the universe.”
….But push yourself to do the harder thing.
While knowing yourself and trusting in what feels right is important to make values-based decisions and communicate with purpose, stepping out of your comfort zone and reassessing how you’re engaging with the world is just as critical for breaking through.
I told Sally that I enjoyed one particular passage in her book about her mentor, Jeanette Sarkisian Wagner and some lessons she learned from her about expanding past your comfort threshold.
She told me,
“Jeanette was a very senior person at Estée Lauder when I arrived there. We ultimately became great friends.
“She always pushed me to do the harder thing. That whole discussion [in the book] about leave an easy job for a hard job, that was a lot of her advice.
“And you’re remembering the story very well about this trip to China. I was jonesing for a tub, and a room service hamburger, and Netflix, and she basically shamed me into going out with her [to explore the city and meet people].
“She was 80 years old and had endless energy. She taught me to get out and get to know the local activities when traveling for work and I still do it a lot.
“Last summer I took my team to an offsite but we did a hike around the lake. Or, when I went to South by Southwest I went to the LBJ Memorial Museum.
“It just makes it more gratifying; it helps you to connect the dots across where you are. It bothers me terribly in those times when you have to fly to the airport, go to the hotel, stay in the hotel until you return to the airport, and go home.”
To me, this story ties in so well with the idea of curiosity being a superpower. By being curious about the goings-on outside of the hotel, for instance, when any of us are traveling for work, you put yourself in a position to observe new things, to develop even more curiosity, and then shift perspectives that can lead to even better solutions.
Given that Sally’s book is all about helping to drive change in ways that open hearts and move minds, you can start by doing both within yourself. And curiosity, coupled with crossing past your comfort zone will significantly expand your own heart and mind.
*****
Sally is one of those rare leaders that breaks through because she brings both warmth and expertise to her audiences. In my coaching of leaders, I’ve observed that one without the other just isn’t as effective.
So, her willingness to take the reader through her career with not just a play-by-play of business challenges but also vulnerability and candor of how she dealt with ups and downs, makes all the difference in how she connects.
Quite literally, her book is about breaking through for leaders, but she actually demonstrates it by how she wrote it.
When Sally and I reached the end of our chat, she shared a funny anecdote with me:
“I got two copies of the book sent to me,” she said, “so I kept one at my house and I sent the other copy to my parents.
“My mom said, ‘You didn’t write a business book you wrote a memoir, okay?’
“I said, ‘No, mom, it’s a business book. It’s a book about my life in business.’
“And yes, I did inject a lot of myself in it. I certainly trust my editor or hope that it’s not too much of me.
“But I think business is often so depersonalized, and so cold, and so antiseptic that I did share a lot of mistakes and vulnerable moments. I feel from this conversation that came through in a good way and that means a lot to me.”
Nihar Chhaya is an executive coach to CEOs, founders, influencers, and C-suite leaders at global companies. You can access his paper on The Power of Coaching for Successful Executives here.
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