The moment is always the same...
A leader stands before their people with something real to say — an epiphany, a conviction, a direction that could genuinely shift how people work and what they believe they are part of — and the connection does not happen. Not because the intent was not there. Because the bridge between what is felt and what is received was never built.
Over 22 years, working inside newsrooms and global enterprises, I have learned that the most consequential communications failures are rarely about the message itself. The town hall leaves people more skeptical than before. The internal campaign that promotes the organization's values without embedding them.
I came up through journalism before moving into corporate communications, and that instinct — to investigate before writing, to look for the pattern beneath the presenting problem — has never left me. I have led strategic communications across HP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Northern Trust, NetApp, and Firstsource,—organisations where the stakes were high, the environments were complex, and the pressure to say the right thing at the right moment was constant.
A fundamental question has always guided my approach to work — what do we need people to walk away with, and are we building communication that actually gets them there? Every engagement begins with that question. The answer is what we build toward.