How Communications Drives Organizational Health - with Ethan McCarty

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Daniel Nestle: Welcome, or welcome back to the trending communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. You know, when I think about people who've had the most influence on me, like many or maybe all of you, I can go all the way back to my parents. It's a handful of teachers, a bartender or two, you know, my friends too, of course. It's a long list, and I always find myself adding to it, like, especially as the years go bye. But professionally, the handful of colleagues and mentors and bosses and I suppose a few writers and speakers that I know, it's a much smaller list then. Looking at where I am now, somewhat of an authority on communications, I guess. A few awards on the shelf and on the wall, a reputation as a leader in the communications technology, aka Comstec world.

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Daniel Nestle: A level of confidence in my own views and perspectives that I've never had before. All of which led to the trending communicator which you're listening to now. I owe all of this, or the vast bulk of it, to three or maybe four people, one of whom, arguably the top of the list, is with me today. A trending communicator by any definition. He's a leading voice in the communications profession. You'll find him on all kinds of boards and committees, from page society to the Institute of Public Relations, where he's a trustee. He's speaking about and writing about communications Comstech employee experience. He's a winner of multiple awards. He's had a career that saw him rise to leadership roles at IBM and Bloomberg, and then six years ago started his own employee experience agency.

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Daniel Nestle: A Forbes contributor educator, a member of the University of Florida's thought leadership circle. He does more for our profession than just about anyone. Many of you already know who I'm talking about. The CEO of Integral, my friend and confidant, the only one and only, Ethan McCarty. Adam Verklempt. Just saying that, my friend. So good to have you back on the well reimagined pod. How are you?

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Ethan McCarty: I'm. Yeah, I don't know. I'm like a little Veklump myself. That is a really lovely introduction. I appreciate that, Daniel. I mean, gosh, like, the thing that I most want at this stage of my career is to be helpful to other folks. And the way you just put that means a lot to me. So I appreciate it. Thank you. And I'm stoked to be here talking with you. Every time I do, I feel like we discover something together and learn something. And so when you asked if I'd be willing. I didn't just say willing and able, but, like, eager to have another conversation with you. So, you know, let's get to know. And I, and I just, I think, you know, I mentioned this to you. I shot you a text.

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Ethan McCarty: I just really loved the conversation that you had with Lisa Kaplan and the way the intro you wrote was wonderful. And, yeah, she's so, she's so smart. And anyway, so I just, I love what you're doing here. And so thank you for inviting me to be a part of it.

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Daniel Nestle: I mean, I should mention, of course, that you introduced me to Lisa. It's my pleasure to be here and to many of my podcast guests in the past and probably in the future as well.

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Ethan McCarty: I certainly am.

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Daniel Nestle: And, you know, you're saying that, you know, you can come back anytime. Be careful what you wish for. I think it's clear that you, look, we have a rapport. We go back now. We go back now five or six years back to whatever, 2017 or 2018, when we started talking about tech, that nascent committee back in page society. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, friends of the pod will know that I talk about you sometimes and that you've been on before when it was the Dan Nestle show. This is your first appearance as a trending communicator. A trending communicator. But clearly you've been a trending communicator before this. This is not your entry into trendingness or whatever it is.

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Ethan McCarty: I'm so trendy.

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Daniel Nestle: Look, you're trendy.

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Ethan McCarty: It's the fact that I wear the same thing every day.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. I mean, look, normally he's the man in black. Normally in the intros and things, I start touch on what we're going to talk about in the show. And I didn't really do that in this one because I just wanted to, first of all, pay homage to my good friend. But also, it's anything goes kind of conversation with you every time. But always looking at the future and always looking at what is important to communications, what's going on with, especially, like, employee experience, because that's clearly your area or your chosen area these days, although you can speak to pretty much anything. But I do want to hear a lot about that. And as you said with Lisa, we spoke about misinformation and disinformation.

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Daniel Nestle: There's a direct connection to that conversation with the way that you deal with employees, the way that companies should be speaking with their employees. And I know that you've written about that and discussed that with other within our profession. It's all connected, I think, is what I'm trying to say. And I do want to get into Comtech and AI as we can. AI is a common topic on the show because, let's face it's everywhere. And I, you know, it's still and will continue to be foremost and like a primary mover in content creation and in workflows and in much more as we go forward.

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Daniel Nestle: But let me just give you the floor, man, because I want to know what's up in your world and what is it that, you know, that we as communicators and marketers even should be like, kind of looking at right now? And what are you looking at that's of concern? It's bubbling up to you, and we can start anywhere.

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Ethan McCarty: Yeah, well, I mean, I can tell you what's on my mind right now, and that is as a small business owner in the communication space, I run an agency, and I can tell you what the market is telling me because of what my clients are telling me. What are the needs that I see across my clients.

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Daniel Nestle: Hey, wait a second, Ethan, could you just remind our listeners, because some people are new to the pod, tell them a little bit about integral.

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Ethan McCarty: Sure.

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Daniel Nestle: And your specialty in what you do, and then we can continue on with it.

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Ethan McCarty: Yeah, sure. My point. So I started integral about six and a half years ago with the intention to really put a focus on employees as a public. And that's kind of the core belief, is that employees are public. This idea of internality and externality is a useful construct for some things, you know, like figuring out how to allocate budget or configuring a content management system or something like that. But it's not of great strategic value. Thinking of employees as a public is. And so if you consider it that way, then you would think of managing a relationship with that public with great intention. And some organizations do that well and others don't. I believe that communications professionals can have a really strong hand in helping organizations manage the relationship with employees in really productive ways.

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Ethan McCarty: And I think there's a real opportunity to do good with a capital g, given that so many humans spend upwards of 80% of their lives at work. If you can optimize that set of relations at work for strategic value and for positive experiences for the humans involved, that feels like a lot of good outcomes. So that's what integral does. We look at employee communications from the top to the bottom of every organization. Literally what's coming out of the mouths and the memos of the c suite all the way into metadata on an intranet and everything in between. We think about that, like sort of ecosystem of communications. We also have a very strong focus in the technologies that support work. So digital workplace as a much broader concept than just like which mobile app or intranet are you using.

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Ethan McCarty: But all of those digital experiences and the data that sort of all the artifacts that backup the data, artifacts that back up your relationship at work and with colleagues and collaboration and all those things and social media and so on, and then culture and change in organizations. So every organization is in a state of change. Sometimes it's very accelerated, sometimes it's very acute. Sometimes it's just the change that is happening in society or in that industrial sector or know, what have you, that market sector. And we think that there's a particularly important salience of culture to how organizations accommodate change.

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Ethan McCarty: You know, whether you are going to be able to sort of greet change with, you know, sort of the resilience and open mindedness is, does not come down just to, like, one individual's will, you know, like whether the CEO is good or not, but rather the agency of many, you know, hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of people who are implicated in that change. And that's, you know, you can actually, you know, inspect and design and enhance and improve cultures to, you know, to beneficial, you know, for the people who are involved and, you know, to drive those business outcomes. So that's what integral has done. And we've had the privilege to work with, you know, many brands across, you know, number of sectors.

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Ethan McCarty: I mean, you know, very, you know, large pharmaceutical companies, fashion, retail, technology, finance, we don't really niche down by industry, but rather work with organizations that are, you know, encountering, you know, they're, they're sort of encountering this, I think I, this moment where it's very clear that employees have much more agency and voice and ability to affect reputation and the ability to affect customer outcomes. It's like that's, I think, more deeply understood now than it maybe ever has been. And so I started this business. I started this business, you know, coming from two organizations that took employee communications very seriously, Bloomberg and IBM, and even created space for me to do work that was experiential, not just, you know, messaging and delivering of content and so on.

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Ethan McCarty: And I think that's, you know, when we go back to, like, what's, what I think is on the minds of many leaders in business, not just marketing communications, its this understanding that, oh wow. We have maybe over rotated on our investment in chasing headlines with traditional public relations or chasing clicks with traditional advertising, and yet were sitting in relationship with many thousands of people whose connections probably dwarf the reach of any one article or advertising or by orders of magnitude. And so that's the thing that's happening, I think. I'm happy that this is my chosen line of work, because there's a lot of renewed interest and energy around it right now.

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Daniel Nestle: Okay. I kept writing different things down and I will get back to that. We'll get back to some of them, probably not all of them. Before we do that though, you're about to tell us about what's on your mind, about what the market is telling you through your clients. And we're gonna start there.

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Ethan McCarty: Yeah, yeah. So it's a little bit of a meta thing. I actually just wrote a piece. I think it's gonna come out and it'll be out in, on Forbes. I think by the time, By the time this goes live, this pod goes live. And it's. I think the title is something like when communications is the organization. And. Yeah, and it's this. I think many organizations are coming around a little bit more sincerely to this idea of the way they configure communicating across an organization, not just with its own people, but with vendors, with partners, with customers, with the public who might be legislators or what have you, that like, actually, is the company more so than the buildings or the product? It's like the way we are in relationship through how we communicate. And that it's not a mechanical feature.

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Ethan McCarty: It's, you know, of like, you know, like we don't have enough volume or we don't have a, you know, the right channels or whatever. But it's like, it's something much more, you know, it's something much more meta. It's like the way we're doing it, the voices that we use, the authenticity and the integrity of the voices in play, the diversity of the voices in play. And then, yeah, all those downstream things like are we using video versus written word or what have you? And so there's this thing called Conway's law, which is. It's worth a Google, but it's basically this guy, Melvin Conway, in 1968, wrote an article called how committees Invent. And he was writing about software development. And in that article, he advances this idea that the way communications is configured is reified in the product that organizations make.

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Ethan McCarty: And so there's shorthand for that. The Silicon Valley shorthand for that is companies ship their chart. And there's, like, the way you're set up is the way you make stuff. And then there's this other theory, and I forget the guy who. It's in the article, the actual guy who came up with it. But it's called the constitutive theory of communications, which basically says the way you communicate constitutes the entity. And there's a really great. We should put this in the show notes. I'll send you the link. But there's a really great. Like, one of those RSA animates of a talk by a professor named Matthew Koschman, who sort of unpacks it. It's really clever.

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Ethan McCarty: And I think when you take those two things together and you say, like, okay, well, there's this idea of constitutive theory of communications, like the way we're communicating, that is the organization. And then this Conway's law thing, where the way we communicate shows up in our product and what we actually make, and maybe not even literally the product. Like a product could be like the reputation of the company. The most reasonable conclusion is to inspect how you are configured, how your communications apparatus is configured, in order to optimize these outcomes, like who you are as a company and what you make. And so I think I look across our clients, and more of them are engaging me and my team to help them design not just campaigns, not just content, not just, you know, like facilitating a session or something like that.

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Ethan McCarty: Like, you know, we're doing, I think, very sophisticated experience and content design. But now we're doing more work, as I would suspect, many other, you know, consulting agencies in the space are doing, on the design of the organization itself. And that is. Sorry. And that's just that sort of, like, that fundamental work is worth revisiting, even if you have a working model to check it against, you know, sort of strategic intentions.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, certainly it sounds like it goes far beyond the scope of a comms team. I mean, that's. This is a. This is an organization wide initiative.

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Ethan McCarty: Right.

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Daniel Nestle: But do you see the comms team as the center of this? Is that how it's working for you, or.

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Ethan McCarty: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of selling my book to say that, but, yeah, I mean, I think that there's a very strong proximity bias here for me, because my clients tend to be the heads of marketing, communications, and HR, and that's where we often will start. And then what keeps happening which I love is it's, oh, well, it starts off with, let's reorganize our internal comms team around some, like a new principle for let's remission that group of people to be whatever the end goal is, to be more driven by experience or to be more digital, or to be more this that, or the other thing, or less expensive or more productive, or use more AI or whatever the initial sort of driver is. And then you start to inspect how that team is operating, and it has implications that are much broader.

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Ethan McCarty: And that's why those theories come into play, because it's like, oh, well, we've designed this internal communications function in a way that is really like about sort of. It's almost like a value added postal service. Like at the end of something, we make all the decisions and we give it to these people who know how to press the buttons on the Internet or make the distribution list. And then the entire organization feels that every day they feel the sort of like, low stage of recognition, empowerment, creativity, latitude for decision making that's been invested in that old model of internal communications. Like that. Like, you literally encounter that every day as an employee. And so that has that effect that I was talking about of being like both. It constitutes the experience that people have of the organization and also indicates how they should behave.

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Ethan McCarty: Like, oh, you're communicating to me in this way that is very sort of transactional and down level. That signals to me that's how I should comport myself with my colleagues and customers. By comparison to redesigning an internal communications team to be an employee experience team, or to be an employee engagement team, or just to be an employee team or whatever, you know, people experience. I mean, there's a lot of different things, and not just renaming it, but fundamentally looking at the remit, decision making rights, the funding, the skill level, all those things, and saying, all right, well, let's up level that.

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Ethan McCarty: Let's make that investment, for example, in a more senior leader, to drive that function, a deeper hook into our innovation capability, deeper hooks into our product or whatever, to make those investments of political capital and money and time, and then that will be felt in the rest of your organization. And so when you start doing that, it sends such a powerful signal that other parts of the company take notice very quickly because literally the things they touch every day, intranets and newsletters and town halls and stand up meetings with the manager and the up skip level thing with the boss and all those things start to feel very different because they're designed differently. And it's a kind of really positive snowball effect that can happen now. We've been at this for not a very long time, just like six short years.

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Ethan McCarty: And the first few years, were in such startup mode that weren't operating at this altitude. And now that we are, we're starting to see that sort of, like, positive momentum build within the organizations that we're working. Yeah. That weren't.

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Daniel Nestle: The metaphors keep rising unbidden into my head as you keep talking. And it's just. I mean, there's so many. Because, okay, conceptually speaking, right, when we talk about internal comms versus external comms, you know, and the transactional nature of that versus employee experience and that kind of. There's like. It seems to me there's. There's an. There's a path between the two or an evolution that has to happen between the two, or just a re imagining in many ways, which is super exciting and also daunting, I think, for a lot of companies. But what keeps coming to my mind is two things. First of all, it sounds a lot like the approach or the kind of definition of brand in general, the way that what a company is not its product. It's not its staff, it's not its CEO. The brand is a promise.

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Daniel Nestle: The brand is a reputation. There's a thousand different ways people have defined it. I always like brand as a promise, but it's a meta discussion, and the way that you've sort of started to describe the employee experience or the employees as a public, the combination of Conway's law and constitutive theory, which, of course, I will absolutely be googling after this discussion. It sounds like we're taking almost that kind of same, I don't want to call it academic, but much higher level approach to what communications is, so that the company is the brand, the company is that amorphous, whatever the result is of the communication within it. And I totally get what you're saying resonates so much.

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Ethan McCarty: It is a bit academic. And, I mean, I'm literally pointing to academics, because I was looking, as a practitioner, as somebody who spent 20 years in house, you know, with somebody screaming at me, why isn't the thing up yet? Like, hit refresh, you know, what? You know, whatever. Like, get the memo out, you know, like, at the end of the day, like, that's. That's your life when you're. You know, when you're running any facet of communications is, you know, like, that's. That's your life.

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Daniel Nestle: And get the message out.

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Ethan McCarty: Yeah, exactly. I didn't necessarily have the language for or like, the models in my mind to like, cope with this thing that I was seeing. And so, yeah, I've spent some time looking at you and, you know, I teach a course on the topic at Columbia, and that is, you know, that gave me sort of a space and a reason to go do a little bit more exploration and kind of find these things. And yet for me, it is not academic in the pejorative sense. It isn't like a worthless pursuit that doesn't have a tangible outcome. Because for me, as a strategic communicator, I always think method and the way you work should be part of your strategy.

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Ethan McCarty: And so you start off with something very highfalutin, like Conway's law or the constituent theory of communications, and you say, okay, well if that's true, then how do I operationalize this? Yeah, and so basically what I'm saying is, like, one of the ways that I'm seeing it operationalize is a, you know, re examination of like the roles, the skills, you know, the decision making rights, the funding and stuff, all those things that relate to building a, you know, contemporary and fit for purpose communications capability for any enterprise. And so, and then there are other, you know, downstream things like, okay, if you think that's true, you might, like, there are sort of tactics that you might deselect entirely because they're not, or you might, you know, change. Here's an example if that's true.

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Ethan McCarty: This idea that the communications is the organization, that's what comprises the identity of the organization, you might take a look at how much of your comms money you're spending on getting the message out versus listening and sensing and perceiving and synthesizing and analyzing the world of data and opinions and all that. And what I find is that almost every communications team that I encounter is massively under invested in their ability to even know what employees think. I mean, and other audiences as well, but employees in particular. And I'm seeing a real appetite right now for organizations to do a lot more robust sensing beyond click through rates on the intranet. I mean those are important too, but the sensing behavior is getting upleveled.

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Ethan McCarty: So its beyond justifying the ROI of my investment in a newsletter and going into something more like, oh, well, if we really understand how people have experienced the company over the last three economic cycles, we might be able to predict whats happening in the next economic cycle and prepare ourselves and prepare them for whatever it is we think is happening. And so, not like some predictive analytics roll out of software and press a button that's gonna tell you the future, but rather like, oh, we see these patterns, and we're able to improve our understanding of the patterns by listening frequency. Like a lot of conversations, a lot of digesting commentary, a lot of real looking at the, for employee voices on Reddit and not just on Glassdoor or looking on all these places where there's all this abundant information.

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Ethan McCarty: Frankly, most organizations, if it's called internal comms, are probably not even fish in there. But that's where the fish are.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, absolutely. It amazes me that especially companies that are dealing with the volatility of markets and certainly the ups and downs that we've seen across many industries these days, and I've certainly been involved with that they wouldn't want to grasp this a little bit more tightly. So I was saying about how metaphors keep popping up unbidden into my head. One thing keeps coming back is this idea that, okay, like, we're of an age, go to the doctor, right? And every time, every couple of months, you know, whatever it is, 90 days or it depends on you, maybe it's twice a year, Doc says, hey, you know what? Let's run a panel, right? Let's get your blood work. Let's get your blood work. You look like you're functioning perfectly fine. But you know what?

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Daniel Nestle: There's a little number in there somewhere that's not quite right, or hopefully not. But they can see things in the results and in the data, in the intelligence that they gather from that very, from the basis of your life system, that with a few little tweaks here and there, or some elimination of some activities, addition of some others, makes a better, holistic, final kind of health grade to your system, right? So it sounds like, I've always said that comms is like the nerve center of a company, and I think it is. But now it sounds, from what you're saying, is more like the circulatory system and the health of that bloodstream, right. Is coming out of the way that the organization communicates with one another. And like I said, if it goes beyond the comm scheme, it's fine.

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Daniel Nestle: It's just more like, you know, what is a blood cell other than a communicator? It picks up some message. It goes out somewhere, it transfers that message, you know, oxygen or whatever it is to another place, picks something back up and brings it back. Right. It's this whole messenger service.

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Ethan McCarty: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: So, you know, the health of each of those kind of where it's all going and the way that exchange takes place at all the different exit points and entry points of that system, you know, have a direct effect on the. On the. On the health of the corp.

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Ethan McCarty: Right.

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Daniel Nestle: Of the whole.

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Ethan McCarty: Yeah, well, it's literally, the corp is like the body core.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, the body.

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Ethan McCarty: Right. And, yeah, you know, I like the analogy. And I think it's. It's a strong one. And I mean, to extend it a little bit, you think about what was available in terms of listening to your body 20 years ago versus listening to your body now. And, I mean, you're talking about the. The panel that, of blood work that you might get at annual frequency that was available 20 years ago, right. Maybe not with as much precision and sophistication, but that was available. And now I wear an apple Watch, and it's telling me the quality of my sleep, how many steps I've taken, my blood oxygen level. I mean, I can basically do this kind of continuous listening to optimize my health. And the same can be said for, you know, at the enterprise level, the sophistication of what's available at.

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Ethan McCarty: Not like the bleeding edge of technology, but the sophistication of what is available is, you know, is light years ahead of where were five years ago, even, particularly since all of what happened during the pandemic. And then also the flip side is, you know, not the flip side, but to sort of, you know, double down on your analogy here, you know, you said we're at a certain age, and just so your listeners know, Dan is older than I am.

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Daniel Nestle: Barely. Barely, but by some months old.

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Ethan McCarty: Fart.

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Daniel Nestle: We're Gen X. We're Gen X.

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Ethan McCarty: Let's put it that way. Gen X was on the boat. No, he's an old man, and I am a youthful chicken. No, but, yeah, we've gotten to the point where actually the expectations of your body have changed. Like, you're, you know, it. You know, it is, it wants that more, you know, care and feeding and tending and whatever, because it's not capable of doing that. There's a similar reality in that the expectations of the workforce, not because of old age, but because of the expectations in our lives as consumers, have change in a way that we demand more input into the experiences that we encounter every day. We are accustomed to a very high degree of, you know, sensitivity to our preferences.

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Ethan McCarty: I mean, everywhere you go, you walk into an experience that's been customized for you in one way or another, particularly if you're at the upper end of the, you know, the sort of income spectrum. You live in a highly personalized world. I mean, you know, like frequent flyer programs to showing up on Amazon, to the health and life insurance options that are offered to you, to all kinds of things are super hyper personalized to you. And so when you go into a place where you don't have that, you actually, it's remarkable. And very often the workplace, it's like you've got, an old colleague of mine at IBM used to say, you've got Jetsons in your consumer life and you've got the Flintstones at work, right? Yeah.

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Ethan McCarty: So you walk in there and you're like, why is it like, you guys, my boss knows everything about me and the HRI system. It knows everything about me. It knows where I live. It knows my age. It knows everything I clicked on know at work and everything. Why am I still having to search for things in the workplace? You know, it's like complete possibility for hyper personalization and, you know, obviously there's. There's a lot of good reasons why that hasn't been, like, blown out entirely, you know, sense of privacy and, you know, and wanting to be able to have some control over those things. But what is, to me, staggering is how little of that has been operationalized. Yeah. Because it's like, there's a lot of things that would not feel, like, creepy and not feel like you're excluding me in the workplace.

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Ethan McCarty: That basic data, things. Like, all right, well, we know you walk in through this door every day because we see your badge swipe. Maybe the enterprise could be like, I don't know, we'll get you a reserved parking spot a little closer to that door. I mean, like, stupid things like that would make. But you can imagine, like, if I. Like, if a hotel chain can do that for you, and they barely know who you are because you stay with them three times a year, why can't your employer, where you walk in through that door 300 times a year?

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Daniel Nestle: Why indeed, Ethan? Why indeed? I think that we all have had experiences where one workplace is. Every workplace is different. They're better and worse than one another in different ways. And you have these complexities of structure that I think are off putting to the decision makers. Like, it's just some, it requires. In other words, it requires a degree of curiosity, experimental value, a corporate value of experimentation and sheer bravery on the part of leaders in especially larger organizations to shift their minds in some way, but also shift their budgets to invest in the kinds of activities you're talking about, but also to think of the employees in a different way, to think of the employees as a public. As you said, one thing that was occurring to me as you're speaking is this whole. Is just that. What is the comms team?

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Daniel Nestle: What is the internal, what's often seen as just the internal comms team. There's a cognitive dissonance, I think, between how these professionals are viewed outside of the team and what they actually do and what they actually can do. One of the many things that I've been trying to put forward in the various roles I've been in has been that one of the roles of the comms team and the marketing team also is intelligence a source of intelligence. When larger companies especially think about business intelligence and they think about turning data into action, or they think about all of those things that you just mentioned, oh, this person's key card is at this door. Let's move them up to this. Let's move their parking space. That's a function of intelligence, meaning data.

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Daniel Nestle: But when you're internally and when you're in the company and you say, I'm going to transform my team, or I'm going to expand the remit of my team and start to look a lot more like a business intelligence unit of, for example. Boy, does that fall on deaf ears. It can. It can. So what should teams be doing? How should leaders be looking at this? Because I think it's an astoundingly large opportunity, and it requires different kinds of communicators. It requires upskilling, as you said. It requires a whole technology kind of apparatus, but not necessarily technologists.

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Ethan McCarty: Yep.

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Daniel Nestle: Right.

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Ethan McCarty: Well, there's thinking about, Stan, there's two ways. I mean, there's basically two ways that happen. It's not when an organization is in steady state or in freefall, it's not going to.

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Daniel Nestle: Can't happen.

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Ethan McCarty: Yeah. What's going to happen is either a company is investment mode, it has free cash flow, it's looking to take share. It's like we've gained the advantage. How do we solidify that? We're on offense. So it has to be that mode, or it has to be at the bottom of freefall. Oh, man. We've just gone through where we've gotten through bankruptcy, and now we're rebuilding. I mean, that's a hyperbolic example. But there's been a, you know, a massive exodus of our most talented people and that. And now we're like, oh, crap. And so how do we remedy? And so, you know, I think it will be hard to make the case unless you're on sort of either end of the spectrum there.

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Ethan McCarty: And if you happen to be in the middle, I don't think you're without, you know, I don't think you're without any options, but it's probably going to be more of a skunk. Works like, you know, like, how do we peel off part of our resources? And one of the things, and we actually did a little bit of work like this together a while ago, is, you know, to look at the, take a sort of portfolio view of what your team is doing and segment it into. This is like the Horizon model, where first Horizon is like, okay, here's all the stuff that we have to do, and the company knows we do, and we're going to just do. And it's known the horizon two is the stuff that maybe we can do. We probably need some additional funding or partner with a different group.

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Ethan McCarty: And then there's horizon three stuff, which is like, we have no idea. It's moonshot. Like, the best KPI for this is we might learn, or maybe it's a lottery win, but probably not. And if you can peel off somewhere between three and six, 7% of your total resources for that third horizon and make sure that people across your team who are actually excited about the work are participating in that, you make that a special sort of dimension of their work and you give them the remit to move into those spaces, but you also have, they have some protection because they're also involved in some of those materially involved in some of those horizon one and two sort of endeavors.

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Ethan McCarty: It gives them some protection so they're not like, over their skis, like, holy crap, I'm on the innovation team, and if we miss our quarterly numbers, I'm toast. You don't want to put them at risk, but you might be able to get, like some part of their time allocated to sort of inventing the future. And comms teams, it's almost always achievable. I mean, comms teams are always under the gun and underwater and, you know, they're all that stuff. And also because the, because of the difficulty that we have measuring communications, there's often a lot of latitude to do experimentation. I mean, you can't be off there taking the brand for, what do you call it, for a joyride.

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Ethan McCarty: You don't want to donuts in the parking lot with Brandon, but you can peel off some effort of some high performing people and say, all right, well, we need to go ensure that the company is out there reinventing itself in some very significant ways. But we don't have the either burning platform or pile of cash to do it right now. What small measure of innovation can we dedicate ourselves to? That's what we really talk about is innovation here.

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Daniel Nestle: Right? And look, you're so right when you said that it only happens when the company is in that we're taking share mode or we're in a growth mode, or, hey, this is the best times we've ever had. Let's give some people some Runway and let them play. But if things turn, and when things turn, the first, I guess the first area of concern for some companies is where are we? Where are we spending money that's not yielding any direct results to the bottom line? So, you know, so those areas tend to go quickly.

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Ethan McCarty: No one's beholden to test to. Yeah, yeah. That one of my friend Jeremy Altoff, he actually runs digital at Hawaiian Air, which is, like, the coolest job ever. And he's the coolest guy. Yeah, totally cool. He. This is like a million years ago when were both getting our degrees in creative writing, because we're lunatics. And I just remember him saying, you know, no one's beholden to writers, you know, and has just stuck with me forever. And then I just remember, like, how many things he and I have cycled through. Or maybe it was after we got degrees in creative writing and were both, like, pup writers at these, like, little startups in New York, you know, in the nineties. And, yeah, it's like, I think he was working for urban. That's what it is.

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Ethan McCarty: He was working for urban Fetch, which was like an early, like, on demand delivery of, like, snacks and stuff in New York. And he was the. He was writing about video games. He was, like, their video game writer. And when they started to lose money, they, you know, they canned him. And he was like, no one's beholden to writers. That was it. And we both had creative writing degrees. And anyway, I think he's right. And so I think, you know, for com's people to say, oh, we're the master storytellers. We're the writers and whatever, like, I think that's true, and that's really important. And storytelling is another area of great interest amongst my clients is, you know, how do we improve? How do we evolve?

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Ethan McCarty: Storytelling is so, like, it's like, infinite, you know, the different permutations and the power of it and also, it's not enough. It's not enough to be like, I'm the corporate storyteller because companies will ultimately, in a pinch, decide I'd rather have my story either not told or told poorly, then pay your salary. And so if I'm scared, if they're in that defensive crouch mode. So if your value can extend, particularly, again, into being able to listen and analyze and to your point earlier, be the thinker, the strategy, the intelligence, to have the strategic intelligence, if that's where a lot of your value comes from, that's a different proposition. And you look at the best communications leaders, they're always more, you know, they're not like, you know, just like the best speech writer. They might actually be the best speech writer, but they're not.

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Ethan McCarty: They're the consignari. They're the person who sees, you know, through the fog of war. And that is, you know, you don't do that without, you know, relationships and understanding and, you know, direct.

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Daniel Nestle: That is so right.

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Ethan McCarty: Exposure to the data.

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Daniel Nestle: That's so right. I think of the great comms leaders I've worked with, and that's where, that's exactly what they are. They're. And, you know, look, I mean, I've been accused of being that on occasion as well. And I love it when people say that I'm a trusted advisor when it lasts, you know? Yeah, yeah, that's true.

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Ethan McCarty: And it feels good, too, to be of service to, I mean, like, some of my best moments in my career were when, you know, like, even if I was like, you know, getting coffee for the boss, like, when I walked up, I was like, okay, so with your coffee, here's an insight. And, you know what I mean? Or whatever. So it's like, I don't think it's only the province of the most senior people. Right. You know, like, I've had, like, you know, in my career as a manager, I've had people who supported me who, you know, were, like, at the very beginning of their careers who came in and they were like, hey, like, you know, you are stepping in a big pile of it right now, buddy. You know, who called me in on things, and that is powerful.

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Ethan McCarty: I've had and I've been in a position to be able to go to, you know, my boss or whoever, you know, even when I was very early in my career to say, I don't think this is right, like, would we ever try it this way? And, you know, being that advisor for them on either communications tactic or how they're showing up as a leader or whatever that was. Even with my degree in creative writing as a writer, that advice was probably much more value than my ability to spin up a yarn.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, well, becoming an advisor, that trusted partner, the conciliatory of anyone, really requires a trust building process. And if you're in a company, or if you're in a role on a comms team or a marketing team, and you need to build those relationships, you need that oftentimes you have to start from a position of knowledge and intelligence, or you have to have that in your pocket. Like, you start from a position of friendship and empathy, probably more often than not, or I would hope. Yeah, but recognizing what is happening and having the data and intelligence to back you up takes that conversation from, hey, like, I like talking to this person to, wait a second, I might need to make business decisions based on what I'm hearing, and that person's more valuable to the organization.

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Daniel Nestle: So I guess my next kind of question to you and where I wanted to find your thinking on this, is the whole question of, like, how do comms people get there? Like, what's the enablement side of this? So you have, right now, you have people struggling to get that message out. Push the button, spread the word, whatever it is. You have companies in various stages of their growth or decline, but our comms people, from one place to another, are beating the grass to get the pheasants out. Just like, hey, let's get this message out today and let's put this out tomorrow. It's really just a mad rush in a lot of ways. Where's the enablement happen? Like, when you have, if you know that you need to be okay, you need to get a handle on intelligence.

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Daniel Nestle: You know that, boy, if I could understand what is happening with this particular audience or what's happening in this particular, when this event happens, what is the result, or what has been the result historically? You know, oh, the economy is hitting a downturn. We don't see rates rising for another 68, 10, 12, 14, 18, 27 months, whatever it is. What does that mean? And how does somebody who's so focused on pushing the button every day become enabled?

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Ethan McCarty: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: I've been working a lot with AI enablement, of course, just like, okay, you need to, it's always a product of time. You have to have the time to first educate and kind of allow people to experiment and develop use cases. But that's with AI. But that time is a luxury, and you need buy in from your leadership. So that whole piece of it is a struggle, I think.

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Ethan McCarty: Yeah, well, yeah, right. I mean, like, that's. That's hard. That's like being in relationship with, you know, with people and, you know, being able to be valuable to them and be in service of them. And, I mean, that's. That's hard. And I think you're right. There is some of it is a function of time. I mean, before spending several years working on IBM's annual report, I was not qualified to read an SEC filing or, you know, proof it. Then after doing that, I was, you know what I mean? And so, like, I. There was no. And there was no, like, I don't think there's any AI in the world that would, like, make me learn that faster. No, there are certainly AI agents that you could use that would help me in that task. Now that didn't exist then.

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Ethan McCarty: But, you know, I think part of it is, you know, as a professional is like, just, you know, you got to grind. You have to cut your teeth. Like, you have to do the work, you know? Yeah, but I even. I mean, look, it doesn't. It doesn't take 30 years. Like, we're at integral. We're gearing up to do this off site in a few weeks. And there's a woman on our team, Haley Self, who was an intern like a minute ago, it seems, and she's been full time at the company for a couple years now. And. But she's very much in the early stage of her career, but she put together a video in advance of our offsite about account management, and it is brilliant. I mean, I learned so much from it, and it's like a ten minute video.

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Ethan McCarty: And just like how she talked about her own practice of the world of information that she sets up for herself when she's on a client account. The alerts, the reading, I mean, the finding out about people's personal preferences and what they like, what they don't like. And the way she sort of. Her mental model for building trust and relationships was so authentic to who she is, and it was so smart. It was very technology enabled without being overly mechanistic. And so I just think anyone at any stage in their career can take the kind of human sensibilities of wanting to be in relationship and apply them in their work world and sort of dial them up with technologies that fast track a lot of stuff.

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Ethan McCarty: Now, what you can't really fast track is your experience acquisition, but you can definitely, as Hailey has been doing, totally turn up the volume on the quality of those experiences. So she might be whatever it is three years into her career. But because of the way shes comporting herself, shes packed in more in terms of understanding how to be a strategist and support senior executives and do the job of listening and analyzing and synthesizing. She's done more in the three years than I think I did in the first ten years of my career because of the way she's done it, with an openness to new methods and technologies and just candor.

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Ethan McCarty: So I think it's, you can get there very fast, and if you're, you know, if you're a 50 year old and you're wanting to go from one kind of work to another kind of work, there's almost, I mean, never been a better time. I mean, not least of which, you know, historically low unemployment, that's a good thing. That's wind in the sails. So that there's just, there's more openness in the market when there's lower unemployment. There's greater openness in the marketplace for people who are going to switch sectors or roles. I mean, that's just a fact. You see that more because people are like, oh, well, we, you know, there aren't a glut of, you know, this kind of, you know, skill. So we'll take somebody with, like, adjacent skills and we'll train them.

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Ethan McCarty: And so in this moment, I think, you know, you have probably more, you know, openness than ever in the last, you know, during our, you know, for the duration of our careers, like, there's been a longer stretch of low unemployment and a higher degree of sort of self paced training and tools that would allow you to do that than has ever been available during our working lives.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. I mean, well, and now being on the cusp of that sort of a life myself right now, I'm finding that to be the case. You know, there's a lot of receptivity to certain ideas and certain ways of working that wasn't the case in the past. And I just want to say one thing is that I had a conversation just yesterday, actually, with a CEO of one of the big pr firms, and I don't want to name him because I don't want to scare his staff. But were talking about, were just talking about, like, will we need junior staff? Like, will we need junior staff in the future? What can we do? And from an agency standpoint, it's a critical question. And what you've just talked, when you talk about Haley, I think that's the answer. I think the kind of person.

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Daniel Nestle: That Haley's the answer. I think the kind of person, the kind of people that agencies and that actually any employer should be looking at now is the self enabled person, the person who is. Who is just like, okay, digital native is the wrong word, but someone who is experimental, open minded, and will be entrepreneurial enough within themselves to build their own ecosystem of intelligence gathering, research knowledge. And, hey, it's a high bar. You have to have the intelligence and you have to have the understanding to be able to get there. So you have to have some core talents and skills. But to be able to do that, I think it's clearer and clearer to me that is the quote unquote junior employee of the near and midterm future. On that note, Ethan, I know that we're running up against it.

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Daniel Nestle: I just wanted to ask you one last thing, which is, what is coming down the pike, and what should people be on the lookout for? And take us home, buddy.

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Ethan McCarty: Yeah, well, let me give that a little bit of consideration. So, first, just before I answer that question, I want to just say, you know, there have been a number of times in my career that people have said, oh, no, but what for the junior staff? You know, like, we won't need clipped reports anymore. So what are they going to do? How will they ever learn how to tell a good story if they haven't, like, showed up at the office at 05:00 a.m. With a stack of Wall street journals? And, you know, the Internet is going to replace all of the 20 something. Okay, so let me just say that's a cycle that is observable, and I'm just calling shenanigans, because what happens is, of course, the, you know, the complexity is, you know, there are there, you know, there's like, it's a.

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Ethan McCarty: It's like the Overton window of complexity just keeps moving out. And so, yeah, so the quote unquote junior person shows up able to not just do the clipping and word processing, but able to, like, use these systems of analysis and, you know, sentiment analysis or, you know, share a voice or what, you know, like. And that becomes the entry level skill. And so the. The thing that I'm. I'd be more worried about if I was your pal who runs the agency is like, what do you do with the senior people who are running around with bloated salaries and are relying on gut instinct to advise their clients? I'm more worried about those folks. And what I'm not actively worried about, I don't lose sleep over it.

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Ethan McCarty: But those folks had better continue to go up that value window or that value, I said window, that value pyramid. Yeah. And be able to say, like, okay, well, I'm going to make even more and better use of all the amazing insights and digital capabilities of these, quote unquote, junior people and only do the things that I can uniquely do. And I think that's a lot harder than finding interesting and valuable work for recent grads. I think there's a ton of work for, you know, recent grads. And I think the harder thing to do is like, when you're in the middle or senior management to be able to, you know, continuously break new ground.

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Daniel Nestle: That's a great point.

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Ethan McCarty: Yeah. And so, but let me. So I'll answer your question. Like, what do I think is coming up? I mean, I think everybody knows what's coming up. I mean, there's like 75 elections taking place this year. About half of, I think you look at what's happening across Europe with so many of these falling towards more conservative, restrictive governments that have less place in their heart for a free press and so on. So I think folks in the communications industry are going to be much more directly affected by sort of the rightward nationalistic trend in politics in the US. Obviously, we have a highly polarized political environment and that is not going to get better anytime soon, I don't think. And so every employer right now is rightfully wringing their hands around what to do about the dialogue about politics in the workplace.

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Ethan McCarty: Do we set up a slack channel that's like politics here? And, you know, everybody else should go look somewhere else if you don't want to talk politics at work. Do we ban politic conversations? Do we? Blah, blah. Meanwhile, at Integral, under Charles Chestnut's leadership, we've been doing research with both research escape and the Harris poll, and we just find again and again that the, you know, the majority of people who are fully employed believe that they not only can have the right to work, to talk about social issues at work, but feel comfortable doing so. It's a slim majority just over. It's like 51, 52% who agree with those statements.

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Ethan McCarty: But then when you go into the earlier stages of the workforce, the millennials and Gen zs that goes through the roof, and so the inbound workforce is ready to feels comfortable, feels they have the right to talk about these issues at work. They want their employers to create spaces for that and to take political action. And the only thing that I've really found that keeps up that to try to find your way to please everyone on every issue is not going to happen. And so the thing that I found that we find in our research is there are a few issues that have relatively universal support. Things like decreasing hunger. Actually, 78% of american workers believe that their employer should enable them and even create paid time off for them to participate in voting or working at the polls or supporting democracy.

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Ethan McCarty: And those, unfortunately, even that's highly polarized. But that is what's going to play out over the next six months in the US and elsewhere and beyond. And so make your friends before you need your friends, my friends. And that is like, if you can do the listening and understand the needs of your workforce when it comes to engaging with societal issues, if you can at least indicate that you're listening, that you care, that you have some principles that are going to guide your actions, that's the play. There is no, like, oh, here's a decision tree about, like, does this affect our business or not? Your employees are not, they don't care. Like, if I care about this issue outside of work, I care about this issue inside of work. Yeah, you know, I don't care. Identity at the door, you know, like, no one.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, that's right. Well, I mean, whether or not the company or the brand, whether or not it's appropriate for a brand to communicate about particular issues to the public, to the external public, to their customers or clients, there are a lot of, I guess there are a lot of mines in that minefield and companies pulling back now, it comes and goes in waves, and that's always going to be the case. But with your employees, with that public, as I'm going to start calling them now, the employee public, I guess, I don't know. There's no such. There are many fewer obstacles or reasons to not communicate what the company is doing or thinking about issue X, issue Y, issue Z, unless it's completely irrelevant and not part of the business.

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Daniel Nestle: But even in that case, you have to be very clear about why it is and why you're not saying something about it, but allow employees to talk about it themselves. Like, there's, there's degrees of this, but the very, I think the very worst thing, it sounds to me, is to just put the boot down and just shut it down. You know, that's not going to create a trust, an environment of trust and openness. Not only that, but that you need.

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Ethan McCarty: I won't go into the cases, but there are a number of them where leaders have taken that approach and what they basically did was an unintentional reduction in force of their highest performing employees. You know, because people just walk. It's, you know, like, if. If you do not respect my rights and I'm a high performing employee in an environment where there is 4% unemployment, what do you think I'm gonna do? I'll probably get a raise. You know, so it's just, you know, like, that's nothing. A good strategy. It's not real. It's kind of magical thinking. And so you have to. I mean, you have to say, like, okay, well, here's our. You know, here's the rules of the road for how we're going to be talking about politics or whatever issues.

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Ethan McCarty: And, like, if you want to engage, like, here's the rules of the road. And that is very well respected. I mean, like, generally what I've seen across our clients is, like, when, you know, like, if there's an internal, you know, chat program, like a yammer viva engage or slack or whatever, if you are very clear about the guidelines, like, look, we're, you know, these channels, we do not talk about politics. This one, you can. Here's our expectations about how we comport ourselves. And so, no, you know, no electioneering. But if you want to talk about your feelings or your experience or. I mean, there's different cultures are different things. People are like, oh, okay, cool, just, like, I wouldn't come into your house and, like, I don't know, just go to sleep in your bed, you know, like, that's weird, you know?

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Daniel Nestle: Or just, like, with any other channel that you deal with social. Like, if we keep it straight to social media, you don't. There's certain things you don't do on this channel. There's certain things you do on this one. You join a group that something's allowed. Join another group. It's not. You accept rules. Well, listen, Ethan and everybody out there, I could keep going on and on and on with Ethan.

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Ethan McCarty: We always have.

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Daniel Nestle: So, you know, well, we're going to have another nice time at some point soon, and I know that for a fact. Keep an eye on this space. And, you know, Ethan and I have some other ideas that we may bring to the public sooner rather than later. But for now, I'm just going to leave you all with a, first of all, my gratitude to Ethan. Thank you. You can find him, of course@teamintegral.com. Which I do suggest everybody go take a look at not only just not only for employee experience and the work that Ethan does but also the tremendous amount of research, the great blog posts, the insights that you'll find there that are, I think, applicable across so many of our roles and our professions. So look@teamintegral.com comma, find ethan on LinkedIn and look at him.

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Daniel Nestle: Look for him on Twitter x, Twitter Twixter. Athenae, you don't post anymore?

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Ethan McCarty: I put stuff on LinkedIn now.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. I just can't. You can. You can take a look. Yeah.

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Ethan McCarty: You could see what I used to post.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, take a, you know, get a glimpse of Ethan's past. But LinkedIn team integral.com, that's the word. That's where it is.

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Ethan McCarty: Thank you.

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Daniel Nestle: Thanks. My friend and I will catch up with you again very soon. Thanks. Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred, but it's up to you. Do you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show? Let me know at dannrentrendington communicator.com. Thanks again for listening to the trending communicator.