Ted Eismeier

Beware the fog of war. Navigating high-pressure situations requires communicating with clarity and precision. Clearly outlining risks and worst-case scenarios upfront helps teams make informed decisions. At the same time, communicators need to remain calm and impartial. Stressful situations (e.g. public controversies, an HR crisis, a policy setback, a product crash or recall) often lead to emotional responses, which can cloud judgment. The best way to counter this is to stay grounded in the facts and use clear, concise, and direct communication.

Joining a nonprofit board or doing skills-based volunteering with nonprofits or local community-based organizations is a great way to grow your network. Work with nonprofits can create opportunities to grow and diversify your professional network beyond your immediate connections and peers by connecting with board members, donors, community leaders and other volunteers.

Make the contingencies and dependencies clear up front. Projects can be doomed from the start when there's general agreement around the intended outcome, but a lack of specificity around the information, context, input and resources required in order to achieve them before you commit to a deadline.

Basic PR skills are easy to commoditize, but what's ultimately more valuable (whether are at an agency, in-house or a solo practitioner) is how your work is influenced and informed by your understanding of other fields (finance, social sciences/research, markets, public policy). Network broadly across your internal organization to understand your colleagues skillsets and knowledge base.

PR and communications are business disciplines, and their practitioners must be fluent in the language of business. Tie content back to measurable business outcomes that matter to your internal clients and stakeholders (e.g. sales, marketing, fundraising, talent acquisition). Integrate PR and communications tactics with data that correlates to these business outcomes.

Don't narrow your focus too much to one audience. Planning for and responding to a crisis requires understanding the impact across the entire spectrum of audiences. Over-indexing on one audience (e.g. customers, industry media) can lead you to inadveratently overlook the impact on others (e.g. employees, local media).