18 Powerful Quotes from Diverse Voices

Recently, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Foundation announced its latest effort in its mission to promote diversity among PR professionals and companies. In its new book, Diverse Voices: Profiles in Leadership, the PRSA Foundation offers a collection of perspectives from 40 senior PR leaders representing diversity across gender, racial/ethnic, and orientation backgrounds. The PRSA Foundation plans to use the book to facilitate discussion events at colleges nationwide throughout the year.

I finished Diverse Voices for myself a couple of weeks ago and was enlightened to read about the problems PR faces in becoming a more diverse profession. However, I also came across some powerful advice that could be beneficial for any professional’s career development.

I’ve picked out 18 of my favorite quotes from the leaders profiled in Diverse Voices that best capture the essence of what it means to be a diverse professional—although I could easily include several more:

1. “When I was trying to break into the profession, there seemed to be a lot of opportunities that were of the “minority fellowship” variety. I rejected those opportunities because I didn’t want to be known as the minority candidate in the office. I wanted to be seen as a qualified individual. Organizations need to find a way to unearth those candidates without labeling them to check off that box.”

—Brenden Lee, Sports Partnership Communications, Twitter

2. “…just a few years ago, I received a phone call from the CEO of a top PR firm. ‘Hey, Mike, I just thought of something great, and I wanted you to know about it right away,’ he said. ‘We’re going to give a thousand-dollar scholarship to one of the HBCUs!’ A thousand dollars! They thought a thousand dollars was going to solve the whole diversity problem. I told him that won’t even pay for a meal plan for one semester… I even talked to some of the kids who received those scholarships. Many of them don’t even work in the profession anymore. They felt abandoned. They believed the rhetoric. And few people even followed up with them after they received the check. It was all about the person who wrote the laughably small check. Sadly, donations like these are not about the students. It was spin, a four-letter word for a reason.’

—Mike Paul, Reputation Doctor, LLC

3. “Diverse students tend to start out at a disadvantage immediately out of the gate. They don’t have the resources to spend their summers working at big city agencies and renting apartments in places like New York or Chicago. So instead of graduating with three or four agency internships under their belts, they’ll have three to four summers working at a fast-food restaurant or coffee shop—just to help pay their school tuition and living expenses. Even before they get started in their professional careers, the diverse kids have to struggle to catch up. They don’t get the advantages of having the real-world experience of an agency, and also miss out on the chance to make connections and begin building their professional networks.”

—Neil Foote, President and Chief Executive Officer, Foote Communications, LLC
Principal Lecturer, University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism

4. “As a professor, I often take my classes on field trips to agencies. We went to one large agency…(whose) people kept trying to engage with the one African-American student in the group. They seemed interested in talking to him about a job there. He pulled me aside during the tour and said, ‘…I would never work in a place like this. There’s nobody that looks like me here.’ And he didn’t want to be that sort of poster child, which was how they were making him feel.”

—Pallavi Kumar, Assistant Professor, American University School of Communication

5. “At every corporate or agency job I’ve had, I’ve always been the only one… So that ‘only’ aspect of it is a thing. When people interact with you as an ‘only,’ you can’t help but observe that being an ‘only’ makes you very noticeable. However, there’s another way of looking at the many times I was the ‘only.’ I also was the ‘first.’ If there’s a first, there can be a second and a third until we don’t need to count. But the ‘only’ aspect may be one of the reasons we have a retention issue. Also, having to be twice as good to get to the same place as a non-minority can be tiring.”

—Denise Hill, Assistant Professor of Communications, Elon University School of Communications

6. “When I first started the agency, I found that a lot of the organizations we were approaching, particularly in certain geographic areas, were not open to working with us. It was very challenging to convince people that we could offer something of value… During this period, there were a number of times when I strongly considered not making it known that I was the owner of the agency. I often wondered what would happen if, while I was out on a sales call, I represented myself working for the company versus being the owner. Would the conversations have gone differently?”

—Vanessa Wakeman, Founder an Chief Executive Officer, The Wakeman Agency

7. “More and more companies are mandating diverse representation on their account teams. And increasingly, request for proposals (RFPs) are requiring that information. It’s a business driven by billable hours, and sometimes the diversity piece, the multicultural piece of the RFP, is not the lion’s share of the assignment…and when it’s not…they bring out the ‘multicultural person.’ But then when it comes time to doing the assignment and having the hours assigned to that person, they don’t get it. It behooves clients to hold agencies responsible for that.”

—Helen Shelton, Senior Partner, Finn Partners

8. If you’re a Caucasian person, and want to understand what it feels like to be the only white person, show up at a Black church one day. Go to a soul food restaurant in a part of town you would normally never travel to. See how people look at you and see how you feel to be the only white person. And just try to authentically be yourself. And see if some of the things that happen to minorities end up happening to you.”

—Rochelle Ford, Dean, Elon University School of Communications

9. “Early in my career, I made sure I didn’t get stereotyped and pigeonholed into things that are just about diversity. I had to establish credibility on everyone else’s terms.”

—Michael Sneed, Executive Vice President – Global Corporate Affairs and Chief Communications Officer, Johnson & Johnson

10. “When people find out that you’re good at something, sometimes projects will find you. But you have to be able to articulate what it is that you bring to the table, and then seek to match that up. But don’t use labels like, ‘Well, I only do this or I do that,’ rather than, ‘Here are the skills I have. How can I apply those skills to different challenges that businesses or organizations might have?'”

—Damon Jones, Global Communications Executive and Reputation Strategist, P&G

11. “I’ve long believed that every hiring decision is a leap of faith. It doesn’t matter how many interviews you conduct or how much due diligence you put in or how many references you rely on. At the end of the day there is a gut call you’re making on an individual, diverse or otherwise. And you’re saying, ‘You know what? I’m going to go with this person because somehow I think it’s going to work.’ And sometimes that decision will work out fabulously well; sometimes maybe not so much. But there’s no getting around that.”

—Oscar Suris III, Former Executive Vice President of Corporate Communications, Wells Fargo

12. “Sometimes I remind myself of this parable when I’m dealing with my own employees: A mouse and an elephant are in the same room, and the mouse quickly learns that it has to understand how the elephant eats, when it eats, what it eats, when it sleeps, what happens to it when it gets upset. Does it move around? Does it stay still? The mouse needs to know everything about the elephant just to survive. On the other hand, the elephant is completely unaware—blithely unaware—that the mouse is even there, that the mouse is under all this pressure to survive or what is even important to the mouse and its survival in the room they share.”

—Andrew McCaskill, Senior Vice President of Global Communications, Nielsen

13. “…we need to be strategic, creative and intentional about nurturing mid-level and senior diverse talent. We must be vigilant about preventing vaguely defined notions of ‘cultural fit,’ unaligned with business goals, to impede embracing and developing multicultural professionals. We need to create equitable, inclusive environments that encourage people to bring their full selves to work and support the sense of belonging critical to retaining this essential cohort.”

—Judith Harrison, Senior Vice President, Diversity & Inclusion, Weber Shandwick

14. “… you create an environment, a culture, that brings out there best, not only from women and minorities, but from the quiet people, the loud people, the people who work and think and express themselves differently. This is the difference between representation and inclusion, and that’s another mountain we have yet to scale. But if you want to win, you have to be relentless about it, all of it.”

—Jon Iwata, Executive-in-Residence, Yale School of Management
Senior Advisor and Former Chief Brand Officer, IBM

15. “The moment that you feel like you’re welcome, contributing and creating value, that’s when the magic starts. That’s when we feel like we can make a career out of our job or a specific company. When we bring our whole self to work it benefits shareholders, leaders, colleagues and ourselves. It’s a win-win for everyone…”

—Lisa Chen, Head of Internal Communications, Distribution and Go-to-Market, Google Cloud, Google

16. “So I think if you’re a person of color and you’re trying to remain purely professional on the job, that is not a good strategy. We have to bring our whole selves into the workplace and be known for all of that richness and strength. That is our superpower!”

—Patrice Tanaka, Founder and Chief Joy Officer, Joyful Planet

17. “…when it comes to young diverse talent, we need them to be the owners of their career and not the victims. We need them to find mentors, not wait for someone in HR to assign one. And we need them to become masters of their craft. After that it comes back to my grandfather: Keep learning and never forget who you are and where you came from.”

—Mike Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer, Llorente y Cuence
Professor, Boston University

18. “If I could go back and tell my younger self what to say to the woman who implied I was more desirable on paper, I would answer, ‘That’s nothing compared to how much better I am in person!'”

—Sheryl Battles, Vice President, Communications and Diversity Strategy, Pitney Bowes

Diverse Voices is available through its website in paperback or digital form. You can also purchase it through Amazon in all formats. I’m looking forward to seeing how this book and the PRSA Foundation move the needle in creating a more diverse and inclusive profession.

From Detroit Publicist to DC Professional: A Young Pro’s Journey to the APR

DISCLAIMER: This blog first appeared as a Pulse article on my LinkedIn page at the request of the APR Committee of PRSA’s national headquarters. You can read it here for your reference.

In September 2014, I found myself out of full-time work again for the fourth time since earning my bachelor’s degree in marketing and management. In my short career, I was one of the fortunate graduates to have held jobs related to my degree.

There was just one problem: even I didn’t want a job related to my degree. I wanted to do public relations.

And I didn’t just want to do public relations. I wanted to master it.

With that, I started my APR journey in July 2015 by enrolling on campus as a master’s degree student in public relations at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. There, I would meet my first APR: my program chair, Dr. Rochelle Ford. She would offer a few of us in my cohort the unique opportunity to earn our degrees by dually working towards completing our APR.

The coursework I would complete as part of my master’s program would serve me well in taking the first steps towards earning my APR. They delved deeper into the introductory knowledge of PR I already had from my undergraduate and freelance experience, and the material from my APR study guide would help me advance even further.

I started seriously preparing for the APR in late 2016, and worked closely with a professional assigned by Suzanne Lundin Ross, the APR chair of the PRSA National Capital Chapter. For the Readiness Review, I presented a campaign from my brief time with McKinney & Associates, my first job in DC. Even though I didn’t develop this program, I did the best I could to tie my portfolio and candidate questionnaire answers back to the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that I would be evaluated on. All in all, my presentation lasted close to an hour, with 20 minutes of discussing the program and 40 minutes of questions and answers from my panelists. The moment after I left the room to let the panelists deliberate on their decision came the longest four weeks of my life: waiting on my results.

They would arrive in the mail in late July 2017. I didn’t advance.

Admittedly, I took the news pretty hard, but still I knew I needed to request feedback addressing where I went wrong. I only missed passing by two points, mostly because I didn’t have enough management experience.

More determined than ever, I worked with an additional coach to make revisions to my questionnaire and presentation. Going into my second attempt, I demonstrated my management skills by approaching it as if I were presenting two programs: the first based on what actually happened; and the second based on how I would do things as the creator of the program. My aim was to control the narrative by bringing my program full circle. Whereas the Q&A portion of my first presentation felt excruciatingly long, the second time it felt like a breezy 10 minutes. I had a much better feeling leaving the room this time.

I received my advancement letter in December 2017. The final hurdle would be the computer-based exam. To prepare for it, I re-read chapters from Cutlip & Center’s Effective Public Relations, 11th Edition – a book I was required to get for one of my first courses at Newhouse – during my work commutes. The entire process took me three months to complete, with a few days of vacation in LA in between!

And on a Friday in early April, I did it.

Earning my accreditation gave me the deeper knowledge of public relations that I was looking for almost four years ago. Back then, I thought my endgame was to land media placements and increase social media followers. Now, I know that true public relations professionals are consistently monitoring the environment for opportunities and threats, and encouraging their organizations to proactively adapt to these changes. I’m looking forward to the ways I can influence behavior change for meaningful missions.

What a different four years makes!

Find out more about #TheAPRDifference at http://www.praccreditation.org/

The Road More Traveled: Why Black PR Professionals are Creating Their Own Agencies

It’s no secret that diversity is lacking in public relations, particularly at the executive level of agencies and corporations. Not only have Caucasian women struggled to break into executive positions, but black men and women have also found their challenges in the profession as well. I’ve talked about this issue in a previous blog post and have given my thoughts on what it’ll take to get more men of color interested in PR. In the weeks since this post, however, I was intrigued to find that the Public Relations Society of America has efforts to increase the presence of minorities in the profession through its foundation. It just so happens that my department chair, Dr. Rochelle Ford, APR, happens to be a trustee for this foundation.

Speaking of Dr. Ford, I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to work with her as a research assistant. The project we’re currently working on involves creating high-level messages for the National Black Public Relations Society’s upcoming annual conference. While I can’t disclose the exact findings based on their recent survey, there’s one common trend that I’ve found interesting:

More experienced black professionals are opting to start their own agencies rather than climb the corporate ladder into an executive level position.

It’s apparent to me that blacks, as well as other minorities and Caucasian women, are tired of waiting for the doors of the executive level to be opened to them. Instead of waiting for their chance, underrepresented PR professionals are taking their career destiny into their own hands by becoming employers instead of remaining employees.

This trend is in line with my thinking at times as it pertains to pursuing my career goals in PR. Even at the entry-level, I experienced the same frustrations breaking into the PR profession. In the summer of 2009, I was one of thousands of Detroit teenagers and young adults who went through the excruciating process of applying for a job through the city’s summer youth employment program. To make a long story short, I spent what nearly felt like eight hours waiting in lines to go through the bureaucratic process of potential employment only to have never been contacted regarding where to report for my job site. It was this experience that motivated me to create my own opportunities upon graduating from Northwood as I established myself as a freelance consultant two years later.

Just as I didn’t want to wait for a job opportunity in PR to present itself to me, black mid-career professionals aren’t waiting around to move into executive level positions. Life is too short to wait on the things we truly want out of it. There is nothing wrong with creating the life you want, even if it means taking risks and being uncomfortable. Perhaps by more professionals starting their own firms, corporations in need of high-level PR will take notice of the vast array of capable talent out there and begin to diversify their executive offices.

PR’s Golden Rules: Traits for Professionals to Live By

From: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/01/11/has-gold/

Have you ever noticed how everything has rules? Yes, everything from the United States Constitution to your mom’s household has a defined set of guidelines, principles and procedures that must be met in order to avoid facing consequences. However, the rules of public relations aren’t exactly set in stone, as I learned in professor Bill Jasso’s class last night. Sure, the Public Relations Society of America has its own “credo” for members to follow; but so does the International Association for Business Communicators and the dozens of other PR-related professional associations around the world. With each of these conflicting views, it’s no wonder why PR isn’t taken as seriously as a profession worthy of respect. After all, the scope of PR work is so broadly defined, how could any one be allowed to determine who is and who isn’t a PR professional?

One thing that’s for certain though is that PR professionals are not only defined by the skills that they have, but also by the way they carry themselves within their profession. Here are three important traits (or “rules”) I think are important for PR professionals to have:

Accountability – PR professionals must own the work that they do for their clients and be held responsible if or when their plan doesn’t go exactly according to plan
Honesty – As much as possible, PR professionals need to be forthcoming when they’re communicating on behalf of their clients in order to earn their publics’ trust
Impartiality – While PR professionals exist to serve as advocates, they must remain fair when dealing with their audience to ensure a two-way communication

When it’s all said and done, PR professionals should keep this quote from John Kultgen in mind throughout their careers:

“If I have done my job well for the right purpose, my life has substance and meaning. If I have done my job poorly or for the wrong purpose, I have squandered my life, however much I have prospered.”

I believe if we all can do this, PR will gain acceptance as a profession worthy of true respect.