This episode features an interview with Lisa Colella, Managing Director of Strategic Communications & Leadership Advisory at CRA Admired Leadership. With more than 18 years of professional experience, Lisa has worked with clients across agency, consultancy, and in-house settings. Her portfolio spans multiple industries, including fast-moving consumer goods, financial services, healthcare, and more. Previously, she was the Founder and CEO of a boutique consultancy and Global Head of Talent Communications and Marketing at Philips. In this episode, Simpplr’s Vice President of Corporate Communications and Employee Experience Strategy, Carolyn Clark, and Lisa discuss balancing formal and informal communication for effective leadership, the challenges and benefits of integrating AI tools into leadership practices, and how behavioral science and creativity can improve communication strategies.
This episode features an interview with Lisa Colella, Managing Director of Strategic Communications & Leadership Advisory at CRA Admired Leadership. With more than 18 years of professional experience, Lisa has worked with clients across agency, consultancy, and in-house settings. Her portfolio spans multiple industries, including fast-moving consumer goods, financial services, healthcare, and more. Previously, she was the Founder and CEO of a boutique consultancy and Global Head of Talent Communications and Marketing at Philips.
In this episode, Simpplr’s Vice President of Corporate Communications and Employee Experience Strategy, Carolyn Clark, and Lisa discuss balancing formal and informal communication for effective leadership, the challenges and benefits of integrating AI tools into leadership practices, and how behavioral science and creativity can improve communication strategies.
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“ The people that excel at creating meaning, not just transmitting information, they understand that communication isn't about just town halls and emails. But, really how they show up every day and that there is science to say if they show up in a way that is credible, they're highly competent. That they're likable in one way, shape, or form, generally likable and they are consistent. That they have a frequently and predictable drumbeat of presence that people can create what we call parasocial relationships. Which is, everyone feels like they have a relationship with the CEO, even though they might see them in a town hall once a year.” – Lisa Colella
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:33): Getting to know Lisa
*(07:27): Lisa’s career journey
*(12:42): Balancing informal and formal communication
*(19:12): How psychology influences communication
*(32:24): How CRA is navigating the AI space
*(38:29): Blending science and creativity for better communication strategies
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Links:
Learn more about CRA Admired Leadership
Subscribe to Admired Leadership Field Notes Newsletter
Subscribe to Confluence Newsletter
Connect with Carolyn on LinkedIn
Carolyn Clark: Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Cohesion podcast. I'm Carolyn Clark. I'm so happy to be with you all today. I'm Simpplr's Vice President of Corporate Communications and Employee Experience Strategy, and I could not be happier to be joined by Lisa Colella today.
Carolyn Clark: She is the Managing Director of Strategic Communications and Leadership Advisory at CRA Admired Leadership. Lisa, I'm so glad you're on the show today.
Lisa Colella: I'm so happy to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Carolyn. I know this conversation is long overdue, so I'm glad we're making it happen.
Carolyn Clark: Yeah, and I know you have that vacation glow coming off of vacation, which is always a good way to be coming into a podcast.
Carolyn Clark: So let's keep it going with some fun. I wanna start a little bit of icebreaker questions. This is one of my favorite things to do, just to get to know you a little bit. Let's start first with something easy. What's the last book that you read? Not for work, but for fun and pleasure.
Lisa Colella: Oh, I read a lot of workbooks.
Carolyn Clark: Yeah, I figured. I bet you do.
Lisa Colella: When I'm not reading my, my workbooks, my learning books, I'm reading my children books. So actually it's a really great book called Young Change Makers that I'm reading with my daughter that really looks at all of the young women and how they have taken a challenge or a particular passionate.
Lisa Colella: Turned it into something that really makes a different in the world. So we've been loving reading that one together.
Carolyn Clark: Oh, I love that. That sounds like a good one. I have to read it to my daughter as well. I'll put it down. Okay. I like this one because I think it's an interesting take. What is an insult that you've received that you're proud of?
Lisa Colella: An insult that I'm proud of? Oh, you know, the not unusual, assertive, bossy alpha female. I get that a lot and it's become, for whatever reason, our society to often be misconstrued as a negative. But I embrace it and think it's all, as long as it's done respectfully and with love, it's what we as women need to do more of.
Carolyn Clark: I love that too. I often say like, yeah, call me bossy. Go ahead. I'm not gonna, you know, they do. Everyone does that as an insult, I think. But it is, you're right. It is kind of a bit of a compliment at times. Okay. More for you, if you could know the, oh, this one's so good. If you could know the answer to one mystery, what would it be?
Lisa Colella: Oh, to one mystery. Like how all of creation has come to be. I mean, just the world in general is a mystery and like we constantly are teaching me new things about the universe and the solar system. It is just mind boggling to me how what we've come to know as nature. You know how it all began and as I think it'll always be a mystery, but it is one that I enjoy contemplating from time to time.
Carolyn Clark: I like that. Okay. Some easy ones for you. Are you a tea drinker or a coffee drinker?
Lisa Colella: Coffee in the morning, tea at night.
Carolyn Clark: Awesome. What kind of tea? What's your favorite?
Lisa Colella: I love a good mint chamomile tea, wind down before bed.
Carolyn Clark: That's good. And when in the morning, do you wanna have alone time first or do you wanna get right into conversation?
Carolyn Clark: What's your mornings like?
Lisa Colella: Oh, alone time. First, I need some space and usually I have a, a nice little morning routine where I get a workout in. I have a nice cup of coffee in a quiet setting before I go wake the kids up and get started with my workday. But I do like using into the day and really making sure that I'm grounded, that I'm focused, that I have my priorities clear before I jump into the world.
Carolyn Clark: I imagine this is a practice that you often talk with leaders about as they're preparing for big conversations or presentations or any kind of important moment. I, I imagine you're telling them to also do some grounding when they wake their day or before they do a presentation or have a conversation.
Carolyn Clark: Okay. Last of our icebreaker questions. Do you prefer making a quick decision or do you wanna sleep on things and then decide?
Lisa Colella: I usually have an initial instinct and I usually like to sleep on it and just make sure that I've thought things through. I know that I have a tendency to sometimes wanna move fast.
Lisa Colella: It's just my personality, and so over time it's taken some training, but now I really make sure I dedicate a little bit of time and appropriate amount of time to sleep on it and make sure that all considerations have had their place before I actually make it and pull the trigger.
Carolyn Clark: Yeah. You know, that's interesting, and this is a little, you know, one of the things that I've thought about, I'd be curious, you've obviously been in the employee space, the employee comm space, employee brand space, and often those roles we have to make pretty fast decisions.
Carolyn Clark: And so I think like you, most of us do have that gut instinct. I actually, I'm curious what you think. I feel like it takes more energy to actually pause, trust your gut, but give it a minute. What's your take on that generally?
Lisa Colella: For me personally, it does, you know, I think everyone's made slightly differently and, and, and have had different experiences, but yeah, I, I think it does require a certain amount of energy to be thoughtful and to be patient and really make sure that, we call it li living the decision before you make it.
Lisa Colella: To really be able to use as much time as you do have to actually live a decision before you formally announced it and communicated it. And sometimes you have that luxury and other times it's just a matter of. Playing it through in your mind for a few hours first, but I really try to be thoughtful about that and I find that those who make the best decisions have similar practices.
Carolyn Clark: Live in the decision is what? Yeah. That's interesting. That's a good take. Well, you have a fascinating background. It was really interesting reading about you. You're based in Massachusetts, you've had a lot of cool careers. Obviously you have landed at CRA, but I wanna hear just a little bit, will you? Tell me about your career journey, and that can be anything where you decide, you start your career.
Carolyn Clark: For me, I started as a kid. I knew immediately what I wanted to do from the beginning, but tell us a little bit about your career journey. What led you to where you are today and kinda your story?
Lisa Colella: Yeah, absolutely. So I've always been a little bit of a, a Jill of many trades, if you will. Some call me a walking oxymoron.
Lisa Colella: You know, growing up I was always, within a 10 minute span would be working on creative projects and crafting, and the next 10 minutes be diving into human psychology books. So I always kind of had this. Strong draw to both art and science and kind of that interplay has always been core to who I am and how I experience the world.
Lisa Colella: You know, when I went to college, I found a university where I could double major in communications and arts and minor in business marketing because I knew at that even then that. Really that interplay would come in and be helpful for my future career, whatever that was going to be. Taking that and combining it with my passion for really helping people and organizations be better, get better every day has been kind of the catalyst behind all of my career decisions in terms of what that's looked like.
Lisa Colella: You know, early on. I worked in some advertising agencies and creative departments and account teams really to get kind of the full view of creative communications. When I worked on a political campaign for a little while back in oh seven, before quickly realizing like my ethical compass was not there, and then I, I fell into the world of consulting and I was there for
Lisa Colella: several years before I went in-house and spent nine years at Phillips in various leadership roles, some in employer branding, some in executive communications and programs. Lived in various countries around the world, which was amazing life experience beyond work experience too. And then in 2018, I kind of grew my entrepreneurial wings and
Lisa Colella: started a small boutique consultancy in the communication space, and then all of that really has kind of come together in my current role at CRA. So at CRA, we have three interrelated practices. So we have our leadership practice, our strategic communication practice in our talent practice. So. I really enjoyed working across all three of these areas in my career, and so that in and of itself was appealing about the firm.
Lisa Colella: But what really drew me to CRA was they, we really take a, a research backed approach to everything that we do. So we studied. Over 12,000 of exceptional leaders, right? And, and continue to review empirical kind of scientific communication literature to identify really what actually works. So not just what sounds good or looks like a pretty slide, but really what is effective for organizations and their challenges.
Lisa Colella: So it's really helped me get even better for my clients and their teams, and keeps it fun along the way.
Carolyn Clark: That's so interesting. I think it's, it's interesting hearing the start of your career because it, if one didn't know, I mean all of these pieces from the political campaign to even the art world, there is this, all of this depth that can be brought into what you all are trying to do as you're kind of training leaders to be leaders to better communicate, to really make an impact.
Carolyn Clark: It's interesting too, you know, that the mixture of that, and I wonder how that also, you know. The data background, the art background, how has that changed when you're interacting with a leader? Because I can imagine, you know, as a comms person myself, I'm interacting with leaders who are very diverse in their backgrounds as well.
Carolyn Clark: They may have had similar backgrounds too, where they're a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and. Builds to this one story. Talk a little bit about that. 'cause I think one of the challenges that many of us have is getting to the heart of a leader's story to bring out the goodness that we want them to bring.
Carolyn Clark: Is that something that you all think about when you're talking to leaders and you bring that into the, into play?
Lisa Colella: Yeah, I mean we think about it all the time. At the end of the day, you know, leadership is about values and relationships and empathy and a lot of human qualities. But the kind of the magical part though is we can really, in an intentional way, kind of engineer them to achieve.
Lisa Colella: There are really three communicator goals. So what's the task there? What do they want people to know, to believe, to do their identity roles, which is where we spend a lot of time to your question around how do you wanna be perceived? What values do you wanna be known for? And their relationship goals, you know, how do you wanna use.
Lisa Colella: X, Y, and Z communication to further that relationship or to strengthen the relationships that you need to be successful. And so once we really get clear with them, and it does, sometimes it takes a little while for them to think back of, you know, who is the person underneath that, that business card or that board presentation.
Lisa Colella: But once they get clear on. Oh, how they wanna be perceived as a leader, what values they wanna be known for. Then it becomes a really kind of fun process to explore together, to really pick out these are the symbols, right, that they can carry into their every day, the choices they make, how they spend their time, just to make sure that they're communicating it, not just with formal communication moments, town halls, presentations, et cetera, but in informal communications, which we know actually has a disproportionate effect on culture, more so than formal communications.
Carolyn Clark: Yeah, that makes sense. And I, I can think of the moments in, in my career when, you know, when I've thought about what good leadership is. And so much of it for me as an empath, as a communicator is comes back to that informal piece. And I'd love to hear you expand on this just a little bit, that informal piece I imagine.
Carolyn Clark: Has a direct impact on the formality as well. And if you, I imagine there's a credibility build that happens, and I'd love to hear you just talk a little bit about that, the credibility of with an individual conversation or even a broader conversation that is informal, that when you come into a formal setting, do you see them play together?
Carolyn Clark: That informal leadership piece, the humanity of it, playing with that sort of more formal, polished piece.
Lisa Colella: Yeah, I think they're, they're both always in play. It's a one, one of the kind of like five cornerstones, we call 'em five axioms of communication as the first is there's literally no way to not communicate.
Lisa Colella: Everything communicates, and so there's always, you know, what's actually being said and then the nonverbals and the style and things that are not necessarily heard, but are. Very real in terms of being perceived. And so the goal is that we educate them and we equip leaders to know, kind of have a toolbox, if you will, right?
Lisa Colella: Yeah. And they pull from the toolbox intentionally instead of accidentally. And so when and when we think about formal versus informal communication, there's nothing wrong with formal communication. This, it is absolutely needed to drive, for example, clarity and strategy and alignment. But more of the trust and warmth and connection comes through informal communication.
Lisa Colella: So it's really kind of knowing what's going to help you achieve your goals in a certain context and kind of, which communicate the mesh method or combination, you know, will help achieve those goals.
Carolyn Clark: Have you seen, and I'm sure you've worked with, you know, as I know your, the firm has worked with so many leaders.
Carolyn Clark: You specifically, have you seen someone transform. I'm sure you've seen a lot of transformation, but I can imagine you, you, once you've had that conversation, you know about bringing the warmth, bringing the humanity to leadership. I can imagine if you've never heard that as a leader or you've just kind of put it at the periphery and kept with a certain style.
Carolyn Clark: I bet there's an interesting transformation to be seen when you can see a leader kind of hit that warmth, hit that humanity in both formal and informal. Can you think of an example, like something like that that's been like an aha moment for you with them?
Lisa Colella: Oh, a hundred percent. I work with a lot of leaders, like you said, the fireworks and a lot of leaders, some of the most, actually a recent case that I can call upon is just a example.
Lisa Colella: Uh, we were prepping an ELT group of, of a fortune. Organization for their first presentation to the board as a new leadership team, A COO had been in that role for 20 plus years and had moved to the CEO role. So a longstanding history within the organization. I. There was a lot of norms around his style, right?
Lisa Colella: And he was one that had typically shied away from vulnerability and answering questions that were like alluded to any sort of personal factors. And the good news is about norms is you can actually disrupt them in really positive ways. I. Because if you to create a certain meaning when you do have an established bit of norms, you can use, we call it disrupting expectations to your advantage.
Lisa Colella: Right? And so we were able to work with him, get him a little bit more comfortable of what's it gonna look like to signal to the board and your leadership team that it is now CEO. Version of you versus COO that they're expecting. And so we, you know, we worked with them on a lot of different things or just around kind of some of the narrative architecture, but more so style, being more of that inclusive leader, really being able to call out, specifically contributions his team members were making, which hadn't historically been a strength.
Lisa Colella: And some of those intentional sim symbolism and style changes, they literally applaud it. And they're like, we have never seen you like this before. And it really kind of marked that transition period, which was an exciting story.
Carolyn Clark: You know, when you're thinking about some of these, the dichotomy of leaders, right?
Carolyn Clark: And their different kind of styles, why are people hesitant, I guess is the real question to kind of grasp into both the soft and the formal side. What's the barrier to entry there? Because it seems like that there is, it seems like it would be a natural thing to wanna be authentic and human and soft while also being.
Carolyn Clark: Effective all the things, but what's that barrier that you see that leaders have?
Lisa Colella: Yeah, I mean some of it is generational. There's been different eras of leadership where certain behaviors or certain ways of leading were more reinforced than others. We're now in an, in this era just happens to be one where we're really looking for a balanced style and to make intentional choices around, you know, what the context is of the situation, what the leader's goals are for that situation, and thus
Lisa Colella: how communications can help get them closer to, or unfortunately farther away from their goals. You know, one of the really fascinating areas of work that, that we have, we call our style code, which is actually our, our research based framework for understanding leadership, presence and expression, and helping leaders be very thoughtful about.
Lisa Colella: If you wanna achieve a certain goal, what sort of power or attractive expression do you need to do? Now some leaders will say, well, this is the opposite of authentic leadership. And if I'm kind of choosing to lean forward to make a statement versus lean back like, am I over-engineering it? And really we kind of use the analogy of a singer.
Lisa Colella: Our goal isn't to make you into someone totally different than you're not. But everyone has a range and sometimes you need to lean a little bit more attractive for a certain situation or a little bit more powerful and just like a singer's voice, like you, your singer's voice is yours, but you can kind of, you know, work with it to go up a range, to go down a range based on what the note calls for, or in our case, you know, what the situation calls for.
Lisa Colella: And so we really try to help leaders not push them outside of. Totally their comfort zone, but to give them a broader range that they can draw upon based on what the circumstance requires and the communication goal they wanna achieve.
Carolyn Clark: Oof. I have so many leaders, I'm thinking back, that could benefit from a CRA relationship, so I'm, what a good thing that you were bringing to bring to organizations on the psychology side.
Carolyn Clark: I wanna get into that a little bit because you've, you brought it up and I, I think it is so key to think about. All of the things that make us human. All of the things that make our personalities, whether it's our, you know, in our personal lives, in our professional lives. What's kind of the psychological impact behind communication?
Carolyn Clark: And I know you all have studied this so much. Talk just a little bit about the influence between that psychology backing and the practice of communication and how they play together.
Lisa Colella: I mean, the funny thing is, even though psychology is really fascinating, and we always wanna understand who we are and who the other person is and adapt to that.
Lisa Colella: That's helpful to some extent, especially for leaders who are focusing on things like self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and so forth. At the end of the day though, our whole practice and our whole firm is built around the fact that behaviors are what makes you better, right? What are the behaviors, what are the routines that create excellence that is really attainable, right?
Lisa Colella: To, to anyone who's willing to work on them and build habits and build excellence, much like elite athletes have become, they're just the best people that master the fundamentals and are interested in getting better at the margins, right? And so. We really focus on from a leadership coaching perspective what those behaviors and those routines are.
Lisa Colella: And from a communication perspective, we also know through different theories, elaboration, likelihood model and parasocial relationship theory. And a lot of what the academic literature says is actually how human brains function and create meaning, not just exchange information. And that's a really important distinction when I think about like.
Lisa Colella: Who are some of the best communicators in terms of leaders I coach, and they are the people that excel at creating meeting, not just transmitting information. They understand that communication isn't about just town halls and emails, but really how they show up every day, and that there is science to say if they show up in a way that is credible.
Lisa Colella: So they're highly competent, which becomes assumed at a certain level of leadership, right? That they are likable. In one way, shape, or form, generally likable and they are consistent, that they have a frequently and predictable drumbeat of presence that people can create what we call parasocial relationships, which is everyone feels like they have a relationship with the CEO, even though they might seem in a town hall once a year.
Lisa Colella: Right. It's very similar to like the relationship everyone feels like they have with Taylor Swift. It's like they would be so excited to see her, but like she doesn't know who you are, you know, walking down the street. Right. But because she shows up. Or others, you know, fanship aside as highly competent in her craft, highly likable in general, and also with a frequency of, you know, when her tours are, you know, when she's gonna be on podcasts, et cetera, there creates that relationship.
Lisa Colella: And that's really key to leaders having a presence that expands beyond those micro moments of communication.
Carolyn Clark: That's fascinating because I think one of the other things I would say that most leaders are well intentioned. They want to have that consistency. They want to show up the same way. But this is where maybe some of that psychological impact comes to play is if you're caught off guard, whether it's unexpected moments or whether it's just a challenge, how do you train people to come back to that kind of consistent.
Carolyn Clark: Credible place if they're distracted. And certainly this spans from, I'm thinking of startups all the way up until major fortune companies. But tell me a little bit about how do you get them to. Maybe it goes back to what we said in the beginning, it's that like take taking a minute and processing the information before acting, before speaking.
Carolyn Clark: Because one of the things that will be curious to hear you say is you could build all of that and then lose it pretty quickly if you're not keeping the hygiene of conversation of all of that. But what do you tell people? How do they come back to that and always show up?
Lisa Colella: Yeah, I mean two, two things come to mind.
Lisa Colella: One is, first, the mindset of curiosity. Like someone needs to be naturally curious and wanna ask questions versus feeling like they always need to have the answers and. To have a general desire to get better and get curious about how communications can help them achieve their goals. Right? And so having that natural curiosity helps, but other than that white space is really important.
Lisa Colella: So what we've seen the best leaders do and as a routine, as a practice, as a habit that is never ending, is creating the appropriate amount of white space in their day and their week, and really. Protecting it, right? As if it were a critical meaning to give themselves the space to kind of reset, to process, to really be intentional about how they show up and, and what lies ahead.
Lisa Colella: And so that is a really critical routine that the best leaders have. And incorporating, you know, there's probably a lot of things they do with the white space, but including reflection of, how am I showing up? People respond to me, to me the way I want them to. What is my next critical goal and what are those three task, identity and relationship goals that I need to think about and bring to that next conversation?
Carolyn Clark: Do you often think about when you're working with a leader like that, do you think about the people who are around them and supporting them? And certainly we know what the comms function is, but when you think about, you know, maybe it's a chief of staff, maybe it's just a close confidant, when you're advising a leader or you're, you know, you're stretching them into a, say a new.
Carolyn Clark: A new way of leading a little bit. What do you tell them to surround themselves with? And I wonder, I'm just curious because I think there, I've worked with many CEOs who everyone kind of glosses over the conversations with them. You know, they go on stage and you say that you've done such a great job, it was so great.
Carolyn Clark: You hit all the marks, all the thing when you know that's not true. So I'm curious, what do you tell them to kind of get that, I would call it their personal board around them or whatever it is. Is that part of sort of your path to advising them?
Lisa Colella: Yeah, I mean it, it's interesting, especially the higher you get.
Lisa Colella: There's really five to seven critical relationships that are gonna make you successful, and there needs to be really strong relationships and a high level of trust within those relationships. You know, we're in the process, we're in kind of the last stages of the process of redesigning a whole executive onboarding program for a client.
Lisa Colella: And you know, whereas they kind of take, initially were taking a little bit more of an HR approach and what do we need to get access to? And kind of more the operational approach. If we're like, at the end of the day, we need to make sure that we are crystal clear on the five to seven key relationships and get those people connected with good quality conversations and context as early as possible, rather than just going through the org chart and, you know, peppering new leader with 50 different conversations a day and it's too much and too many.
Lisa Colella: So it's really about quality over quantity. It's about asking great questions. If the leader is asking the right questions, great questions, non-obvious questions, they're gonna be able to extract much more from the time they do have with those people. But yeah, you wanna surround yourself certainly with a supporting cast that are gonna tell you what you need to hear, not always what you want to hear.
Lisa Colella: I. And that's, it's an ever evolving journey, right? No. No one's gonna be perfect all the time in terms of taking feedback or giving feedback or, but that's part of the coaching process. And so, you know, that's why we're privileged to do the work that we do, so that when they do need that kind of unbiased point of view, they have that as a checkpoint.
Lisa Colella: But certainly the quality of the teams that they lead and the people around them, having trust and credibility with those folks is critical to their success.
Carolyn Clark: Yeah, that makes sense. And I, so many of the listeners of cohesion are varied in their level. They may be just coming up in internal comms, HR in that space, and some have been in it for a long time.
Carolyn Clark: What are some of those kind of go-to regular tips that you would say? I. At each level. Right. So for example, I was at GoDaddy for a long time and I had a, a nice team, but we supported, you know, we supported every level of the organization from the CEO to your sort of more senior director level. So all of the levels there, and I.
Carolyn Clark: I wonder where should someone start, whether they're supporting just sort of the leader of a small division all the way up to the CEO. What are some of those kind of go-to tips that you would just kind of put on your Post-it note for those comms people to keep reminding themselves when they're working with leaders to be more authentic?
Carolyn Clark: What are some of those that you've got? I'm sure you have a hundred of them, but.
Lisa Colella: Yeah, I was sifting through Hmm. In a post-it note, I have a post-it note for real estate.
Carolyn Clark: Yeah, exactly. Well, because, because, and lemme tell you why I say post-it note is because if you don't make the white space to read, to prep right, which it sounds as key, whether you're a leader or at a whatever place you're needing in the moment, that quick reflection.
Carolyn Clark: So if you could only put three tips on a post-it note to constantly remind us as we're going US communicators, what, yeah. What would they be?
Lisa Colella: Well, I think the first, when you're talking about the split moments, like symbols can be used in a dime. So we talk a lot about symbolic leadership and so what is a physical manifestation of a value that a leader's trying to communicate and be known for, right?
Lisa Colella: So it could be they really wanna be seen as someone who listens to the frontline workers and really takes the voice of an employee into consideration. It's like, great, well we're gonna have our next town hall, like on the front lines then. And like just that location alone sends a strong message. If we want to be seen as someone getting ready for a promotion, it's like we're gonna dress a certain way or deliver a certain message.
Lisa Colella: So I think keeping, really keeping like a radar out for what does my leader wanna be known for and seen as values and really kind of giving. Micro moment and micro doses, you know, not that it feels too, too much, right? Can be weird, but what are those micro symbols that can be used that really kind of demonstrate that beyond words, I think would be one.
Lisa Colella: And that's when I draw upon a lot. I think you having that kind of, we alluded to it earlier, we call it the 40 40 plan that's based on that kind of executive visibility and parasocial relationship structure, where if there's a regular cadence of communication. That sounds like a drum beat, right? So once a quarter, it's four big moments, eight times a quarter.
Lisa Colella: It's kind of a medium event. And then 40, like whether it be every week there's some sort of post or like light moment of visibility and being able to draw upon that and make sure that there's frequency. 'cause what we know from the literature is that frequency matters more than duration. So we always say that 15 times four is more than one times 60.
Lisa Colella: If they have 60 minutes in a given month on a leader's calendar, do four 15 minute conversations instead of 60, because that frequency is actually more important. So.
Carolyn Clark: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm imagining my post-it and I, I think the symbolism piece is really incredible. E even that visual to be able to, I'm imagining just reminding a CEO by kind of reminding them of that, saying like, this is what you gotta keep coming back to, keep coming back to, and that repeating of things.
Carolyn Clark: Can be so challenging hearing you say that 15 four. You're exactly right. I think there's this moment in all of whenever we're working with an organization where you want to do new things, where you want to, you know, you want it to feel different or something, but the reality is people want you to show up.
Carolyn Clark: They the reliability of how a leader shows up. As you've just said, it, it becomes really critical to how they're perceived for the long term versus the short term. I, I like that. I'm, I'm thinking of my post-it note that I'm gonna write and remind my own CEO all the time.
Lisa Colella: Yeah. Symbolism, visibility, drumbeat, and frequency.
Carolyn Clark: Frequency. Yeah. I, I really like that. I wanna switch our gears because I know this is, AI is a topic that's really important to you. It's really important to CRA and I can't wait to hear, and you've got a lot going on in that space that I wanna hear about. But I wanna kind of take a step back on the role of AI generally and talk about, let's say, a year and a half ago when some of the AI drumbeat and controversy and all of that started to come to the forefront.
Carolyn Clark: What was the first step that you personally took to get a hold of it so that you could understand its impact, AI's impact on not just the people that you are supporting, but on your work. Where did you land a year and a half and ago on it and where? Where do you land today when you're thinking about kinda the impact of AI on leadership and communication overall?
Lisa Colella: Yeah, I mean, where did I start? Gosh, I was a clumsy toddler at Disney World. Like I, I was just getting in there and fumbling my way around and, you know, there's no replacement for just getting your hands dirty. Yeah. So I was getting licenses to what were then, you know, the leading LLMs and just playing around with it, and both personal and professional.
Lisa Colella: Use cases. You know, I learned 45 different things I could use, ways that I could make use of leftover ham at Easter. You're, you know, yes. So it's fun, but it, but to do that, it gives you a lot of firsthand insight as to what these really are good for and what they're not. So many people that I've spoken with that have
Lisa Colella: started using ai, have had a bad experience in their first couple use cases. 'cause they were trying to use the tools for stuff that they really just weren't designed for. And so they've put up an accent like, oh, I hate ai. It doesn't work. So it's really about, you know, it was a very humbling. Experience, I'll say, to help to learn a whole new language almost.
Lisa Colella: But it really just had to come from diving in and using it and trying to learn. And thankfully I'm surrounded by a lot of really brilliant colleagues, you know, several of which are much smarter than I in that domain that I was able to learn from along the way.
Carolyn Clark: As you're navigating with clients, you know, how they're thinking about ai, how they're using ai, what are some of the ways that you are.
Carolyn Clark: Helping them to navigate that just generally. And I would also love for you to talk a little bit about Alex. I know that's, you know, kind of CRA's AI supporter. I don't know how you would describe it, but tell us a little bit about Alex.
Lisa Colella: Yeah. I'll first step back and answer your first question around like, how are we helping our clients and you know, we're helping our clients while we're doing all this work ourselves.
Lisa Colella: So we're really. Taking it seriously and, and doing our own work within the firm that you know, then whether it's tomorrow or a year and a half from now, we can then extend those learnings to clients. But we're really helping leaders think about AI as a copilot rather than an autopilot. A lot of leaders get these kind of headlines around their capability, like, oh, well, great, like we don't need X Team anymore.
Lisa Colella: And the reality is like, we don't believe it's going to be a tool that. Replaces jobs. It's really replacing tasks strategically. And so, you know, we're helping leaders develop AI literacy, technical skills, really understanding how they're designed, what they're supposed to do. You know, so many of our clients that we talked to are using 'em as search engines, like they're not search engines.
Lisa Colella: That's not fundamentally how they function. So really helping them understand both the technicalities and what they're good for and what are good use cases and where the. Technology just hasn't caught up yet to a human capability. And then also thinking about the human factors and how we selectively and intentionally decide what we have AI do for us and what we need to maintain.
Lisa Colella: Human pardon for skill development. What we don't wanna do is. 10 years from now, we have a generation where all of this, you know, a lot of the skills that would be able to understand whether an AI tool delivered a quality product or not are lost. Like we need to preserve some of that judgment and some of those foundational skills.
Lisa Colella: So that's kind of at a high level what we're helping leaders think through. Now, the way that this is manifesting across our three practices are as exciting and slightly different for each of them. So. Within our strategic communications practice, like I said, we're doing all the work ourselves. We've created projects in Claude that now streamline a lot of the work that we do, but we're able to consult with our clients to take them through a, an integration journey that we've found to be useful and that they can.
Lisa Colella: So starts with understanding the tools, starts with identifying like where's the intersection of tasks and use cases that say a communication team does, and helping them make thoughtful choices about. Where AI should be used and again, where it shouldn't for variety of reasons, whether that be quality or skill erosion, et cetera.
Lisa Colella: And then helping them roll that out, implement it, right, refine, and as a cycle. On the leadership front, as you've alluded to, we've developed Alex, which is our AI leadership coach, and really gives. Leaders, you know, 24 7 access to our research and expertise. So Alex is built solely on, in Admired Leadership proprietary content.
Lisa Colella: It doesn't crawl the web for whatever, you know, leadership content is out there. From a psychological perspective. It really maintains kind of the behavioral view I spoke about. But what's fascinating is, is that. We're not using it to replace human coaches. Our coaching practice is very vibrant and growing, but really to extend and enhance it.
Lisa Colella: So oftentimes when I'm coaching a leader, we'll have a conversation. We'll kind of pick one or two things to work on. And the way that I can give Alex is like, great use Alex. Every time you're going to the situation to prep or you know, have it be devil's advocate next time you're in this situation to give you real time advice based on the feedback.
Lisa Colella: Or I am up late, but I'm not up at 3:00 AM So if you are like, use Alex Ray as a replacement, right? So it's incredible the just how conversational it can be. And you know, users have the ability to add preferences, which really tailor the advice to their specific role or the people they're leading or you know, any number of specific contexts.
Lisa Colella: And then lastly, on the talent side, we're looking at how AI can help streamline really empirically based assessments. So for example, we have a new leadership. Character assessment that's in the beta phase and about to roll out more broadly. And so how can we kind of use AI to help with some of the, you know, some of the analysis, not, of course, we still have human oversight to it, but also make connections that maybe a human could have missed.
Lisa Colella: And really we think that both human and AI together can create a stronger result for the leader.
Carolyn Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I also wonder if, you know, the thing that I like when I've learned a little bit about Alex from you is just, it also comes to the table with immediate credibility in that. You're a trusted partner of these CEOs and these leaders, and they know that work.
Carolyn Clark: They know where the, the information is coming from. They trust you all. It's coming in from there. It's not going broad, you know, and sourcing all kinds of things. It's coming very clearly into a pool of work that they know is trustworthy. Incredible. So that's very cool. And yes, I love the idea that, you know, if you wanna train yourself at three in the morning, that you, Lisa, don't have to get on the phone with someone you, you know.
Carolyn Clark: You've done all this work that's feeding into this, this alternative option, I get really excited about ai. I, I also like you, I describing it as a toddler. I went kind of crazy trying to figure it out and one of the biggest things, which you've alluded to with what you were talking about is using it for that alternative.
Carolyn Clark: Thinking, and we're all biased, you know, in every way possible. So when you can ask AI to pull out the opposite for you, pull out where your gaps are, that's where I've found it being very, very effective. Creating projects in Claude as well, or personas that you can come back to and say, Hey, I prepped this entire conversation for one group of people.
Carolyn Clark: I wanna know in detail how the frontline folks are gonna. Poke holes in this theory or poke holes in all of this, it does give you a chance to correct before you even get out there and test things, which is really fun.
Lisa Colella: Yeah. In a very psychologically safe space.
Carolyn Clark: Exactly. No judgment in, in, in there, which is really nice.
Carolyn Clark: I wanna come kind of full background, just a little bit of your background. You clearly are a creative at heart. It sounds like you have a passion for both kind of crafting for the art side of things, how. Do you apply and CRA apply all of this behavioral data, all this empirical work that you are doing, and you've got all of this and matching it with the sort of creativity, the art side of life.
Carolyn Clark: How are you bringing those together and kind of what's the approach that CRA and you take on that.
Lisa Colella: Yeah, I mean literally it's always a dance in the in of the constructs of any given day. For me and the conversation I'm a part of, I think the easiest and kind of cleanest way to describe it is because we have the foundation of behavioral science and we know kind of how information flows through organizations, how messages are received and interpreted in the best ways, you know, what drives people to act on what they hear versus resist.
Lisa Colella: That kind of gives us a solid foundation of like, here's. The situation and how we need to approach it. But then from there it becomes a lot of creativity and instinct. Right. And you know, people use the term intuition a lot as it relates to creativity, and I really think intuition, I. Is more a byproduct of experience like that intuition in, in some cases, especially in the professional context, right, is coming from experiences where you've had to exercise judgment where you've made a call or seen something play out either successfully or not.
Lisa Colella: And so once we kind of get our guardrails on us, then it's like how do we actually get to that goal becomes a lot more kind of creativity and intuition based, based on the reality of the situation. You know, we have within our firm and once a month we have what we call coaching clinics, where we bring two, you know, scenarios to the table that we all like provide our, here's how we would handle that situation in, in advance, and then we discuss it like, oh, well why do you approach it that way?
Lisa Colella: And I approach it this way and we were just kind of talking and our founder was saying the other day of. Wow, this is a really meaty challenge and like five different perspectives are all valid. Like none of them are wrong. But the fact that we're taking a certain approach just comes down to the artful piece of, you know, knowing the people involved and knowing the sensitivities and knowing kind of the long game versus the short game.
Lisa Colella: And so I love that because, you know, on the communication side, yes, creativity is sometimes. Design and art, and then sometimes on the relationship and leadership side, it's more kind of how you approach a situation and you know, factor in all the pieces to get to the best outcome.
Carolyn Clark: Yeah. Woo. Lisa, everything you're saying, it makes me wanna tell everybody to hire CRA, because I feel like these are the things that, even training communicators, I imagine that's part of your world.
Carolyn Clark: I can imagine a world where. You are training other ones of you, you know, and I think because I, I think in that moment you really wanna be able to pull from some of this. And I'm imagining that those listening can gain some information about CRA, but tell a little bit about how we can, those who don't know what CRA is, how can they get involved?
Carolyn Clark: How can they reach out to you? What's the best way to, to kinda learn from you all ongoing?
Lisa Colella: Yeah, there's so many opportunities. So I'll start with very high level. So cra admired leadership.com is our website gives you an overview of kind of everything we do in those three areas of strategic communication, leadership and talent.
Lisa Colella: And we have offerings and all those areas that range from free to. Right. So on the free side, which I'm happy to, we can put links in the show notes. We have a daily we call Admired Leadership field note. So bite-sized blurb delivered to your inbox every morning around kind of. Quick snips of you can put into practice that day and become a better leader and move yourself forward.
Lisa Colella: So that's a great way to, to get involved. Anyone's welcome to try Alex for a, a week of free trial access. So that's a free offering for anybody as well. And then on the communication side, we have a number of, obviously, we'll, do we do anything? From large scale consulting engagements to coaching teams through either long term or short term situations.
Lisa Colella: And we offer a ton of development opportunities. So we run a lot of communication events all around the country in different forums. Communication for leaders, communication for communicators, like if anyone's looking for a development opportunity, would love if you know to connect with me and I'm happy to.
Lisa Colella: Figure out what your goals are and kind of point you in the right direction. We also have a free, every week we put together an AI, we call it Confluence, the intersection of AI and communications. So that's a weekly newsletter comes out usually Sunday nights, so it's right in your inbox Monday morning, and it's a great way to stay on top of what's happening
Lisa Colella: in the AI space. And if you were gonna read one thing a week, I would say we do all the heavy lifting of figuring out what's out there and what's the latest and greatest. And so that's a great resource to dive into as well. But yeah, check out our website. My, I'm on LinkedIn and anyone's welcome to connect with me and once they understand what people are looking for and kinda how they wanna get involved, we're all about community.
Lisa Colella: We don't do advertising, mass marketing is, you can tell most people haven't heard of us though. We work with at least 35 of the Fortune 100. We do a lot of work, but we like being kind of behind the scenes and making our clients look great. So it's all through referrals and word of mouth.
Carolyn Clark: Awesome. Well, and I think from places like this, getting to hear just your brilliance on podcasts like this.
Carolyn Clark: So thank you for joining us. We got to talk about a lot. I'm excited to do my post-it note to be honest, and to kind of, keep coming back to that and sign up for these newsletters. I'm thrilled for that too. I appreciate you joining us. Thank you so much for being a partner of Simple's as well. We we're, we're really happy you all are part of part of our world.
Carolyn Clark: It was really good to speak with you today.
Lisa Colella: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Carolyn, and I look forward to continuing to partner with you and your team.