Building a Great Culture Through Effective Communication with Nick Kalm

Michael Vandervort, Phil Wilson & Nick Kalm.

 Michael Vandervort: [00:00:10]

Hello, this is Michael Vandervort, and I’m here with my co-host Phil Wilson. On today’s edition of The Left of Boom How. Hello, Phil. How are you today?

Phil Wilson: [00:00:18]

I’m great. How are you?

Michael Vandervort: [00:00:21]

I’m good. Now that we got our little glitches worked out to get started. I want to introduce our guest. Our guest today is going to be a gentleman named Nick Kalm. I’ve known Nick for a number of years. Nick works in the communication business. For the past 30 years, Nick’s worked with hundreds of leading corporations, nonprofits, and academic organizations and their leadership teams to enhance, protect, and restore their reputations. I’m not going to go into all the credentials Nick brings. They’re great.

[00:00:52]

I’d rather just say hello to Nick and start talking to him about the topic of the day, which is how we can effectively use corporate communications and reputation management to build a great culture. So, Nick, welcome to The Left the Boom Show. It’s great to have you here. How are you?

Nick Kalm: [00:01:07]

Thank you, gentlemen. Great to be here. It’s a real pleasure. I’m excited about your new show and to be a guest on it.

Phil Wilson: [00:01:13]

Welcome.

Michael Vandervort: [00:01:15]

We love having love our friends here because they give us a little break as we iron out the wrinkles, I guess so. So, Nick, we have a standard opening question that Phil introduced here and it’s prompted some great conversations. So, I’m going to hit you with that to start. And that is who is someone who believed in you as an individual and as a professional early on, and how did they inspire you to become who you are today?

Nick Kalm: [00:01:49]

It’s a great question, and I’m glad you asked it as well. There are a couple of answers that I’d give. They’re probably a little bit trite to begin with, but not all of them will be that way. My parents certainly believed in me. They have always been great cheerleaders to me, even though they came from a very different world. I’m the business person and the communications person. My father was an artist, college professor, and administrator. My mother worked for the UN.

[00:02:14]

So, what I’m doing is about as far from what they did as can be, but they always supported me in what I was trying to do. And then when I was thinking about going off and starting my own firm, which I did 21 years ago, I couldn’t have done it without my wife’s support. She knew I had that entrepreneurial bug in me, and she was wonderfully supportive. So, my parents and my wife would be two of them, for sure. But then I had some advisers and other friends and colleagues who just encouraged me to do this. It really helped me get that lift to feel like I could go off on my own and start my own firm. And I’ve been blessed that I’ve been able to do that now for the last 20-some-odd years.

Michael Vandervort: [00:02:55]

Yeah. The entrepreneurial thing is something I could never see my way through. You and Phil both have let the bug bite you and succumbed. So, I don’t have much experience, but it’s a lot of people’s dreams. You guys have both had great success, so that’s really cool.

Nick Kalm: [00:03:17]

Yeah. And it sounds terribly hokey to say, but it really is true. Two weeks into doing this, 21 years ago, I found the thing that I knew I wanted to do for the rest of my career. And what a gift that is. And then, frankly, to be able to do it too, which has been just incredible. So, I’m really happy about that.

Phil Wilson: [00:03:35]

I do an anniversary lunch with everybody on the team on their anniversary. We’re still small enough that I can do that. So, Christina’s was today. And this was her fourth anniversary, but she reminded me that this is my 26th anniversary at LRI. And unlike you, Nick, you took that that step. And I really do like to talk about these inspirational leaders in our lives because that’s really at the core of what this whole show is about.

[00:04:14]

I didn’t start. My dad had started this years and years before I ever got involved. And so, he was really the one that put it all on the line. Tell me a little bit about the encouragement that you got to take that leap- because that’s a big leap.

Nick Kalm: [00:04:37]

It was. As you guys know, I’m based in Chicago, but I didn’t grow up here. And I’d been working here for about six years when I decided to start my firm. The thing was, at that point, I knew I had enough of a track record working in-house in communications for a bunch of big companies and working for two of the biggest PR firms. I knew that if I failed, I could go back in either a communications role with the company or in another big PR firm. So, I thought I was at the point in my career. Let me try it. If it works, great. If it doesn’t work, I can get a job.

[00:05:11]

I was at that point eminently employable because of where I was in my career. I had at that point, an almost 20-year track record, so I knew I could do it. So I figured, what the heck? And again, having a supportive wife and thankfully, a home equity line of credit that I could live on the first year. I was a pretty senior person at the biggest PR firm in the world, and I basically took about a 70% pay cut in the first year to start the firm. But I was so happy to be my own boss that, frankly, even if I had stayed making not even what I was making when I was working at the big PR firm, I knew I was going to be happier because I was steering the ship.

[00:05:50]

I could celebrate the team, but I’m not going to be sitting there subjected to other people above me in the food chain making decisions that I didn’t necessarily agree with. And that was it. And then just because we were very fortunate to have three great clients literally in the first month- our first three clients were FedEx, GE, and IBM. Those were clients one, two, and three. I am not the smartest guy on the block, but if you get those three clients right away and you manage to screw it up, you’re doing something wrong.

Phil Wilson: [00:06:22]

It says a lot for you, though, that you were able to pick those up right off the bat. Well, the reason I keep my law license up to date is just in case this whole labor relations gig doesn’t pan out. It’s been 26 years, but you never know.

Michael Vandervort: [00:06:42]

Phil Wilson and nobody on the shingle [laughs]. So, Nick, you’ve talked about making the move. So, Reputation Partners. Tell us what’s important to know about you and your company in terms of what you do for your clients and to help businesses.

Nick Kalm: [00:07:02]

Absolutely. So, we’re a full-service high-touch communications firm that’s made up of a lot of smart, really good people. And we’ve worked with every kind of organization and virtually every kind of situation that can impact any kind of institution. You rattled off the list at the beginning, Michael. Corporations, health systems, trade associations, universities, not-for-profits, you name it, if it’s anything that they want to try to improve. The reason we call the firm Reputation Partners is- is there anything they want to improve about their reputation that isn’t as widely known, anything they want to protect because it might be under threat for some reason, or if they’ve gone through a difficult patch and they’re trying to get their reputation back, that’s what we do.

[00:07:45]

And that’s what we’re known for doing, which has been really great. And as for me, as I said, I’m originally from New York, but I’m out here and I’m fully a Midwesterner now or almost fully. It takes a little while to get that New York out of you. And I’ve been gone now, this month actually, right now marks 30 years that I’ve been in Chicago. So, I’ve been out for a long time. I’m a family guy. I love having a business. I have a son that I’m very proud of and a wife who sticks with me. So, that’s who I am now.

Michael Vandervort: [00:08:14]

This is not on the sheet, but how big of a difference is there really between New York and Chicago? Because they’re kind of one and two in terms of culture and pride when you talk about big cities in America, right?

Nick Kalm: [00:08:30]

Again, I’ve been gone now for a long time, 30 years. But it was when I moved out here, very different. It took me a full year, I would say to really dial it down. And you guys know me, I’m still a pretty intense guy. But if you’d seen me 30 years ago, you would have run screaming the other direction. Believe it! I know this is going to be hard to believe. And for anybody who watches this, who knows me, that I’ve mellowed. But I really have. The intensity and the stress.

[00:08:56]

And again, New York is great. I love going back there, great restaurants. We have friends and others who are there. It’s a wonderful place to visit, but it is a hard place to live. And frankly, just moving to Chicago, I moved here basically, and I was making the same salary that I was in the New York area, and my standard of living went up 40%. And Chicago is just I’d say, a smaller, not quite as intense, not quite as stressful place to be as New York. So, that’s my assessment.

Michael Vandervort: [00:09:31]

You can’t totally tell on the screen, but Nick is also, at least from my 5’10 perspective, Nick is like 6’6 or higher. He’s intimidating because you have to look up in the air to talk to him.

Nick Kalm: [00:09:43]

I know. So far, nobody can see my bald spot.

Phil Wilson: [00:09:49]

But he blocks a lot of wind. You want to get behind him. If you’re in Chicago, you want to definitely be walking behind Nick.

Nick Kalm: [00:09:55]

And I create my own wind, too.

Phil Wilson: [00:09:57]

Yeah, that’s true. And before we segue, you talked a little bit, Nick, about your team and about, the work that you do. We’ve worked together on a number of projects, and I just would add, you talk about high touch, they are just a great team to work with and very smart and capable folks there.

Nick Kalm: [00:10:30]

And again, it’s been great to work with your folks too. The thing is we knew we were going to be competing with the big firms that I used to work at, and we do all the time. And the thing is what we’re able to provide them, they’re just not set up to do is that high touch client satisfaction. We’re obsessed about that stuff. We have a 99+ percent 15-year net promoter score. And that’s the thing I’m most proud of. And again, we drop the ball every now and again. I’m sure we annoy some clients for sure and others wouldn’t hire us again.

[00:11:02]

But we’ve worked with 700, almost 800 clients now. And having that 99% net promoter score over 15 years says we’re doing something right. And that’s something I really try to instill in the team. And that’s the kind of people that I try to surround myself with. And obviously deliver whenever we’re working with clients.

Phil Wilson: [00:11:20]

Yeah. You do a great job.

Nick Kalm: [00:11:22]

Thanks.

 Michael Vandervort: [00:11:24]

Yeah. So, 800 clients. I didn’t realize that. I knew you were busy, but I didn’t realize you guys were that prolific in your client base. That’s great. You just said a second ago, all sorts of, industries, all sorts of individuals. What do you tell the CEOs or whoever your main client is? What are the 3 things you tell them that they need to do in terms of communication when you start dealing with a client?

Nick Kalm: [00:11:58]

For CEOs specifically, we’re very often dealing directly with these folks as we should because a lot of what an organization does or doesn’t do is going to be driven by whoever’s at the top. So I’d say one for CEOs. And, again, you’ve seen a lot of them get away from this for a number of reasons. The interesting thing that a lot of people who don’t deal with CEOs all the time are surprised by is a lot of those folks are very introverted. They’re very happy in their office doing their own thing.

[00:12:22]

So, the number one thing we tell people, CEOs in particular, is you got to be visible, both internally and externally. Don’t just sit there in your ivory tower or your home office or whatever it is and just deal with your direct reports and not the rest of the organization. You got to be out there. Let them see you. Let them hear from you. That’s number 1. That’s both with employees, customers, all kinds of outside stakeholders, and so forth. Number 2, I think Merriam-Webster came up with the word for 2024, authentic. Be authentic.

[00:12:53]

There’s so much that happens where organizations, oh, we don’t want to tell our employees that or we’ll freak them out or we don’t want to say this to the community or they’ll be upset or we don’t want to say this to our customers. People are adults. And one of the things that’s true about where we are now in 2024 is people want the truth. People can handle the truth as opposed to Jack Nicholson and A Few Good Men. We can handle the truth. Treat people like adults. Be authentic about if things are going well, talk about things going well.

[00:13:23]

If things are challenged, be honest about it. It’s not like people aren’t going to know, and you’re just going to get so much more credibility with them if you are authentic. And then the third one is to be responsive. Be responsive to society. Be responsive to employees. Be responsive to the market. Be responsive to your customers. Be responsive to other stakeholders.

Phil Wilson: [00:13:44]

And I would say, on that authentic piece in the middle there, one of the things that- so Chris Matthews had the show hardball. Before that, he had the book Hardball, and prior to that, he was Jimmy Carter’s speechwriter. And so, one of the big lessons in that book that I- probably the main one I took away from it, and I still talk about it even to this day, is hang a flag on your problem. And around that whole on authenticity piece, you can pretend like you can hide the ball for some period of time, but the truth will come out eventually.

[00:14:24]

In this world, it’s likely to happen sooner than later. And you want to be the person who tells people what’s going on. “Hey, there’s a problem. And I want to make sure that you hear about it from me. I wanted you to hear it from me first.” Pretending you could punt and avoid whatever aftermath is going to happen. It’s going to happen at some point, and the longer you wait, and especially if you’re responding to it versus you own. It’s a whole different environment, right?

Nick Kalm: [00:14:58]

Totally. Absolutely. The example we love using, even though it’s from years ago. Think about the Gulf oil spill and Tony Hayward at BP. If he had just come out at the very beginning and said, “Look, guys, this could be really bad. I don’t want to scare anybody, but this could mean that the Gulf of Mexico could not be used for fishing, boating, or swimming for years to come. We could end up with tens of millions of gallons of oil in the gulf. I’m telling you that that’s the worst-case scenario. We’re going to work our tails off to make sure that doesn’t happen, but I want to prepare you.” You set it up so that it could be worse. And then whatever it is, if it’s not as bad, people go, “Oh, good. It wasn’t so bad.”

[00:15:45]

Versus it’s this big. It’s a little bigger. It’s bigger. It’s bigger. It’s bigger. It’s bigger. People go, “You don’t have a handle on it. You don’t know what you’re doing. What is going on?” Same thing with data breaches. Same thing with all these other things. Everybody wants to try to contain it, which is inauthentic even if they don’t know. You don’t want to scare people, But if you create the expectation that things could be bad, but we’re doing everything we can to address it, and then it ends up being anything less bad, you look like a winner.

Phil Wilson: [00:16:11]

Yeah.

Michael Vandervort: [00:16:14]

We talked about this on the phone briefly the other day. We didn’t really talk about [unintelligible 00:16:19], and that is the Chicago Blackhawks thing that just happened with Connor Bedard. They were caught up in what is sounds like a workplace HR investigational issue with a player who misbehaved. And, of course, sports always throws everything into weirdness, right? Everything’s magnified because everybody wants to know. But the bottom line and the way they handled this one, unlike the last one from a decade ago with their child abuser physician or whatever it was- I can’t remember.

[00:16:49]

They still didn’t come out and tell anybody what was going on, and they let their star draft number 1 drafty get dragged through the muck on social media for 3 days, and it was just horrible. I don’t want to ask you to bash the Blackhawks, but that transparency, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with the need to investigate and make sure you’re fully informed before you start sharing information?

Nick Kalm: [00:17:13]

Well, I mean, because this is one of those situations where, again, you’ve got lawyers saying one thing, you’ve got management wanting to do another, you’ve got communications advisers wanting to do a third thing. And, again, it has to be it’s important for anybody who’s in a leadership position to sit there and surround yourself with a lot of smart people, get their best advice, and then you’re paid the big bucks as the CEO to make a decision. Don’t overly defer to the lawyers. Don’t overly defer to the communications people.

[00:17:41]

But in a case like that, Michael, where you’re talking about the Blackhawks and they’ve been in negative headlines before in terms of their personnel management issues or mistakes that they’ve been making, they need to be a lot more transparent about stuff. Now what we all know and your viewers know because they live in and around the world of HR, you can’t sit there and talk publicly about HR matters because first of all, it creates all kinds of new litigation risks for the organization. And, plus, it leaves everybody in the organization thinking “Wait a minute. If something goes wrong, is my boss going to hang my personnel file out to dry?”

[00:18:14]

So, it’s a tricky business, but you’ve got to think through it. If you’ve been through a situation like this once as the Blackhawks were several years ago and it happens again, then suddenly people start realizing, any organization can have a fluke, any organization can have something like this happen to them once. But when something happens to an organization that’s similar enough in nature that it happened several times, it’s like that organization has a problem with its HR policies.

Phil Wilson: [00:18:38]

Yeah. For sure.

Michael Vandervort: [00:18:56]

Why does reputation matter so much, and what do you tell your clients when they want to improve their reputation? What kind of steps do you encourage them to take?

Nick Kalm: [00:19:04]

Because so much is tied to it. Shareholder value, employee recruitment, retention, customer satisfaction, deal flow. If you’re a company that wants to acquire other companies or do joint ventures or go into new markets or whatever. If you’ve got a bad reputation, people aren’t going to take your calls or letters. They’re not going to want to do business with you. And if you’re in the midst of a deal discussion and something bad happens and you can’t provide the right context of it, that deal is going to disappear and go away.

[00:19:33]

Community support. Litigation. Regulations. If you seem like a good company, a good well-run company, there are all kinds of studies that show that companies that are the fortune most admired have higher shareholder returns than companies that are least admired. We’ve talked a lot, in our various circles about what’s happened, not to pick on any company, but look what’s happened with Starbucks. Starbucks was a company at the very top of their category in the most admired, and they are falling precipitously as a result of what’s been going on with them and all of the union organizing that they’ve been facing and how they’ve responded to that, and all of that impacts reputation.

[00:20:15]

And then Howard Schultz giving- again, all of this many different things that go into it, but it just impacts so many different metrics. If you’re trying to recruit the best and the brightest to run your new division, your reputation, your organization’s reputation, your leader’s reputation impact that so much. And it’s all goes into what the accountants talk about as goodwill. It’s not the book value of an organization, but it’s all of the other things that go into why is that organization worth what it is. And it impacts all of those different things.

Phil Wilson: [00:20:46]

It can it can be the book value, too, right? Look at look at Twitter or whatever it’s called today. There are hundreds of millions of dollars of value that are just getting flushed down the toilet all around reputation.

Nick Kalm: [00:21:07]

Exactly. Amazing. God bless them. But Elon Musk, it’s great to sit [unintelligible 00:21:13] $44 billion on something and then have that 44 $44 billion only be worth whatever. 17 billion was the most recent figure. Losing $27 billion- I’d be pretty bummed if I lost $27 billion.

Phil Wilson: [00:21:25]

He can afford it.

Nick Kalm: [00:21:27]

You would need to.

Phil Wilson: [00:21:32]

It is hard to wrap your mind around the amount of value that has- and look, companies go up and down in value. Butt that is just purely reputational. And the fact that billions of dollars can be tied to that is pretty incredible.

Nick Kalm: [00:21:59]

It’s crazy. And look, I know one of the things we want to talk about is when companies sit there and wade into issues. And this is the company I keep talking about that we’ve seen is Disney. Now Disney (and I’m stunned by this), is finally acknowledging in their public financial disclosures that their controversial takes on issues are costing them market share, reputation, and valuation. They’re doing it. They’ve done it knowingly. They then ended up in that whole battle with Governor DeSantis.

[00:22:35]

They’ve done all of the other things that folks who are critical of companies that seem to be going woke, so to speak. It is dramatically hurting their business- the people that they’re putting in charge of the films that they’re deciding to make. That’s why they’re getting Nelson Peltz making a run at a proxy fight there because the feeling is that the company is not being well managed, even though they lured Bob Iger out of retirement to rerun the company.

[00:23:05]

Again, I’ve seen companies doing this, and I’ve as you guys know I’ve opined frequently. I’m like, we are such a divided country. everything is controversial. Why in the world would you take positions that you automatically know are going to antagonize and potentially enrage half the country? Now, that’s the thing. One of the things we talk about is why companies do this. They do this because they have a vocal minority of their employees. That’s why they took the position they did on the so-called don’t say gay law in Florida, Disney I’m talking about.

[00:23:40]

A vocal minority of their employees pressured them to do it. And again, I get it. I said earlier, what’s something that CEOs need to do? They need to be responsive to society. So, I’m not saying sit there and put your head in the sand, but think about how this aligns with our values. How are our how are our customers going to view this? How are our shareholders going to view this? How are our partners going to view this? If some of the loudest group sitting there chewing on your ankles saying you must take a position on this terrible legislation, don’t just go, okay, well, I guess we’re going to go do that. You have to think through the implications because these have multi-billion-dollar implications for companies.

Phil Wilson: [00:24:17]

Yeah. And there’s a difference between an issue that is at the core of your business. I’ve seen you write and talk about this. There are some issues that you have to take a stand on because it’s a core part of who you are as a company. And then there’s these extraneous- it’s not that they’re not important. They’re wildly important. And there are diametrically opposed views on them. Even if it upsets a bunch of people in your organization, if it’s not really core to who you are and to what you’re bringing to the world, there’s really no reason for a company to jump into the middle of that.

[00:25:11]

And it’s become fashionable to do that. But it seems to me it’s not just the reputational risk, but it creates all kinds of distraction. It veers you off of what you should be concentrating on all the time. So, there’s all kinds of costs to it.

Nick Kalm: [00:25:33]

And the other example I love pointing to is Delta Airlines with their huge hub in Atlanta. They were looking to get some sort of significant tax breaks from the state of Georgia. And then they came out after the state of Georgia passed some sort of Voting Rights Act, Voting Enforcement Act, Voting Integrity Act, and criticized that. Again, what does voting integrity have to do with an airline and their business to your point, Phil? Zero. And what happened then was the legislature said, “Guess what, that nice tax break that you wanted. And airlines operate generally on a pretty lean profit. That tax break is gone. Have a nice day.”

[00:26:08]

And again, all that because they decided to wait into, again to your point Phil, a legitimate societal issue. But what in the world does it have to do with an airline? So, that is the challenge. And again, I want to be clear, I’m not saying that companies should completely stay out of every issue. If a company is deciding at some point that they want to go back into (I’m making this up), Russia. Everybody pulled out of Russia. Not everybody, but the vast majority of companies pulled out of Russia after they invaded Ukraine.

[00:26:39]

If you’re a company that makes widgets, you’re a multi-billion-dollar widget company, and you pulled out of Russia because they invaded Ukraine, then you start thinking about going back in for whatever reason, they end up with a cease-fire or a peace treaty or whatever, or withdrawal or the war is over. You don’t just sit there and go, “Okay, now we’re just going to go back in.” No, you go, “Well, let’s see what’s the risk? Well, how has currency changed since then? What’s the likelihood that Russia is going to decide to invade one of its neighbors?” You go through a calculus there.

[00:27:08]

Why would you do that on that kind of a business decision with such bottom-line implications, but not go through a similar exercise when it comes to taking a position on a controversial issue?

Phil Wilson: [00:27:19]

Yeah, I totally agree.

Michael Vandervort: [00:27:21]

This is a tangential question, Nick, but I think it’s really relevant to what we’ve just talked about. And that is whether you think of politics, the division in politics or the division in, in religion- like in the US, are you a faith-based or not, or Hamas versus Israeli. Surely that stuff must come up in your practice. How do you help companies deal with that? If you’re not in agreement it seems like then you’re canceled no matter which side you’re on. And sometimes you can’t stay out of it. You get dragged into it whether you want to or not.

Nick Kalm: [00:28:00]

Absolutely. And no matter what, we tell clients you have to be prepared. You’re going to get slings and arrows because nothing you do, and if you choose to do nothing, it’s going to annoy someone. So, you just have to understand that the idea of pleasing everybody- so the same way we tell you, don’t deliberately antagonize half the country on the one hand. On the other hand, don’t assume you’re going to be able to please everybody by doing something anyway.

[00:28:24]

A perfect example of that is the whole Bud Light, Dylan Mulvaney controversy. They waded into that thinking they were just doing this promotion with this one influencer. And again, historically, boycotts have not worked. Boycotts have just been some noise and people signed petitions and it may have a tiny little impact on sales. In this case, it was completely different than that. So, it’s just a matter of really making sure that you understand what you’re stepping into and why, and that’s it.

[00:28:54]

And if you’re not prepared to realize that, you can say, look, I appreciate that this issue, whatever it might be, it might be the George Floyd murder, whatever it is, something along those lines. And I understand that the George Floyd murder impacted and inflamed public sentiment like nothing has happened in years since then. I get that. And I understand that some of our employees are pressuring us to support Black Lives Matter for example. We know that what we need to do as a company is we need to make sure that we’re respecting everybody, and we have a lot of different constituents to serve.

[00:29:29]

“Yeah, but that means you’re supporting racists.” No, we don’t like racists. We don’t support racists. But we’re not going to sit there and come down on the side of some position on some issue that is going to antagonize the customers that we really want to serve and the communities that we want to serve. So, we’ve got our values. Here’s our values. Here’s our principles. Here’s how we’re going to operate our company. Here’s how we’re going to promote from within. Here’s how we’re going to compensate people. Here’s how we’re going to treat the environment. Here’s how we’re going to create advancement opportunities for people of color.

[00:29:58]

All of those different things. We’re going to do the right thing there, but we’re not going to allow ourselves to be saying we support X or we oppose Y. That’s hard to do. And again, people go, “Oh, you’re just being namby-pamby. You’re gutless. You won’t take this on.” And you just take that issue. And again, nobody’s going to sit there and love you for taking that position. But you’re not going to create enemies the way some of these organizations have unwittingly done.

Michael Vandervort: [00:30:29]

So, that brings up reputational rules. And you mentioned a couple of, the oil business, say, versus the health care business or whatever. Do certain companies or certain types of industries get more of a pass or more scrutiny, depending on what they do?

Nick Kalm: [00:30:50]

Yeah. In general, business-to-business companies generally get less scrutiny because they’re not customer-facing and they make components for other companies so they don’t really have to enjoy the support of the public. The consumer-facing companies get the most. The highly regulated companies and industries also get a lot. And then just if you think about the industries that just happen to touch the widest number of members of the public get a heck of a lot. We talked about airlines before. Not everybody flies, but a vast majority of the American population flies.

[00:31:22]

Food is another one. We all need that. That’s universal. And entertainment is up there as well because it’s nearly as universal. So, those industries get a disproportionate amount of scrutiny because of the lines of business they’re in. And then other industries as well. Obviously, it’s regulated, but health care. We all need it. We all worry about our health. We all want to make sure that we can get through the day, week, month, year and be healthy. Nobody likes to go to the doctor. Nobody wants to be in the hospital. Nobody wants to have to take pharmaceutical products. But we all need to, to varying degrees.

[00:31:56]

So, that industry broadly, health care gets a lot of scrutiny as well. And then just like I said, some business-to-business and some other companies that are just less consumer-facing do. And of course, there are very controversial industries like tobacco and guns and alcohol and so forth that traditionally get a lot of attention because they arguably don’t necessarily have a huge societal benefit, and they actually have quite a significant societal cost.

Phil Wilson: [00:32:25]

All of those share reputation and PR is also a part of the way that they get business. And how they compete for business is they advertise a lot more than the widget maker who’s somewhere in the supply chain. And so, that lever of negative PR and negative publicity is more valuable to pull if you’re opposed to that position or opposed to that company or opposed to what they’re doing, than it is for someone whom that just doesn’t mean as much.

Nick Kalm: [00:33:10]

Exactly. The tobacco industry in particular, has had to put tremendous amounts of dollars and resources into trying to build up goodwill because for years and years, before they started exploring these non-flaming cigarettes and tobacco products, that’s all they were known for. And it’s like, how do you defend that? You haven’t been able to advertise it in almost 60 years, but you’re going to defend it. But they would spend lavishly on supporting cultural institutions, educational institutions, because they knew they needed to buy goodwill, because the nature of their products were such that they were very controversial.

[00:33:49]

And it made it tough then for a lot of these organizations that were on the receiving end of it, because they knew that they couldn’t sit there and come out and say, yes, smoking is okay, but it quieted them down and made them less likely to be critical of the companies that were funding them so lavishly.

Michael Vandervort: [00:34:07]

We’re going to start crunching on time here, so I’m going to keep us moving along. Let’s switch gears a little bit, realizing that you have a bit of a bias inherently baked into the next question. Do you think companies need more help with internal or external communications and tell us what the differences are.

Phil Wilson: [00:34:32]

What’s his bias? He’s like, they need both.

Nick Kalm: [00:34:34]

Well, yeah. It’s interesting. For a lot of companies, they need more help with internal. But it’s a big psychological leap that they need to make that they admit that they have trouble speaking to their own employees. A lot of organizations insist they’re all right. We don’t talk to the media every day. Help us talk to the media. Or we don’t talk to the community or to advocacy groups or whatever, universities or whatnot. We don’t talk to them every day, help us talk to them. So, they don’t talk to them, they need help there.

[00:35:08]

Internally though. The interesting thing is that what we see with a lot of organizations, and I know you guys see this as well, is they don’t necessarily listen. They don’t know how to communicate with their employees, which is a difficult thing for them to admit. It’s funny and you guys will laugh at this, and I’m sure your viewers will when they see this as well. I’ve lost count of the number of companies that I’ve talked to and I’m like, so tell me, what are your primary employee communications vehicles? “Well, we use email.”

[00:35:34]

That’s great. Well, how many of your employees are manufacturing or plant-based? “Oh, 70, 80%.” Well, do they read emails? “Oh no. No, they never look at emails.” So, 70 or 80% of your employees, the only way you communicate with them is with a technology that they don’t use. So, it’s not working. Again, that’s something as basic as that. But even just understanding how are they communicating with the employees. Are they using newsletters? Are they using video? Are they using chat? What are they doing and is it working?

[00:36:04]

So many of these things are interesting. We’ve seen this with so many companies. They build up these vehicles and they put teams and reporters in front of let’s put out this magazine and let’s put out this video series. And we’ll come in and we’ll say, so folks, is this stuff working? They’re like, “We think so.” Well, have you tested it? Have you asked people where they’re reading it? One of the best tests you can make is stop publishing something for a little while and see if anyone notices.

[00:36:30]

And if no one notices, then it wasn’t working. And maybe you didn’t need to do it in the first place. So the shorter answer, which I’ve not given, but the short answer I’ll give to your question is it really depends on the organization, but it’s harder for them to acknowledge, I think, that they need help talking to their own employees. But that’s often one of the most critical audiences you can get, because you’ve got 5000, 10,000, 300,000 ambassadors for the company that if you’re not talking to them in the right way, how are they talking about your business to the people that they’re interacting with personally or professionally?

Phil Wilson: [00:37:03]

And I’m curious- I think you agree with this, but it’s also very common that employers think they do a good job of communicating just because they’ve got some vehicles, they’ve got the newsletter and the email. And so, they look at all that as we’re great communicators. And they’re terrible. They don’t have any inkling that they’re terrible until maybe something comes up where they’ve invited you and me to come help them because it’s like, no, you guys are so asleep at the switch. Not asking the questions that you said.

[00:37:47]

Communication is a two-way event. You have to listen and you need to discuss and talk and empathize. There’s a lot more to communication than just sending out a newsletter or sending out an email.

Nick Kalm: [00:38:03]

100%. Absolutely. There is that feeling. Even just, well, do you survey your employees? “Yeah. Well, you know what? We did it before the pandemic and we haven’t done it since.” Well, when you did four years ago, what did you do with it? “Well, we looked at some of the data.” Well, did you share any of the data with the employees? “No, we didn’t.” Wait, what?

Michael Vandervort: [00:38:21]

Yeah. I had a situation at one of my former employers where we had a business unit where every year we would do our employee voice survey and their results would get worse. And they’d scurry around and do stuff and try to fix it, and it would get worse. And that happened 3 or 4 years in a row. And they finally went, “Well, we’ve tried everything.” And so, I wound up being inserted in and went over and just started doing individual meetings with employees. I’m asking them, do they communicate with you? “Well, no.”

[00:38:54]

And you as the manager what are you doing? “Well, we got a newsletter, we got TV monitors, we got stuff up there.” And so, I asked the employees, do you read the newsletters? “No. Nobody ever picks them up.” What about those monitors? They’re all over the place. “Yeah, but they’re not in areas where we can see them.” So, to your point, Phil, they were doing stuff valiantly, trying to fix it, but it wasn’t valuable to the people, so the solution was just expended energy. And I think that happens over and over and over again. That must be super frustrating.

[00:39:27]

So, Nick, switching gears a little bit. Books and resources that you might recommend to clients. Which ones do you have, a set of books or other kind of resources that you recommend to clients the most?

Nick Kalm: [00:39:39]

I’d really encourage clients to look at case studies to understand companies and organizations that have been through some of the same kinds of things that they’ve been through as well. So, Harvard Business Review is always great for case studies. You can get some good stuff out of the conference board and other organizations as well like that. I really encourage that kind of thing specifically. Go talk to somebody and learn from somebody who’s been through this before. Certainly, consultants like us can help as well but I know that a lot of clients just really like to be able to connect with people who are like peers of theirs, who have gone through or are going through similar experiences.

[00:40:16]

I tend to be very practically focused on that stuff, and that’s really what I encourage them to do. So, find those case studies, talk to the people who’ve opined about these kinds of issues or spoken at conferences, or participated in case studies with the HBR or others to really use that as a starting point, to figure out what it is that you need to do and learn from, for sure. But having that outside perspective- we all have our faults, but sometimes it takes our spouses or our friends or our colleagues to say, “You got a little bit of spinach stuck between your teeth,” and we wouldn’t have otherwise noticed that ourselves.

Michael Vandervort: [00:40:53]

Phil loves his books, and he reads them all the time. What’s your take? What do you how do you approach it with our clients, Phil?

Phil Wilson: [00:41:08]

So, one that just came out recently, we’re actually going to do a lunch and learn on this book, but I don’t know if you’ve read it, Nick, called Magic Words. I don’t know if that’s Chip and Dan Heath or if it’s Chip. Chip. No, that’s not the Heath’s. Who wrote that? You’ve got it right there. Jonah Berger. That book is terrific.

Nick Kalm: [00:41:39]

You gave it to me, in fact.

Phil Wilson: [00:41:42]

Oh, I forgot. Well, no wonder you have it. I think that looks great. Like I said, I talked about it already, but Hardball is a terrific book. It’s about communicating in general. The stories are mostly politically related, but the communication principles in it, I think are really, really good. Chip and Dan Heath, that’s why I was thinking about- they did a they had a book called Made to Stick. And one of the key lessons in that book relates to being able to visualize what it is that you’re communicating about. They tell a great story about some company had many different SKUs of gloves.

[00:42:33]

And so, you could tell the story in words going like, “Hey, we have way too many SKUs of gloves. Here’s a list of them.” But what they did was they went to a conference table, they got one of each SKU of glove and put it on a conference table and invited everybody to come in. Didn’t tell them anything other than just there’s this table piled over with gloves. And they’re like, “What the hell is that?” And they’re like, “That’s all the different gloves that we try to sell.”

[00:43:08]

We do this in campaigns. The amount of money that you spend each year in union dues, for example, you can say it’s going to be X number of dollars, but it’s way better to show shopping carts overflowing with all the stuff you could buy with the money that you would otherwise pay in union dues to go, is it worth it?

Nick Kalm: [00:43:31]

Oh yeah. A picture is worth a thousand words for sure

Michael Vandervort: [00:43:36]

So, last question, and then we’ll wrap up. We like to throw our pop culture references in. So, Lord of the Rings. Is there one ring to rule them all for a successful communication strategy?

Nick Kalm: [00:43:55]

Phil said it earlier- it’s listening. I think that’s it. You can come up with the most magic words. We were talking about magic words and I think that’s so key. But unless you’re set up to actively listen- and you guys do this obviously with your approachable leadership training so much too. It’s like you’ve got to make sure that people are actually listening to the people that they’re speaking to, hearing from them, and creating an environment where they feel like they are heard.

[00:44:20]

If you do that, you can even get by with so-so communications to them. But if they’re feeling heard and valued and respected, that’s number one. And that’s a muscle that is not terribly well developed in a lot of companies right now.

Michael Vandervort: [00:44:35]

Yeah. That’s along with front-line leadership who listens, those are two main things that companies really need to focus resources on. Nick, where can people find you and Reputation Partners?

Nick Kalm: [00:44:55]

Is a great discussion. I really enjoyed this very much. As you can tell, I love talking about reputation stuff. So, we’re simple- reputationpartners.com. I’m on LinkedIn, Nick Kalm, like cool, calm, and collected but with a K. That’s where we are. And we’ve got, I think, a good website that talks about what we do and try to do some good thought leadership out there. Phil, you’re my hero in terms of thought leadership. I’m just trying to swim in your wake here a little bit, but it’s good stuff. And I’m delighted to be with you guys. And I’m looking forward to continuing to build a relationship with everybody.

Phil Wilson: [00:45:31]

Yeah. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Nick. This was a great discussion with great tips. Hopefully, people find some good practical takeaway. Like I said before, if you have a communication issue like, Nick is my first call like that. So, if you do have any kind of internal-external communications issue, be sure and look Nick up. You’re a great follow on LinkedIn too. You’ll weigh in on a lot of these events of the day. You see a company that’s blowing it and you don’t step away from that. You’re like, here, look, here’s an example of somebody that is talking about something that they probably need to just stay on the sidelines. Or they need to not just say, “Hey, we’re investigating.” You need to explain what’s going on. You’re going to lose the story.

Nick Kalm: [00:46:28]

Yeah. Just trying to help people. Like I said, case studies are so important but it’s also useful to watch when companies are shooting themselves in the foot. Don’t do that.

Phil Wilson: [00:46:39]

And one last thing. I know we got to go. I’ve gotten to know you and your team’s culture a little bit. But you’re also a good follow as an example of a company that really celebrates its team, celebrates the growth and development of that team. It’s a great window into what a small business should be doing to build a great culture. So, I think that’s another really good reason to follow you.

Nick Kalm: [00:47:14]

I appreciate it. Thank you.

Michael Vandervort: [00:47:17]

Yeah. Hey, Nick, thanks so much for joining us on Left of Boom today. We’re going to go ahead and wrap up. I hope you have a great rest of the day and enjoy your weekend in Chicago, Nick.

Nick Kalm: [00:47:29]

Thank you, gentlemen. Great to see you both as always. I appreciate it.

Phil Wilson: [00:47:32]

See you soon, Nick. Thanks.

Michael Vandervort: [00:47:33]

Take care.

Nick Kalm: [00:47:35]

Yeah. Bye now.