Deirdre Latour on Why Everything is Communications

Mixing Board Studio Session

Deirdre Latour is the founder of Rebellis Communications. She previously served as Chief Communications Officer at GE where she led communication strategy for the company during crises, major acquisitions, massive layoffs, financial turbulence, CEO changes, the evolution of technology and more. She leverages this experience to help companies and leaders promote and protect their brands in ways that resonate today.

In this Studio Session, Deirdre and Mixing Board Founder Sean Garrett talk about the importance of small wins, building real trust as a leader, managing up, and working for people you respect. 

SG: How would you describe the path that got you to what you’re doing now? 

DL: I was at Edelman and at Porter Novelli in the beginning of my career where I largely did entertainment and consumer work. Then I got recruited to GE, where I stayed for 14 years. I ended up the Chief Communications Officer and was on the leadership team at the company. I was there until 2018, then left and went to a British company called Pearson, and then went back to Edelman where I spent a year and a half running their New York office. 

Then I took time off to be with my three boys. From there I decided to start my own company. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people about different jobs, and a lot of times the jobs didn’t feel right to me. They were perfectly good jobs. But I did so much at GE (like over 40 quarters of earnings), that I was looking for something new and challenging in a different way.  If I ever find that next job that feels right, I will take it even though I enjoy consulting.

SG: You spent 14 years at GE and ended up reporting to the CEO. How did you navigate the politics there? And when you think back on that ascent, was it just about putting one foot in front of the other? Or was there some kind of unlock? 

DL: When I started at GE in my early thirties, I was fairly junior in the banding system, coming from Edelman as a VP. They sat me down and said, "You're really good at what you do. You're really smart. You're really valuable. But you need leadership coaching." That was the biggest pivotal point in my career – them saying, you're amazing at 70% of the job but you really suck at this one thing. They didn't say it that way, but that's really what they were saying. 

At GE, they had a very specific system of how to move and grow people and they wanted to move women up through the company into leadership. My GE career was about micro-wins, micro-interactions and micro-wins. I started working for the CEO when I first got there, I was doing his charity work. But I was flying with him and stuff. Those micro-interactions fed the growth and reputation internally I needed to get to where I ended up. Ultimately, I was named an officer of the company. There were 300,000 people in that company, 130 officers and a small number of them were women. It was a really big deal for me. But it wasn’t about big dramatic wins, it was every day going in for the small wins.

SG: You ended up managing 420 people. How do you do that? 

DL: Through process. Which sounds really boring, but it was through great attention to operating rhythms. I had a war room every Monday morning, I had a separate council for the comms leaders of the businesses. I probably spent 60% of my time on people. That's also my nature, as my leadership has evolved. I spent a ton of time one-on-one and a ton of time traveling. I went to Beijing to have big team meetings with the team there. It’s about real trust and respect. I'm not Chinese, I don't speak Mandarin. I had to trust that those folks in China were going to do the right thing and come back to me when they needed to. And they did. You treat people like adults and they do the work.

SG: You're spending 60% of your time on people but there's obviously a lot of other stuff going on. How much are you managing up, managing other leaders, letting them know what's going on in the comms world, and making sure that they're cool with it? How did you balance that and what was your technique?

DL: I managed up because you have to. It’s just lots of communication, and different communications depending on who the leader was, because every leader takes in things differently. If I sent a weekly update to the CEO, he would delete it. But he would call me almost every day. He would call me with whatever his agenda was, and I would say, "Hey, do you have two more minutes? I have a couple things." That would be my sales job and my time to share updates – I've done this in China, I did this over here, I want to make sure you know this. I made the most of whatever opportunity I had. It’s a lot of managing up because you have to. Everybody has to.  If you don’t communicate your value internally, who will?

SG: Do you think you changed people's perception of the role of comms while you were there? Because a lot of stuff changed over that time you were there.

DL: Yes. It started with my predecessor, Gary Sheffer. He got a ton of respect in the C-suite. When I came in, basically the last year and a half was just a crisis, 24 hours a day. They needed me very badly. They had to decide – either we trust her, she's going to handle it, or we gotta figure it out. I do think that as time evolved a lot of those executives started to understand that strategic communications is not just a nice to have. They knew that we would fail if we didn't have a strong leader in the seat. So then anything that would happen in the company, I was at the table to discuss what we were going to do about it.

SG: Then you got promoted to report directly to the CEO. What was the impact of that?

DL: It's very dependent on where you work. I don't think people should get hung up on that if you have the power you need within the organization. If you're reporting to the general counsel, for example, and not the CEO, but everyone gives you all of the access and power you need, who cares? Prior to that change I was still fully working for Jeff Immelt even though I wasn't working for Immelt on the org chart. When that change happened the CEO at the time gave me another title – Senior Advisor and Chief Communications Officer. That helped with people understanding that I was actually a business person and not just a “PR” person. 

SG: We could spend two hours covering the CEO transition there, but what was your major lesson learned from that process?

DL: This sounds so dumb and obvious, but it's really hard. The major lesson learned is figuring out the actual truth of what is happening. There is so much emotion and psychology among a lot of people, board members, other executives, the guy who didn't get the job, etcetera. It gets so messy. I did some things really well, and I did some things really badly, that I look back at now and would do differently. 

SG: So you left GE, you joined Pearson, which is a big UK company that does life-long education. One of the hardest things in comms is shifting organizations, whether they're two years old or 25 years old, to move from a reactive mindset to a proactive mindset. What was your experience with that?

DL: Pearson is a hundred-and-seventy-five years old British company. I love the British people. I just want to say that. But I'm a New Yorker, from Massachusetts originally. With the British team, you had to dig through stuff to figure out what they're actually saying to you because there's so much politeness.

As I learned, getting the world of education to shift is a slow process. I'm a fast mover. The CEO of GE once said to me, your greatest quality is your instinct. I just know when we need to do things (of course good data always helps). They would say, it'd be years before we can do what you are suggesting. It was a very slow pace, and you have to be patient with that.

My team did this great reel on the brand and what the brand stood for in the world. The reel was a dynamic synopsis of the brand in rap, it was basically like Hamilton style.  This was a mistake. It was not that revolutionary but oh my god, you would've thought I went naked to that brand meeting. The lesson was, how do you push? When do you push? How far can you do it?  I did eventually win with the board on the brand evolution and the messaging but I learned a lot of lessons along the way.

SG: Did you feel like you left them in a better place?

DL: The team, yes, a lot for team reasons. But also sometimes the shake-up is good, even if you're not the one ultimately the one to execute the shake-up.

SG: How do you see the role of agencies today? 

DL: I think it's going to be more and more niche focused experts. For those of us who have been at a big one, we know the cost structure is unsustainable. There is just so much overhead that the fees get all screwy. Then there's the classic bait and switch of you're getting Deirdre in the room, and then you get Deirdre's deputy who graduated yesterday. 

I'm not talking about any specific one, but I don't see how they continue at that size. Given the nature of how things are now, the world is so unstructured and diffuse, and we have to change how we bring brands to market in such a different way. The typical agency model is old-fashioned. There's a corporate team and a consumer team. it's not integrated.

The benefit when you're at a big company is to have an agency that maybe can help you in six countries. But when I left, it wasn't working anymore because they didn't want Deirdre's agency, a massive agency in China. They want a Chinese agency. At the end, even that was getting so niche.

SG: You're now proudly a consultant. What do you love about it, and what are you trying to improve?

DL: I'm fascinated by the opportunity to do what I like to do with cool people that I want to do it with. I'm really excited about that. But I'm finding it hard. I was in big companies for so long so I’m in the funky beginning stages where I’m still figuring things out. 

I loved leading teams. I love lifting people up, helping people become better than they ever thought they could be, is my favorite thing. Now I'm doing some communications coaching work, not leadership coaching, but literally  –– when do you communicate, how do you communicate, how is it working? I love it. That's an interesting twist. It's not what I would've expected to do and I am good at it.

SG: What advice would you give someone entering into comms now? What is your case for optimism and how they should approach this work?

DL: Communication is more important than it's ever been at any time. Everything that you see is entirely communication based – so there's a lot of opportunity to do great work. 

I would also always look really, really carefully at who you're working for. I've made the mistake of saying, there's so much good, there's so much opportunity, but… this one guy is not great. Everyone has to pay the bills, and I get that. But even if you're layered in a big organization, is it an organization you feel good about? 

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