Any job change requires an adjustment. But the transition
between PR agency and corporate life - and vice versa - can be an
exceptionally bumpy road. The fundamental PR skills may remain the
same, but the very different environments in many cases demand very
different approaches to your work style.
Most agency pros, for instance, will tell you that agencies tend
to demand longer hours that can encroach on personal lives.
Likewise, corporate pros say their own work environments usually
come with more cumbersome bureaucracy, or more "politics."
But many PR professionals who have made the change see the
negatives as positives: The long agency hours are a sign of
entrepreneurial vigor, and corporate politics are merely the bumps
that come along with learning the ropes. For those making the
transition in either direction, they say, there are tools and
techniques to help ensure a soft landing.
Entrepreneurial Vigor
In most agencies, you'll be responsible in some ways for growing
business. That has been a big adjustment for Judy Radlinsky. A
former director of external communications at HP, she left that
role in June 2002. She knew her HP job would be changing because of
the HQ/Compaq merger, and she was curious about the variety
inherent in agency work. Thus in September she joined The Hoffman
Agency as a VP - her first job on the agency side. She says she
would not mind seeking out new clients, if only she had more
information to go by.
"You just can't know as much about a new-business opportunity as
you can with a new business process or a new initiative in-house,"
she says. Working in-house, you know the "client" players and are
part of their organization. With an outside client, on the other
hand, "you can get lots and lots of information, but you never will
get the full range, because you are not living [inside the client
organization]."
To figure out the system, Radlinsky is working with others in
the agency who can serve as mentors.
"I am seeking out those folks who seem to thrive in the
new-business environment, and I am asking them a lot of questions,"
she says.
In particular, Radlinsky has worked alongside VP of Global
Programs Michelle Herman, who has primary responsibility for
business initiatives.
This approach is hardly unique among job changers in any
industry. But almost without exception, our sources - no matter how
much experience they have in PR - say their most valuable asset in
making the corporate/agency switch has been a good mentor.
In fact, for those considering making the transition,
professional recruiters recommend face-to-face work over and above
other forms of research.
"Go and meet and talk with a bunch of people on the other side
and find out about their jobs," advises Ted Chaloner of Chaloner
Associates, a recruiter specializing in communications
searches.
Kris Brown, a former PR exec at Gateway, was recruited by Porter
Novelli's high-tech practice (then known as Copithorne &
Bellows. She is now PR director at Lavidge & Baumayr in
Scottsdale, Ariz.
Before making the leap to the agency life, "I talked to other
folks who were on the agency side. I asked a lot of people about
the plusses and minuses of each," she says.
Grass Is Greener
Many communications execs who have made the change felt their
level of credibility with the "client" - whether a client
organization or an in-house client department - lessened. Corporate
pros who moved to agencies say that as a corporate VP it was easier
to gain acceptance for your ideas throughout the corporate
hierarchy.
"The clients don't know you the way they know their colleagues,
and so you have to work a lot harder at gaining trust and
confidence," says Kathleen Dezio, who went from Lockheed to an SVP
spot at The McGinn Group.
Ironically, Tom Womack describes the same dilemma - but he went
from an agency to a corporate position.
"In an agency, [clients] know that there is value in what you
are doing - you are being hired by them as an expert consultant,
after all - whereas on the corporate side you have to justify your
existence every day," says Womack, a former senior associate with
Burson-Marsteller.
These anecdotes are mirrored in a national survey on transitions
among PR executives conducted by Heyman Consulting. That study
shows that "a majority of executives from both groups spoke about
the need to sell the benefits of their work continually as the
single biggest challenge in making this transition."
For some people, making the transition means finding one's place
in the food chain.
Steve Capoccia, general manager at the LEWIS Agency, has been on
the corporate side before, where he found himself seeking out the
players, chatting about their hobbies, forging social relationships
with the executives who exercised control over the PR process.
"You have to be aware of the lay of the land in terms of who
controls the decision-making process," he says. "Even for something
as simple as a press release, you need to know what the approval
process is for that, and you want to make sure you develop good
relationships with people so you can walk in their office and say,
'Where is the XYZ release?' That means if you see someone in the
company lunchroom, you get up and spend some time that way."
For others, adaptation means learning to work on a client's
timeframe.
Kathleen Dezio went from Lockheed to The McGinn Group, where as
SVP she has had to learn to ease back on the throttle. "The biggest
challenge so far is coming to terms with the fact that you are no
longer an inside player, which means that you don't control the
decisions," she says.
"There are things that I could propose in a corporate setting
and they would be accepted immediately, because I was a 'known
quantity.' Before, I could make it happen, and I knew that I
could," she says. In her new role as outside advisor, rather than
inside player, "there is a lot of waiting while an idea makes its
way through the [client's] corporate hierarchy."
Executives interviewed for the Heyman study offered much the
same advice. Asked how they had overcome their career-change
challenges, they answered most frequently that they had "learned
how to pace themselves."
[Editor's Note: Coming up in a March issue of PR NEWS, we'll
show you how to make the transition from corporate to nonprofit
life.]
Embracing Change
Many senior-level PR pros who leave the corporate setting do so
to take on an extremely entrepreneurial role with an agency,
whether they're launching a new office for an established firm or
hanging out their own shingle as a consultant.
Steve Capoccia once served with Fortune 150 firm Textron. He
left to launch the Boston office of international high-tech PR firm
LEWIS. "I saw more leadership opportunity within an agency versus
in a corporate setting," he explains.
But his first taste of that leadership was not exactly what he
expected. Capoccia had to find an office location with good
commuter access at an economically viable price. He had to get the
phones working and purchase the appropriate computer systems. As a
PR professional, these were not tasks he was trained to handle.
Margaret Dawson, on the other hand, loved the entrepreneurial
bit. As founder of The Weber Group's branch office in Taiwan she
ran her own show and enjoyed it, and when she came back to the
United States for a job as international PR director for
Amazon.com, it was hard at first to give up that leading role.
"I learned to own the piece of the business that I had," she
explains. "For example, when we launched the Japanese site, that
was hugely PR-driven. So you take the project, you own it 150
percent, and that becomes your little business."
Contacts: Steve Capoccia, 617/454-1100, [email protected]; Judy Radlinsky,
408/975-3039, [email protected]; Kris
Brown, 480/ 998-2600, [email protected]; Tom Womack,
972/312-6670, [email protected];
Margaret Dawson, 206/624-0388, [email protected];
Ted Chaloner, 617/451-5170, [email protected]