Allies and Ambassadors | Morag Barrett, Kerry-Ann Stimpson, Jacqueline Jodl and Haylie Wrubel | 510

Peter Winick: You and I have both online and offline had conversations around the concept of building allies, that is finding individuals who will help support you or support you take your ideas to scale. So how do you define an ally?

Oh, an ally is your best friend at work. And you can have more than one best friend, to be clear, but for everybody listening to this conversation, I think it's easiest to sum it up with: think about the person in your career—boss, colleague, whatever—who you would jump at the chance to work with again. And that, to me, is probably the ally for each of us. And for me, what distinguishes them is they're the ones who are there championing you and celebrating your success when you need it. They're the ones that will give you the kick in the pants when we all need it. And they'll hold us accountable for being the best version of ourselves. So that to me is an ally. What about you, Bill?

So I use a slightly different definition of ally. So I think about allies from the perspective of thought leadership, which is about taking ideas to scale. So when I talk about allies, I'm talking about folks who will help open doors for you and help you take an idea to a place that you couldn't have taken it on its own. Now, your allies may also— to use your kick in the pants metaphor— it may not be you but they'll help kick the idea into shape. They may be your intellectual sparring partner.

Oh, I agree. And think about it, whether it's accelerating my career or accelerating an idea or shaping an idea, allies are invaluable because they give you that outside-in perspective. And for me, a true ally, they're the ones who are championing the idea and saying, "Hey, Bill, you need to talk to Morag because here's what she's working on." versus we've had adversaries and rivals who might go the other way, which is, "Hey, Bill, talk to me. Morag gave me this thought, but I'm now running with the idea and they are stealing credit." So you're right, allies and advocates amplify, but they don't just amplify me when I'm with them. They amplify us when we're not in the room.

And this is one of the reasons why I was excited about this conversation. I use the term ambassador in that case, right? Because the ambassador speaks on your behalf and speaks on the idea's behalf when you're not in the room, just like an ambassador would in a diplomatic setting.

Yeah, I agree. For me, I think my differentiation there would be two degrees of separation. The allies are there in the room with you, whether that's a virtual Zoom room or in the meeting room if you're actually able to meet in three dimensions. Your ambassadors are almost like ripple effects. So you're gonna have first-degree ambassadors who are championing the idea for you, but also there are gonna be the second-degree, the, "Hey, I heard that Bill and Morag were working on this. I've not actually— you should talk to them." And that's where we start to get the ripple effects, where things start to go viral, but also we start to get momentum and curiosity behind the ideas and how they may help us all individually and collectively. Learn, grow, and succeed.

And if you're trying to take an idea to scale and create even a movement, having allies and ambassadors first order and second order is absolutely essential because there's no amount of work that you can do individually or as a small team if you're working on a big project that has the potential for significant impact You need help. You do.

And I think one of the mistakes I've made, certainly in the early part of my career, was I valued independence versus interdependence. It was one of the catalysts for writing my first book, Cultivate: The Power of Winning Relationships. I'm pretty smart. I'm pretty resourceful. Give me a challenge or a project, and I will go do and execute with a minimum of supervision. But the reality is, as soon as— you've just nailed it— as soon as we start involving others, we get to that exponential and it grows much more quickly. It becomes infectious in a good way, Luke, bearing in mind we're living through a pandemic. And we start to incorporate other ideas. I mean, we talked about my latest book manuscript, again, working with input from editors each time, as much as getting your homework graded is stressful, each iteration just makes it tighter and makes it more robust. To help more people in the future.

So, how do you wind up cultivating allies rather than creating adversaries and rivals?

Well, the first piece is understanding what is it that you're trying to achieve personally and professionally. So, whether you're working within an organization's ecosystem or whether you are a thought leader who is sharing with a broader community, Understanding what is— what does success look like for you? And then I suggest just starting with the first 5. Who are the first 5 people that come to mind that have an opinion or have a voice that is being listened to within the company that you're operating? And those are your potential allies and ambassadors. And so once you know that list, then you can start taking the first steps to cultivate the relationship. And getting them on board with the idea and being clear and explicit around how they can best help you to help them to get the word out.

So let's explore a little bit about something that I know you're passionate about, which is that internal communications with employees. How do you help make sure and how do you educate people about the importance of dark social within the organization?

So from my perspective, I think first of all, we always have to start from a place of understanding what's in it for me, right? I always subscribe to the belief that people ultimately work for themselves, right? They don't really work for the company. And so whenever it is you want to educate them or onboard them into something new, you have to start from the place of, well, not only how is this benefiting the company or impacting the company, how is it impacting you? And as co-owners of the brand or co-ambassadors of the brand, we always want to be super sensitive to the fact that we need to always be in tune to what's happening in terms of the conversations happening about the brand. What are people saying and hearing about us? And that's really where it starts from an internal communication perspective. It's saying, look, there are these conversations happening in these channels that we can't control. We recognize that you actually exist in those channels because you've got your own networks going on. How do we address the fact that we need to be partnering more, uh, as again co-ambassadors of the brand and you as owners of your own personal brands? How can we be partnering to leverage what is really an awesome opportunity not only to build a company brand but also to build your personal brand as well through these channels that are clearly very active, very dynamic, and flourishing as we speak.

And so one of the things that I love is that alignment of an individual as an employee building their brand also reinforces the brand of the organization. And the more that you have stars within the organization, the more people say, Oh, that's an organization that's going places. They've got their stuff together if they can attract and retain that quality of people.

That's right, absolutely. And, you know, the fact too that the company is, I would say, quote unquote, allowing that, and I use the word allowing loosely because we recognize that it's still an ongoing conversation. There are a lot of companies that are still more so content with kind of clamping down and wanting to control the voices of their employees in the social space and not really permitting them and allowing them to flourish and build their own personal brand. So the fact that you see an organization with employees who are out there having the conversations, building their brands, producing valuable content, and people are saying, "Hey, that company is onto something," in much the same way, because they're catching the vision that it's a win-win. It's not just about spitting out company content, But it's about trust and working with and partnering with employees, recognizing that, hey, they're going to be out there talking in their social channels anyway. Why not make it a partnership? Why not make it work for everyone?

Well, and whether it's happening on publicly seen social or a friend texts and says, hey, I'm thinking of a financial services company. What do you think of JMMB? You work for them. That could happen by a text message, and that answer is going to impact the brand.

Just like that. Just like that. So let's talk about—

I think one of the things you have to do is accept that as a marketer, there are conversations that you cannot control about your brand., right? And that's a hard thing to accept. So you sit in a CMO seat on that. How do you think about that in terms of your organization?

So the first response is that I think that it's potentially scary, right? Because it's always great to want to be in control. Again, you're especially coming from a place of managing the official company accounts, you know, you're putting out the branded messages that you sit and work so hard to create. And then recognizing that there is a whole other world of conversations going on again in channels that you can, let alone you can't even control it, you can't even see it. So you don't even know what's happening. It can be potentially scary, but at the same time, I also see it as a place of potential great opportunity, quite frankly, because when you think about again how the company brand is seen and perceived, We are, we're all about talking about ourselves, right? And I think people expect the company message to be positive, but what we recognize is that trust of institutions is at an all-time low these days. People tend to trust more so the word or the recommendation or referral of a friend, a family member, or a colleague more so than they would trust the company marketing message. And so there is the opportunity. It's not about, well, I can't control it, so I'm just going to take to the bottle on this one. No, it's recognizing here's a great opportunity. What can we do to— if we can't control the conversation, what can we do to impact the conversation as best we can? And that's where I think it's a great place to start as a marketer.

If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. And how do you take a good, necessary idea so that you create more impact? And one of the things I want, want to touch on here is the concept of allies and ambassadors. And I think your work becomes very closely related to that. And from the lexicon that I use, an ally will open a door for you. They will get you into a room or a conversation that you might not get to on your own. An ambassador makes a deeper level of commitment. They say, "I believe in this idea. I will speak on your behalf. I will join the movement, and I am here with you." And so I want to ask both of you, how are you cultivating allies and ambassadors?

Hailey, do you want to start?

Yeah, I think that was a brilliant way to articulate it. And Bill, we will credit you when we use that language moving forward. But I think you, you really nailed exactly what we're trying to do with our thought leadership campaign. Something that we constantly talk about within Special Olympics, and a lot of this is credited to our chairman, Dr. Tim Shriver, is for 53 years Special Olympics has been a nice to do. Oh, that's so sweet. Oh, you work for Special Olympics. So sweet. Oh, those kids. That's a terminology used pretty frequently. Those kids are so sweet. We need to take Special Olympics from a nice to do to a need to do, to an urgent, life-changing, life-altering message. And we need to do that through ambassadors. And through our enablers. And through this thought leadership campaign, our idea and our goal and our strategy is to work alongside key thought leaders within the education, within the inclusion space, and not only thought leaders that are individuals, but organizations that act as thought leaders and to sell them essentially on our message of inclusion. Say, this is what we're trying to do, we think it aligns with your message, and really, to use the terminology we were using earlier, invite them, invite them in, invite them to be a part of the message. Once they're in, once they've got their invite to the party, we're going to co-create deliverables that we can use to open the doors, to provide the legitimacy for our work and have those ambassadors, have those key individuals a part of our team that continues to push this message forward. And through having those co-joint deliverables, as well as having some key speaking opportunities, key additional opportunities, that is what we're going to use to leverage us moving forward. Jackie, what else?

Yeah, I think that's great. And I love the language of allies and ambassadors. So the way we think about that is we think about it in terms of a continuum. So let's say that allies are on the left and let's say ambassadors on the right. I think that what we recognize, the first key is that when you're starting to identify Allies, and I think this is the mistake that many of some of the other thought leadership campaigns, you know, where they've gone wrong, is they're identifying allies very narrowly. We need to identify allies broadly. Like, where do we have a shared agenda? You know, does this resonate with you? Can this, can we find some resonance, you know, in your agenda to support our work? And then, you begin the process of, you know, through our work, through sharing our impact, by shifting those allies down the continuum to move into the ambassador lane. And that is, we have a whole, you know, we have a whole collection of social, political, and cultural ambassadors that are actually called Special Olympics ambassadors. And those are the ones that are willing to go on the front lines and really storytell for us, going back to the storytelling theme. But understanding that, the connection, that allies and ambassadors are their different strategies to recruit them, but ultimately, we want those strategies to come together, and that we want many of our allies to shift into becoming ambassadors for the movement. We call it the Special Olympics movement, If you're sitting in any Special Olympics room, whether it's in any part of the world, you'll hear everyone referring to it as a movement. And I think that it absolutely captures what we're attempting to do on a broad scale. You know, scale for us is a movement. I think that that really reflects all of the passion that we all have for the work that we're doing.

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