[upbeat music] Hey friend, it's Scott Amenta here, the founder of the Chief of Staff Network. I'll be your host on today's episode.
We help chiefs of staff through the three Cs, cohorts, curriculum, and community via Slack, cohort-based programs, live events, conferences and more.
You can learn more about our memberships, events, and courses at chiefofstaff.network. We've got another great episode ahead of us with former chief of staff at Harry's, and now founder of Metronome, Rachel Peck.
In this episode, you'll hear about Rachel's career spending nearly a decade at Harry's, where she served as chief of staff to the founders before leading learning and development.
She shares lessons from scaling internal and executive communications at every stage of company growth, and what it takes to make company messaging truly memorable.
Rachel is one of the lead facilitators of the Chief of Staff Launch Pad, our new program for aspiring and early-stage chiefs of staff.
We talked about how to write in your principal's voice, build trust through proactive comms, and approach crisis moments with authenticity and clarity. Let's get into it. All right, Rachel, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me. We've been together in lots of different contexts, but not on a podcast yet, so this is a first. It's true. We've been on stages. We've been at coffee shops. We've done workshops.
It's about time we got a podcast episode in. This is a long time waiting. I know a lot about your career, but our audience probably doesn't. You spent nearly a decade at Harry's.
You moved through a chief of staff role to leading learning and development. How did some of those experiences kinda shape your approach to communication?
Uh, and I guess before you answer all that, tell us a little bit about yourself and your career path even before Harry's.
I think one of my favorite things about talking to chiefs of staff is that everyone has such a different, interesting, wandering career path, and I'm probably no exception to that.
So I started my career actually in corporate communications. I was doing public relations and investor relations at a boutique firm here in New York.
Quit, found my way in the startup world after that job, and that's when I joined Harry's back in twenty thirteen. Found my feet on that rocket ship and was there for about a decade, which was a lot of fun.
Um, like you said, I was a chief of staff to our founder and CEO, and then pivoted to start and lead a learning and development team at Harry's before starting my own firm, Metronome, where we do leadership development work in the form of executive coaching, team workshops, off-site, and systems design.
So I joke all the fun HR stuff. And communication in a lot of ways has been a thread that has run through all of that.
Obviously, it's where I started my career, and I have a lot of love for it as a strategy, mode of communication, mode of motivation, so I'm excited to get into this conversation with you and talk more about it.
You obviously saw Harry's go from a few dozen people, if not less, fewer, to hundreds of employees. What kinds of communication challenges came up along the way? And l- let's start with internal challenges.
Like, just as head count grows, what did you guys come across over the course of that change? So when I joined, we were small enough to all sit around a big table.
[laughs] We would do our lunches sort of all sitting around a big table and then grew to, you know, over a thousand people globally, so a lot of growth.
And communication was a challenge, I think, at every step of that journey. There's different, I think, inflection points when you have to think differently about communication.
Sometimes people say that, like, a hundred and fifty people is the first point where you really need to think about scaling your communication, but I think it's probably even sooner.
And communication hits at every point of the employee life cycle, right?
So everything from how do you onboard new people and communicate mission, vision, values, culture, your job, your expectations, what you can expect, like, all of that throughout the life cycle.
Um, changes that are happening. Here's a performance review process we're rolling out. Here's a new way of thinking about decision-making. Here's what's going on in the business. Hey, we just acquired a German factory.
Like, across all of the different sort of, like, internal and external moments of the company you have to think about not just how do I communicate the message, but how do I communicate the message based on where the company is today in terms of size and stage and culture and scale.
So it's fun. I mean, I think it's a fun challenge, right?
It's like your tactics and messages look different when you're twenty people sitting around a table versus when you're five hundred people globally distributed across multiple offices.
But it's the same, I think, principles that run through a lot of those different moments in a company's scale. And so it was fun to see how it looked at different moments in time.
I always forget that you guys acquired that German factory pretty early in the company's life cycle, which was a huge bet and probably felt like the most risky thing, at least at the time, for the company to be doing, but clearly paid off.
How's your German, by the way? Nicht so gut. [laughs] I'm sorry, Scott. I know you're, you're recording this from Berlin. Better than-- arguably better than mine, though. No, I'm kidding. My wife might say so.
[laughs] You were close to Jeff and Andy from the beginning, so how did kind of their approach to communication and kinda working with them shape your thinking around just, you know, executive narrative and especially founder narrative, right, for kind of a founder-led company?
I think Jeff and Andy are-- they're special leaders in a lot of ways, but I think one of the ways that I sort of most appreciated their leadership or most learned from them is the way that, A, they care a lot about communicating.
I think they see it as a core part of their job, and they're good at it.
They're very different actually in terms of style and tone and how they like to structure messages, and so there was a bit of a learning curve in terms of communicating on behalf of Jeff versus communicating on behalf of Andy.
But I think at their core, they care about it a lot, and they both are pretty authentic in how they communicate and share messages.
So for me, it was really a matter of understanding each of their voices and styles and goals, just spending a lot of time together, doing a lot of drafts, [laughs] like trial and errorAnd then over time feeling really comfortable, not just recommending messages and channels and tactics, but often actually like writing for them in their own voice.
You did a lot of that without any use of AI, by the way, for audience listening. Um, it's a totally different world these days. [laughs] You're aging me.
Well, I mean, and myself as well, but, you know, I think it's an important skill to learn and to do it from scratch to try to emulate someone's voice is much easier said than done.
You know, 'cause it's not just verbiage, right? It's tone and structure and- That's right.
I think today if I were using AI, I would be really, really careful to feed the AI model with a lot of their actual authentic communication so that it doesn't just feel like it's gobbledygook or like corporate jargon.
I think one of the biggest problems I see in executive communications is that it feels like it's written by a robot versus an actual human.
In some ways I didn't have the luxury of AI, but in other ways I think I didn't have like the curse or the crutch of AI, and so I actually had to like be a human writing for humans.
[laughs] And one of the things that I think is so awesome about Geoff and Andy is that they're so authentic as communicators. Like, you know, we're dropping F-bombs. Like, we're telling personal stories.
We're telling jokes, like some good, some bad. [laughs] And I think that if I were using AI, I'd wanna make sure that AI captured all of that, and it didn't just sort of like whitewash them or turn them into a robot.
Yeah, that's right. I know. I think you're right.
Like, AI can be a little bit of a curse or a crutch, if you will, in terms of, you know, actually building those skills, which is part of the reason that we're here today, because you're obviously teaching or leading some of the, the sessions in Chief of Staff Launchpad and, you know, internal and executive comms is obviously a really important one, and having learned it from the ground up, having done this kind of at now a massive organization, I'm curious if you could share a little bit of like your own experience as a chief of staff, but now having coached lots of other chiefs of staff, what do you tend to see as kind of the first big mistake that chiefs of staff make when it comes to thinking about their internal and especially their executive comms?
I think that I and lots of chiefs of staff often think pretty narrowly about what is internal comms.
Something comes to mind when we say that phrase, and often for people it's one of several things, like your all-hands meeting, big corporate moments, board meetings, and yes, like, those are all really important channels that you have to think about and prepare for, but I think there are tons of moments and potential channels that you can use and take advantage of under the umbrella of corporate communication.
So the first thing that I would do is coach or push a chief of staff to think really expansively about all of the messages that they're trying to get across and then all of the channels they have access to in, in more of a creative and open-minded way.
So for example, like your physical office, if you have a physical office, like that's a communication channel. What are you putting on the walls? What's the signage like? Does it feel like you?
Is it reiterating and reinforcing the messages that matter to you?
Thinking about Slack and different channels in Slack, thinking about your email signature as a form of corporate communication, like these are all moments when you're able to communicate, and so to think really broadly about the channels that are available to you, and not just think all-hands meeting or like, you know, quarterly report or these big moments.
I think we sometimes put too much pressure on those moments, and so they can feel stressful, and it can feel like you have to fit a lot in, but there are dozens, hundreds of touchpoints you can have internally and, and often externally, but certainly internally to take advantage of and be strategic about.
I'm thinking back to I think one of the first times that we met, and we were probably sitting at some chief of staff roundtable event.
We were talking about values and how you bring kind of the communication of the company's values to life, and I remember explicitly you saying that one of the values for Harry's was address the mammoth in the room.
Embrace the mammoth in the room. Embrace the mammoth in the room. Yeah.
[laughs] And the fact that I still basically remember that is insane to me 'cause I don't remember any of my company values going back to my own resume.
But, you know, it was clear that like you need word choice that is memorable, that is kind of endemic to the brand, right? The mammoth kind of in the logo, and you know that it works. I remember you saying this.
You know when it works, when people are actually using that in their day-to-day meetings with their colleagues. That's when the values have actually stuck.
That's when the communication has actually made its way deep enough into the brain where it actually people are now living it rather than just saying it.
Yeah, I thought it was just a great example of something that has like actually come to life properly at Harry's, and I think what most companies strive for. I think it's such a good point.
I think we're often scared of being sort of weird, and I think the things that have been most successful in terms of my own communications when I was working at Harry's and then as I've seen other leaders practice this too, it's when you're weird.
It's when you do something that's unexpected. It's when you use language that's sticky. That's when people remember things, and you need people to be able to internalize, remember, understand your messages.
And so yeah, like be weird.
Another example, I was working with Geoff on a note internally to the company when at the time we thought we were gonna merge with the parent company of Schick called Edgewell, and we were sending a note to the internal team to sort of announce that and let them know before we started in a series of like town halls and Q&As and other touchpoints, and we were talking about how to sort of end the note in a way that was like us.
You know? Like inspiring and motivating and like, "Let's go." And the phrase that we ended up with that's sort of legendary that still sticks is, "Buckle the fuck up."
[laughs] And that's like how we ended the note to the internal team.
I forget if we actually spelled it out or if we used some asterisks and @ signs, but [laughs] either way it's like, "Buckle the fuck up," like- Regardless, it's highly memorable. Did that memo ever end up coming out?
Yeah, it was in an internal memo. Yeah, the timeline is that we thought we were gonna merge, so we let the company know.
We spent about nine months preparing for this, and then-Ultimately, it was blocked by the government. Long story, separate podcast.
But yeah, like it was this moment of like, let's be as us as possible, and I think it especially worked because it's a moment when everyone internally, whether they were consciously doing this or not, was probably thinking, "Is our culture gonna change?"
Like, what does this mean in terms of our ability to still be weird and [laughs] like, you know, like ourselves and authentic and Harry's?
And so I think it worked so well, not just 'cause it sounded like Jeff, because it sounded like him in a moment when people were worried that he would stop sounding like him, like he would be corporate, he'd be big company now, things would change.
And so I think just like your ability to use language really strategically like that in like conscious and subconscious ways told people like, our culture's not going anywhere.
Like, we're still committed to being ourselves, and so I think it was really effective and memorable. Yeah.
I mean, it also serves as kind of like a great call to arms, if you will, of just, hey, acknowledging that this is a big change, that some things about the culture or the team or the product are going to change, but this is a kinda do or die moment.
Like, we're pushing all in on this. And so you either join for the ride or take the seatbelt off and get out of the car.
You could write that in a long paragraph, like I just basically said, or you could write that in a, you know, four-word sentence that's amazing.
I was gonna ask if you had any other examples of like amazing comms that you've seen or experienced, some kind of internal newsletters, like what does great look like? But I think we kind of answered it.
Like, great is memorable. Anything else to say there? I think that that's right. Great is authentic, great is memorable, great is fun.
I think we take ourselves really seriously, and it's nice for a piece of communication to feel like it's coming from a human being, and you actually care about that human being.
Like, I always thought that like the biggest compliment that I would get is when a newer hire would be like, "Oh, I feel like I already like know Jeff and Andy, even though I've never actually met them," because their sort of ethos, their personality, their way of talking was so authentic and real and everywhere.
If you're trying to break into a chief of staff role or you're already in the seat and wondering how to make the most of your first ninety days, you're not alone.
We've heard from so many aspiring and new chiefs of staff who are navigating ambiguity, unclear expectations, and the pressure to deliver quickly without a playbook.
That's exactly why we created Chief of Staff Launch Pad, a six-week cohort-based course designed to help you build confidence, structure your role, and hit the ground running.
You'll get expert-led sessions from former chiefs of staff, practical frameworks you can use immediately, and a peer community that's navigating the same challenges.
To learn more or apply, head to chiefofstaff.network/launchpad. What about when things are not going well? Let's talk about crisis comms. Things feel like they're going through the tank.
You know, somebody needs to respond. The team has questions. Maybe the public has questions, depending on the type of organization. In these moments, how should a chief of staff react?
How do they prioritize internal versus external messaging? What's kind of the first thing on the to-do list in your book? I always think like internal team first. Put your oxygen mask on. Take care of your internal team.
That's not to say that you can't in parallel focus on external statements, but I think that like you need your team to feel like they know what's going on, like they're not reading something for the first time in the press, like they are bought in and committed even when things are hard.
And so often the messages are gonna be very similar. You're just gonna think about the channels and the communication internally versus externally.
But I personally always had a bend towards like what does our internal team need. That's my own point of view on that.
I think that like particularly for internal, but really for both, I think that when you're in a moment of crisis, sort of like have two rules or like two thoughts.
But I think it's really important to focus on acknowledging your own role, acknowledging your own fault if there was fault, acknowledging clearly what's happening, like acknowledge, acknowledge, acknowledge without excuse or without confusion.
And then the other piece is just like listen. I think that like a lot of times when something's hard, people wanna explain it all away. Like, I even do this personally in my life.
It's like, "Oh, I didn't mean to do that, and here's like..." Like, you know, you start to get anxious, then you start to make lots of excuses, and you start to then fumble your language.
And I think that a very helpful reminder in moments of crisis is to just find ways to listen instead of talk.
That internally could look like, "Hey, we know that we're in this hard moment right now and we wanna hear how it's impacting you.
So instead of having a town hall, we're gonna have a series of listening circles or listening sessions where you can share how you're feeling, how this is impacting you and your team."
Not only does it get you off the hook from having to write really maybe complicated or hard messages, but I think it's what a lot of people want or need. You could do the same thing to customers.
Like let's say you have like a customer data breach or something that is externally impacting your customers. Maybe you have to raise prices because of tariffs or some other external thing going on in the world.
Maybe you say, "Here's what's going on. Here's our why. But we wanna hear from you. What is this bringing up for you? What do you need from us? How can we continue to earn and build your trust?"
And so I always think that there are like moments to listen.
That's sort of how I would think about approaching it at the very highest level, like acknowledging what's going on, your own fault or role in it, transparently what's happening, and then shifting from explaining towards listening.
I would agree with that.
I would add to that in saying like the chief of staff, this is kind of the best opportunity in a lot of ways to go back to the relationships, go back to the trust that hopefully you've built over whatever months and days you've had in the role across the whole team.
And so particularly for that first batch of internal comms, you know, yes, there might be a company-wide message.
Hopefully, you're probably at the writing table in terms of crafting that message, but that message is going to apply across the broadest swath of employees.
It's not gonna address anyone individually, and so-This, I think, is the opportunity for a chief of staff. And look, it depends on the size of the organization. You're not gonna take thousands of one-on-ones in a day.
It's not possible.
But where you can scale, you know, some amount of your time to go listen across teams, right, across the organization, and actually hear the reflection back of, "Well, here's what we read in your memo or the CEO's memo.
Here's what I heard, and here's how that impacts me," allows you to be m- more proactive rather than reactive to the following sets of messages that are gonna come out in the following days, right?
That's gonna happen on an all-hands. It's gonna happen after the investors get wind of whatever's going on, and now there's another set of input, and it's gonna happen as the press gets, you know, wind of it as well.
And so those employees are, are gonna wanna be constantly messaged to and kept up to date.
It's never one and done is my learning, at least from these types of moments, and it's hardly insulated, usually never insulated just to, like, one small group. Everything is a leaky bucket, regardless of the culture.
Yeah, that's totally right. Something that you said also sparked for me, like, leaning on your previous relationships to do this, and I think that it's a really good reminder.
So for feedback, there's a lot of research that three to one is the ideal positive to constructive feedback ratio.
So for every one piece of constructive feedback, you want three pieces of positive feedback so that you can continue to maintain a trusting, healthy relationship with that person, and it doesn't feel like you're just giving positive feedback, or you're just always giving constructive feedback.
I think about communication sort of similarly. If the only time you're communicating with people is because there's a problem, like, your ratio is off.
And so thinking about this proactively, even when times are good, [laughs] and especially when times are good, and making sure that, you know, sometimes you are gonna have challenging news to deliver, but making sure that that ratio feels right so that your CEO isn't just, like, the bearer of bad news.
But they're also doing AMAs, Ask Me Anything, and they're also sharing positive business wins, and they're celebrating the values, and they're doing positive, exciting culture-building things, not just coming in to, like, be the grim reaper.
I love that the ratio example is really strong. You often hear, you know, this notion of don't try to sandwich feedback. Like, don't provide good feedback, then hard feedback, and then good feedback again.
Like, then the hard feedback just gets lost kind of in the shuffle. The three-to-one ratio definitely makes a lot more sense, and it doesn't all have to happen at the same time.
I think that's the other kind of critical piece, right?
Is you're having conversations on an ongoing basis, and so in the back of your head, you should be doing that math of how much constructive feedback am I giving versus how much kind of positive indicators of the job or work experience is happening.
Let's talk a little bit about your role as a chief of staff, some reflections on your own leadership.
I'm curious, like, thinking of all the leadership skills that a chief of staff kinda needs to own on a day-to-day basis, which is the one that you would say has taken the longest to kind of perfect?
And I know perfect is a strong word. So I'm no longer a chief of staff.
I haven't been a chief of staff for a minute now, so I'm not currently in the role, but I, I work with lots of chiefs of staff, coach chiefs of staff, and there are lots of skills.
I think that the beauty and the hard part about the role is that it can be so tailored to the individual, and it's a lot of, you know, what the Chief of Staff Network talks about and teaches.
And so this probably isn't new news to people listening to this.
But I think because of that, like, the skills that I was personally working on building were probably different than the skills that other folks were building.
So a lot of the communication stuff actually came very naturally to me, and I really enjoyed it. That's why I'm teaching a workshop around it now.
[laughs] So I think that, like, a lot of, like, communication skills came very naturally to me personally. Some of the more, like, commercial skills didn't. For some people, it's the exact opposite.
You know, they come from, like, investment banking backgrounds or management consulting backgrounds. And so, yeah, give them a diligence project, give them a modeling exercise, and they're good to go.
But ask them to communicate something in a motivating, inspiring, and authentic way, and they're stuck.
So for me, it was actually a lot of the sort of, like, commercial skills or making beautiful slides for the board and thinking about, you know, strategic planning processes and some of the more commercial stuff was harder for me.
Some of the more people, relationship, communication stuff came easier, but for other folks, it's the exact opposite.
So I think it depends a bit on the person because, for better or for worse, the chief of staff needs a lot of both.
[laughs] They need some of the, like, more, like, interpersonal relational skills, and they also need some of the, like, harder business commercial skills.
And so for me, it was harder to build commercial acumen, but for other folks, I think it's harder to build more EQ and relationship skill.
Yeah, I love it, the kind of classic combination of right brain, left brain, and it's never going to be even, and every chief of staff is obviously coming into a totally different experience, but building those skills is not impossible.
Since we're kicking off the first cohort of Launchpad, last question for you. What's one takeaway you hope every participant walks away with from your course in Launchpad? I hope they walk away with more than one thing.
I hope they walk away with practical tools and frameworks. But I think that if there was one thing that people would walk away with, it would be feeling like you are in control of designing systems that work.
So not just being reactive or responsive or scrambling to fight fires or play Whac-A-Mole with communication, but you feel like you have the tools now to sit back and design an internal and external communication infrastructure and architecture that allows you to not be reactive and not be just feeling like you're on your back foot or behind.
Some of that is part of the job, [laughs] but I think there's a lot you can do to set up those systems so that you're constantly feeding key messages. You're constantly preparing for communications.
You have lots of channels. You have lots of messengers. You have lots of audiences, and you feel control over all of that versus just feeling like you're running around to fight fires as they come up.
I think preparation leads to consistency.
Consistency means that people aren't left in the dark, and that's the whole idea of being proactive rather than reactive, so it's an important one, and I'm excited to see it kinda come to life in your workshop. Me too.
It's gonna be really fun. We have case studies. We have discussions. We have my own lessons learned and mistakes made, so I think it'll be a fun course and hope to see you and lots of people listening there. Awesome.
Well, Rachel, thank you again for joining the Chief of Staff podcast. It was great having you here, and, uh, we're looking forward to Launchpad. Thank you. Long time coming. We should do another podcast soon, Scott.
This was fun.
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