S02 EP09. Earn It Every Day: The Real Work Behind Strategic Internal Comms

What does it take to move from being brought in at the end to being the first call leaders make?

In this episode of Elevate, host Joy Fajardo sits down with Meghann Klein, Senior Director of Internal Communications at Marriott International's Revenue and Technology Group, to unpack what strategic internal communications really looks like when you earn the title instead of claim it.

Meghann has spent 20+ years walking into functions that weren't being taken seriously and rebuilding them into something the business can't operate without. From healthcare and non-profits to a rebrand at the Entrepreneurs' Organization that lifted communications value by 22%, she's built her career turning comms from a support function into a strategic lens on the business. At Marriott, she led her team through a major restructuring, introduced a business partner model, and rebuilt how internal comms shows up across 140+ countries and nearly a million associates.

In this conversation, Meghann shares the diagnostic questions her team used to rebuild after restructuring, why the Einstein principle is a communicator's best filter, how to earn your way from "phone tree number five" to phone tree number one, and why variable speed (not speed itself) is the leadership muscle women especially need to protect.

This one is for every IC and EX pro who's ever delivered beautiful work no one else saw, and wondered how to get pulled into the room earlier.

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Music: Ramaramaray by Aiyo | Get Up on That Horse by spring gang 
Via Epidemic Sound

©  2026 LineZero

Transcript

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Welcome to Elevate, a podcast where we sit down with the women shaping workplace culture as some of the biggest names in the business. These are the leaders navigating change, putting people first, and keeping teams connected and engaged every single day. Tune in to learn how today's leaders are breaking barriers and building cultures where employees truly thrive. I am your host, Joey Capardo. Welcome back to Elevate. If you are internal comps or employee experience space, you probably know RayGame. At Line Zero, we actually partner with them on webinars and events throughout the year. So their content stays on my radar. And last October, at one of their internal communications conferences, Meg and Klain said something that stayed with me that executives already have strategies. What they don't have is someone who can make complex strategy make sense. That's the thing that gets you invited back in this conference again and again. She wasn't just theorizing. She was describing what she'd spent 20 years building the evidence for. She started in healthcare communications, moved into non-for-profits, and at the entrepreneurs organization reinvented the global communications training program across seven countries, helping lead a rebrand that lifted the organization's communications value rating by 22%. She ran accounts at a boutique PR firm at all internal comms and culture work at Front Point, a national home security company. Now she's Senior Director of Internal Communications for Mario International's Revenue and Technology Group. Megan, welcome to Alvi. I am so glad you've accepted our invite today. Amazing. Now I know our listeners are all excited, so let's just get into it. My first question: how did you actually end up in internal communications? Because, you know, not everyone who's been in this field for 20 years actually planned to be here. What pulled you towards this work? Yeah, it's uh kind of by accident, actually, uh, which I know a lot of communicators uh maybe don't want to admit. I will freely admit it. Uh, I did not actually graduate from college thinking that I was going to be in internal communications. Internal communications was not a thing uh way back when I got started. Um it was by accident. I remember interviewing at one of the big four PR firms in New York um following graduation from my alma mater, Rectors University. Um, and I remember sitting in a cubicle farm back in the day, typing on a word processor, drumming up a fake press release and thinking, God, I do not want to do this. And I actually turned down the job offer, and this was in the early aughts. Um, and this was a pretty bold move for a 21-year-old who had no idea what she wanted to do. So after doing a little soul searching, talking with my mom, and then really trying to figure it out, I ended up um working for an employee market research firm outside of Philadelphia where I grew up. And I sort of fell into internal communications through a love of learning about people and the data patterns that sometimes precede them. And so following that path, I landed into what we now call change management and internal communications. And so my career has just been a very weird, a very wild at times winding path, but it's it's really taken me to where I was. And, you know, probably about mid-career, um, I was able to sort of be a little bit more intentional because we had great managers, great guidance, great opportunities to experiment. And so that's sort of how I've landed into internal communications, just kind of by accident. That's interesting because as you said, a lot of IZ professionals kind of fell into it as well. They they were doing something else and the work kind of found them. And there's something different about someone who can actually point to a pool towards the communication key specifically. Now, I want to talk about what you walked into at Marriott. When you joined Marriott's Revenue and Technology Group specifically, what was the state of internal communications when you arrived? What did you actually find? Well, the cool thing is I've actually been at Marriott twice. So this is actually my second tour of duty. So this time around, I'll focus on the second half, and we can certainly go back in time if you'd like. So the first time I walked in, I worked for, I worked um global technology was sort of my internal customer. And so I was offered or asked to come back and lead an awesome team of two sort of disparate or disconnected, but really incredible veteran communicators. One was sort of doing executive communications, and another one was doing a very specialty niche, sort of information security communications. But they weren't necessarily working under a shared vision or a shared organization. And so I was really up, I had a really wonderful opportunity with some great leadership to come in, unite this team, and then also hire an additional um teammate who came later down the road. And actually, it was someone who we had worked together, part of that mid-career opportunity I sort of alluded to previously. So keep that network alive, which was great. So she decided to come and work uh with me again, which was a huge honor. And so together, this group really was doing a lot of internal communications, a lot of project strategy, which is sort of a cousin to internal communications now these days and change management. But I'm very proud to say that everything that that team sort of came through, we sort of talked about our mechanism is what we built really about internal communications as being more than just PowerPoints or more than just town halls. Really thinking back to what matters to the customer. And even sooner than that, it was who is your customer? And in this case, it was always, you know, our frontline associates who are receiving, you know, different tools or technologies that were being deployed across the business, but they were really the end user in order to serve the guest that everybody knows and loves Marriott for. And then in 2024, so about a year and a half into my role, Marriott went through a pretty big restructuring, um, which I did share a bit of at um at the Reagan conference where you heard. And so it's something that was really interesting to me. I remember during my interview with my, my, my leader now. I had asked him, I said, Oh, is this a part of, you know, this the central communications, you know, the global communications team? And he's like, well, actually, no. We're this sort of hidden communications team that's sort of far and wide. Um, and I was just sort of thought, oh, that's kind of interesting at the time. And then he, you know, almost two years later, there was a big consolidation effort to bring together a lot of like disciplines across the enterprise, really just for streamlined thinking. It just didn't make sense to have a lot of different shared capabilities stashed around disciplines, especially when we're really trying to support our regions and our continents and those groups and those leadership teams that really are closest to the customer. And so communications was one of those disciplines that really needed to be re centralized in order to support the enterprise. And so we we went through a restructuring, and that's never easy. I mean, we could probably do a whole case study on that alone as internal communicators and change agents. But I'm very, very proud of the structure that we put in place, which really shifted from a lot of these niche communicators to a really thoughtful, centralized generalist model. And so we introduced the business partner model for internal communications. So we were, we had our home team now, um, sort of re centralized and restructured. And then we would be able to go out to the business in a thoughtful business partner model in order to support our internal customers. And so we also realigned our team structure to be in the enterprise. Um, so really thinking through that, what I call like the big red M, right? The big Marriott, big rocks um growing forward strategy. And then sort of really um partnering with our C-suite leaders who can who are really making the decisions and setting that vision. So that way we are sort of strategist advocates and really thinking through what do our customers need? What do the customers of our customers need? And then how do we ladder up down across in a very head-swiveling 360-degree view of what does the business need in order to continue to be competitive, to continue to deliver great service, but also how do we make sure that we're making decisions that really help keep things streamlined and focused? And those communications experts can help sort of fill the middle, sort of back and forth, up and down, left and right. Now, as you're speaking, I'm thinking about your case where actually a lot of organizations have communication that looks kind of more like a coverage, you know, you're everywhere, you're busy, but nothing really ties together into something the business can point to, right? Yeah. And what we often may or may not realize is there's a real cost to that. When comps is fragmented, or you know, as you said, there's multiple teams that seems to be just supposed to be just one team, you're spending energy without compounding it. And then eventually the business looks at the function and asks, what are we actually getting from this, right? Yes. So when you joined, you had a choice when you actually saw that. You could have patched things up around the edges, you know, or you can improve uh some processes, you can clean up some outputs, but from what you're describing, you and your team, the the whole Marriott, it seems, you went after the whole model. If you can walk me through what rebuilding actually looked like, you've talked about the team becoming strategic generalists, aligned to the business scorecard. What does that mean in practice, day-to-day for you? Oh, yeah, that's a great question. Again, I feel like we could probably talk for a day alone about that. One of my favorite things, and I make this joke often, is saying, asking why this way. What is business problem? Are we trying to solve? And as a former Amazonian, that is a very powerful question because it really forces you to get specific and to get really real with yourself about what what is this really, what are we really trying to accomplish? What is that future state look like? And how are we working backward from where we are today? I will remember for our business partner group, it was January 2nd, 2025, just come through this restructuring. It was the day after New Year's Day. And a couple leaders, um, myself included, we got together with our senior leader and we put everything on the table. Everything everybody was working on. Um, managing, you know, this PowerPoint deck to this big organizational launch that's coming up to this policy and procedure that needs to be communicated. I mean, everything. There was nothing too big or too small that went on the table. Because we had to be really transparent with ourselves and with each other about this is the volume, right? This is the pipeline. These are the expectations that the business everywhere has of us to deliver. And so we had to triage based on timeline, capacity, because we were a pretty big team that had been sort of resized. And then we were being joining a new global team that had additional communications capabilities from public relations to public affairs, social media. I mean, they also had their ways of working that we had to really, you know, join these forces together thoughtfully. So we kind of didn't want to bring all of our baggage with us because some of this stuff was a great moment in time to say, hey, listen, this really doesn't have to get done right now. Maybe we can revisit this in mid-year after we kind of get some of the momentum going. But it was really helpful to figure out what we had going, when we thought it needed to be due, and who was now on our team and well suited to pick something up and execute it well. And so we were just, again, radically transparent with ourselves. We were very honest with what we needed to get done. And we had also, so Merritt has what's called the growing forward strategy. And so the growing forward strategy is this really intentional strategic roadmap. We are not shy in talking about it. Tony Capuano, our CEO, talks about it with investors. He talks about it with our owners, um, our owner and franchise community, and he talks about it with associates all the time. This is not something that's just a really slick looking, you know, one pager that's on our intranet. This is our decisioning lens for what we work on as a company and what we don't. But it also gives associates, I think, clarity and assuredness that there's a plan. There is not just a vision, there is a mission that we all have in mind together. And so from there, we're able to operate and move with an enterprise mindset. That is a communicator, a communicator's dream, especially for internal communications. And so using that as well as our decision-making lens to say, well, I understand that that was needed in our, you know, previous life, our previous environment, but is that really truly going to move the needle with what we're trying to accomplish now, when it needs to be accomplished, and who we have on our incredible bench to really deliver this well? And if we could not say yes confidently and comfortably to all three of those questions, it went in a backlog. Backlog uh might be a second favorite phrase that I have because it's not that we're saying no never. We're just getting diagnostic in saying it's not ready for right now, and we need to dig into why it's not ready. So let's go back to the team to really understand. Okay, maybe this can be a passion project, or maybe the customer is not ready, maybe the organization is not ready, but at least we can document why it's not ready now. So when it is ready, we can pick it up and move quickly again. And that I think in hospitality is hard because we are hardwired to say yes to everything all the time. I think in a fun way, communicators, especially internal communicators, are also hardwired to say yes. I think there's a lot of power in using those diagnostic questions. Why this way? Does this have to be done now? What do we need to make it done really, really well? What are those success factors? Who on the team can help? Really thinking through all of those things up front and really thinking about your inputs makes the output easy and fun and just really accomplishable. But until you have those inputs really nailed down and agreed upon, it's really hard to get started and get started well. It's not always the case for internal communicators, especially when you're aligned to the C-suite or to the enterprise. There are demands of a business, and we are a 24-7 global business. So sometimes you have to be flexible, but getting as much of that as you can up front, I think just really helps an internal communicator just really deliver strategically and confidently. Guys, listeners, we've been we've been hearing a lot of tips here. I've heard triage, backlogs, uh different terms. It's not a no, it's more like let's revisit it when the time is right. So I I really love that. And what Megan is really describing, I feel, is you know, filtering work through the same business lens across the whole team. That's how you actually stop taking on work just because someone asks you for it and start doing work because it's actually driving business results. So now there's something you've said publicly, Megan, that I want to get at. You mentioned that you don't just declare yourself a strategist. You've said that building strategic credibility, it takes time, reflection, and delivery. You can't just arrive and play the title. Now I want to hear that story. What does that road actually look like? How do you build it? Yeah, that's a great question. And I I'm I'm giggling a little bit because I took a little bit of a bold choice in starting that way. I I still asserted, I was not born a strategist. I would did not come into this world thinking about that. I did not graduate from university or with my master's degree, does not say strategist on it. It's why I was thinking about this a lot. I was reflecting on this. What I've observed in my 20 plus years of doing this, which is just wild to think that I've been doing this for that long, is I still think, am I a strategist? Am I doing this every day? I and I'm like, yeah, I think so. But I think what that means is that it's something you have to earn, right? And it just sometimes comes with time. It comes with expertise and it comes with delivering and showing up. And sometimes you deliver, deliver beautiful work and it is appreciated and everybody knows it's beautiful work. Sometimes you deliver beautiful work and you're the only one who knows it's beautiful work. And there are, of course, times when you're like, man, if I had more time, if I had more resources, if I had more this for that or the other, maybe it's pretty or it's okay, but and someone else thinks it's great. But point is just keep showing up, right? Keep delivering every day because you have to, you know, earn that strategist title or label or however you want to consider it, you have to earn it every day. And sometimes you earn it really well. Sometimes you're like, okay, well, there's always tomorrow. And that is okay. I think one of the things that you said when you were teeing up this question that really hit home for me is resilience. And we talk about resilience a lot and sort of in the macro of everything that's going on in the world right now. And it's really, really hard to be resilient all the time. I will also tell you, as a strategist who earns that strategist a title every day, sometimes that you need to have rest and recovery as well. And I don't think that we talk about that enough, especially as women. That doesn't mean our male, um, our male and other counterparts don't encounter that, but I can only speak about it from my experience. I think that rest and recovery is so, so important, especially coming out of what feels like constant change or constant disruption, especially with AI and just everything that's going on out there. But that rest and that recovery, I think is so critical as you're honing your craft, as you're promoting your expertise, especially I talk about, you know, everybody's an expert in today's TikTok culture. It's not true. But if you deliver and you deliver well, whether that's for yourself, your customer, or anybody in between, take the time to celebrate that win, whether it's big or small, take the time to reflect, take the time to rest. I think that is just so, so, so important as you continue to earn that advisor, that trust, that strategy label that you're giving to yourself or others are giving to you. I just cannot stress that enough. It is so important. The rest and recovery piece is interesting because I've recorded probably around eight podcast sessions at this point, and I've heard it three times. You're the third person. And I I think that comes with a load of work. Like you have to do more and more with less and less. And so that becomes more important for us to really be very intentional about pausing, resting, and just recover. Now, the second piece that I got from what you shared is the delivery part. I think that part is the thing that not people skip over, but a bit more impatient about, right? You can position yourself really well, but someone has to see you solve a hard problem before they start pulling you into the room early. That credibility is earned in the doing and with years of experience with just showing up, as Megan mentioned. Now, it's almost like you have to be willing to do the less glamorous work sometimes. Sometimes, as Megan said, it feels like it's super glamorous for you, but it's only you who can see that it's glamorous. But you kind of have to prove that you understand the business and not just the craft of communication before you get to that strategic conversation. And also, there's a version of this that I think a lot of women in particular navigate. You know, you're doing real strategic work, but sometimes we are still not all the time and not in all organizations, but at times it's still labeled as a support function. Yes, right? And figure figuring out how to shift that takes a different kind of patience. Now, once you've built that credibility, a new problem opens up. It's not just about being seen as a tr as strategic anymore, it's also about doing the hardest part of the job, taking complex technical business strategy and making it land for people across completely different roles, different contexts. Uh, that translation piece is where I want to go next. A lot of your work goes or involves translating strategies that's genuinely technical and high stakes. You know, the kind of thing that's hard to explain even in a boardroom. Now, how do you take something like that and make sure it actually lands with employees, not just gets communicated? Oh man, try, try, try, try, try again. That's that's the short answer. So, yeah, so my internal customer is the chief revenue and technology officer. So he covers quite a lot of different aspects of the business that have technical ease around it. So everything from global sales and revenue strategy to distribution and our channel mix through business transformation, digital aspects, through global technology, data analytics, AI, and then across, of course, the entire business through our. Our consonants and sort of enabling a lot of our other uh what we call disciplines or or organizational functions like marketing and customer to operations, HR, et cetera, et cetera. It's a lot. Um, and he has an incredible unique vantage point and sort of through the supply chain of Marriott International. And I have the distinct pleasure of getting to watch what feels like a masterclass in real time all the time, whether they're big masterclasses or small ones. I think they're just incredible opportunities to listen and observe. I am also not afraid anymore. That doesn't mean I don't hesitate, I don't do this perfectly, but I ask the small questions. One of the things that I am maybe notorious now for saying is really using that Einstein principle. If you can't explain it simply, then you don't understand it well enough yet. And in a very complex technical business between commercial performance and technology, that is that in and of itself is a unique role. That's usually divided by multiple people in other major corporations or even smaller business functions. So it's it's a really unique vantage point that I get to storytell from. And so for that, though, it really started off as I had to ask a lot of questions, both in small forums, big forums, you know, grabbing people in the hallway, grabbing them in the coffee shop, but really asking for leadership time to sit down and say, hey, I need you to teach this to me. Because as a communicator, if I don't understand the business of my client or the business of Marriott, how on earth am I gonna help, you know, 900,000 associates or folks who wear that Marriott badge around the world not only understand what our mission is, but really feel it every day. You know, they are the ones who are helping our guests. Our business is, you know, 90% frontline. So I have a responsibility to those people. Those, those are my customers as well, because they are helping our guests every day. They are the heroes of our business. And so it really is my duty of care to make sure that they feel connected to whether it's our enterprise strategy, you know, as a part of the total global communications team, I get to be a part of, or if I'm communicating, you know, on behalf of, you know, the business of revenue and technology, or talking about AI, or talking about our commercial performance and why that matters to our continent and our regional experts and teams. That is sort of what I feel is my mission is to make sure that they understand that. And the way I do it really is just by asking a lot of questions. And sometimes you have to know the right timing of when to ask those questions. If you're in a boardroom and there are a lot of convert, there's a lot of conversation and decision making going on, and that conversation is moving quickly. Take as many notes as you possibly can. I still write things down. I have lots of paper notes, I have sticky notes, I have my portfolio that I carry with me everywhere. And it might be very analog or old school, but it helps me retain information I find that helps me a lot better than trying to type because then I can always refer back. I can annotate my own notes. I still do that old school from you know what I learned in university. And truly, you know, just having a little bit of judgment, you know, don't necessarily slow down the pace of decision making. But what you can do is reflect on your notes and say, hey, listen, you know, the next time I have a one-on-one or a coffee or get somebody sort of in a small format. I heard this a few weeks ago. Can you talk me through what you're hearing? Talk me through your experience of is this new? Is this different? But activate that diagnostic listening that you have as a communicator. I find that is where the value of a strategist really comes to life. Of course, the long emails and the beautiful PowerPoints and the super polished talking points are also helpful, but it's in those quiet moments where your value really shines. That advisory, that thinking, that reflection, that curiosity, I find that is where I get the most value out of the work that I'm doing. I get lit up by maybe planting seeds in other people's heads, maybe not, but it might spark creativity for yourself. The next time you are writing those PowerPoints, you might get that message a little crisper, a little clearer, or you might say, hey, listen, this whole section is just not working. I don't have the clarity as to how this ties to our strategy anymore. Let's let's pick on that a little bit. Let's interrogate that a little bit. Let's like dive deep and discover. And maybe it goes into the backlog. Maybe it doesn't. It's that constant editing that you get to do through inquiry. And I think that is just where strategy really, really comes to life. But my my my bottom line to your listeners is just don't be afraid to ask, but do it in the quiet moments after you yourself have had the opportunity to do a little research, to do a little reflection, and maybe had a little rest because that's where you get to move fast and really drive value. I'm loving this, Megan. I was nodding and smiling, and I was like, our listeners, I'm getting a lot out of this conversation. I know our listeners will do too. So really amazing. Thank you for sharing all of that. I feel like with everything you've just shared, there's really a real craft behind all of this. You know, you have to understand the strategy deeply enough to kind of simplify it without losing the meaning. And a lot of communicators are afraid to leave anything out because they think simplification means dumbing it down. But in reality, it doesn't, right? As you said, the Einstein principle where if you cannot explain it simply, you don't understand it enough. And when it doesn't land, when people walk away more confused than when they started, you see it everywhere. You know, productivity, morale, how much harder every subsequent conversation gets, the cost to that is real. So making that translation work uh consistently across thousands of employees in different roles in different parts of the world, it really requires infrastructure behind it too. So I want to talk about the tools and platforms aside of this, because technology choices, of course, matters a lot. So, what tools and platforms does Marriott actually use to keep employees connected and informed? And when you're evil evaluating employee experience or communications technology, what are you really looking for? Marriott is known for its scale and its size. And so with that sometimes comes some complexity or regulations or compliance things that we just need to be aware of. Again, we've got employees in 140 plus countries. And so we just need to be aware of how we want to reach them. But not only that, they're largely a frontline employee base. So we need to be mindful of how they need to be reached. And so a lot of that, you know, while we can talk about tools and structures for sure, the people network is also a really incredible structure that I don't want to miss. But some of the tools that we still use in Silver Lion are definitely Outlook and email. We use, we work with a company called Acoustic to distribute a lot of mass emails. Um, I mean, for example, within the revenue and technology group alone, we're talking tens of thousands of employees, and they're in varying sort of spaces, varying countries, varying roles. They might be at corporate um headquarters, they might be at what we call above property or our consonant teams, or they may be on property, um, you know, working in the hotels, but so they're not always in front of their computers. So we just, but email is always uh, I think, a really good backbone to rely on, but it is not the only channel that we use. We do have a wonderful internet and that our team also is constantly working with other marketing and communications experts sort of around the business, um, because that again is a wonderful central hub to refer back to. So that internet is still very, very important. And we can tailor content based on, again, what country people are coming in from, maybe what brands they work for, what part of the business they're serving. And then we have, of course, our generally available information to everybody on the company. So those two definitely work in concert. And they might be a little bit old schooled, but they are tried and true tools and methodologies that we definitely rely on given the broad, broad global employee base that we have. We also um we're, we're, we're toying with other opportunities with our centennial coming up. I don't want to give too much of that away. Maybe we can talk again, or I can have one of my wonderful colleagues come on and talk to you about the entire strategic planning that's going on already for that, which will happen next year. We're very excited about that. Sort of narrowing it down more practically for our specific communications group. One of the best tools that we still rely on is Smartsheet. And I did talk about that previously. And what I love about that is it gives us documentation to track what we work on. And then it can feed into other smart sheets that we have with our global communications team that we then share with other folks kind of around the business so they can see a centralized hub of all of the things that are kind of on our radar. So we think about it as sort of an air traffic control kind of mechanism, but backing up to that smart sheet, so that our team has a tracker where we go in and put in all of our work. Again, big stuff, small stuff, everything in between. Because then that ladders into a quarterly report. I don't ever want to miss when we're talking about tools, because reporting is so important. And I feel like you cannot talk about tools without reporting. If you are not reporting on what you are doing, then I'm like, what are you doing? Right. I know we talked about that early in our in our discussion here today. But I think as communicators, you know, we are often thinking about company reporting and company tools, but we need to be a little bit selfish for ourselves. I think metrics are half the battle. Reporting is still a true form of storytelling. So to all of the communicators, all of PR, all the marketing folks out there, make sure that you are using the right tools, not only to disseminate your messages or get your story through for the business, but make sure you are doing it for yourself as well, that you are tracking and reporting on the value creation and value realization with those tools in concert that you're using, either on behalf of the business or on behalf of your own business as a communicator. Because the minute somebody asks you, what does communications do? Or and you immediately have we save time, we increase, you know, connectivity to the messaging. That is an outcome. You can also then back that up with your KPIs and your metrics. We did this, we learned that, we improved time to market by X, Y, Z percent. But the minute you can give them that headline report, now you're storytelling on behalf of yourself and the business of communications within an entire organization, and you've got them hooked because now they're going to be asking what we call buying questions, which is exactly where, as an internal communicator and strategist, that's where you want them asking, what can you do for me or how can you help me versus I need a PowerPoint or I need a long email and start deliverable here. I think that tool conversation has to go hand in hand with reporting because that's the value realization sort of coming full circle as a communication strategist. I am so lucky. I'm getting this one and on. I can ask more and more, I can go and on on and on. But anyway, I'll move on to the next question because we have limited time. But thank you so much, Megan. I'm getting a lot of tips here. So amazing nuggets there. Now, of course, the tools help you rich people, but the hardest test, especially right now, when so many organizations are navigating so much change is what happens when you have to communicate something that's genuinely difficult. And you've spent a big part of your career at the intersection of change management and communication. So when an when an organization is going through something big, a restructure, a technology shift, for example, a major strategic PIVA, what does great internal communication actually look like? And what do most leaders get wrong? Wow, that is a big question or questions. I will start by saying a lot of times when there is difficulty or complexity, whether that is a huge technology deployment or a transformation effort, or maybe there's something from the macro environment that's pressuring like the business to operate differently. So sometimes it's an intrinsic challenge or an extrinsic challenge or extrinsic pressure. Oftentimes we find ourselves, especially as communicators, the urgency. Speeding up, speeding up, speeding up. We got to go now. Yes, that is true. But what I would encourage is as a communicator, as a strategist, take the time to slow down. Take the time to ask all those questions or get as much information as you possibly can to make the best decision available to you within that context. Are you going to get it perfect? No. But sometimes in an effort of we see you trying, that is where trust is earned, both with associates or employees internally or customers or the market externally. I think, especially in, you know, the age of change that we have now, I don't think customers or associates or people at large expect perfection. But if it's a we're trying, we don't have everything, we're not going to get it right, that actually creates an opportunity for real humanization and connection. Again, whether it's on behalf of a brand like Marriott or a different brand, or your associates who are, you know, maybe in the Middle East and are dealing with incredible conflict and trying to run hotels and support guests or supporting the folks who are trying to do that. I think in both scenarios, if you have the chance to just take 15 minutes, call your closest leader, call your closest friend, but really try to get as much information as possible. Because again, if you try to go out to market or you try to go out to your employee base and you miss the mark because you miss the tone, or you use a certain phrase that doesn't resonate, or maybe just like feels really off base, that first impression, I think, is again that that old adage, it's so hard to recover from that. But if you can take the extra 15 minutes or take the extra half of a day to just really try your best to get it as right as possible in that moment, that will pay dividends down the road. And it will help you to move faster or turn on a dime as quickly as you need to. I often find organizations are increasingly unprepared. And communications strategists and experts often get called in what I call like last mile delivery. The more you can earn that credibility and that trust that we were talking about every day, you become um, you know, like I'll call it like phone tree number five. You become phone tree number two. And eventually you become phone tree number one. And so when you can have that trust and you could have that visibility sooner and sooner, you get the luxury of time, or you get the luxury of being in that war room when those decisions are being made. So that way you can move quickly and you have playbooks, or you know people who have playbooks, or you know people who have those fact patterns that you can rely on in order to move fast. Again, I think it's not striving for perfection, but it really comes down to saying, is this the absolute best information that we have at the time to make a sound decision? And can we pivot if we need to as more information comes in? Or do we wait? And sometimes that's not a communications decision, but it is a question as communicators, we can ask of our business partners to help continue and earn trust, not just with our stakeholders, but really with our customers, whether those customers are employees or guests who are staying at our hotels. But I think that is really where that value comes in. And it is not easy. And that's where I think, you know, finding those five minutes to recover, even if it's you step off screen and you just for a moment, that can help you recover even quicker. And sometimes if you get the day off, if you can give yourself that recovery kind of when some of the dust is settled, do so. But I think again, just asking as many questions as you can up front, using your best judgment. And if you don't know, phone a friend, ask someone, reach out in your network, you know, reach out across the company, reach out, you know, if you have an advisory board or a mentor or another communicator at another business or a friend. But just really rely on that. But sometimes it's just instincts, right? That gut has to be used. And most importantly, if you mess up or you make a mistake, own it. We all make mistakes. There are a lot of mistakes that I've made in my career by trusting my gut, but I also didn't trust my network. And I didn't take the time to ask those questions up front, even as we were moving fast. But you just have to kind of like weigh both of those data inputs, as we talked about before, and just make the best decision you have based on the conversation, based on the input you have at that time. But that's also coming comes with like some judgment calls or some professionalism or that expertise really has to kind of come into play. It's a really tough one to navigate. And Megan, you're a strategist, but I also see you as a leader. I actually read his book that says, you know, the title of the book, I think, is Leadership Without Authority or something like that. You're a senior director in internal comms, but you're also making a team out of the people outside your team so that you can earn the trust and be the phone line number one, I think is what you uh use as an analogy. Not a good thing. So just be careful with how you navigate that one. Yeah. But that leading without authority, I'm not the CEO, but I'm gonna make this person part of my team by earning his or her trust. And I think that plays really a huge part in internal comps. And I'm making notes, I cannot help myself. I told myself stop taking notes during uh podcast because my head is like this view, but I cannot stop myself. So I have some notes here. So I love you, I'm analog, so please, please, yeah. So and I I have my whole book like we're taking notes too, so we're all the same book. A couple of things that I also make a note of is timing. I think that's super important based on what you shared. Just take the time to get it right, it's not perfect, and I think it's part of leadership as well to be to show vulnerability at times because we're all human, and that shows authenticity as well. When people see that you are reachable, like he's just a human making a mistake as well, then you know it's just makes everything more personal, easier to reach and understand for other people too. I want to shift gears because this is a show about women and leadership, and you've spent two decades building credibility, rebuilding teams, repositioning communications as something that a business can't operate without. Now, looking back on that journey, what has it actually taken to be seen as a strategic leader and not just a communications resource? And what do you wish someone has told you earlier in your career? Oh man, I this is such a great question. And I will I will start off a little bit with a a chuckle. I don't always see myself as a communications leader, right? I mean, there were times looking back in my career where I was just jumping at the bit for that next title, that next win, that like next big sort of home run. Um I just look back now and I'm like, wow, I was moving really fast earlier in my career. And it's interesting because after 20 plus years, I find myself sort of moving at a variable speed now. There are times when the business demands I move a lot faster, but there are also times in my life that demand that I move slower. And so at this point, you know, I'm a mom. I know we were chatting about that earlier off camera. You know, I'm a mom, I'm a wife, I'm a daughter, I'm a sister, I'm a friend, I'm an auntie, you know, I'm all of these other things. So I do feel a little bit of pride or honor to add communications later to all of those wonderful titles I get to live outside of my business life. But I think both both of these things parallel each other because I just remember earlier in my career, like, oh, I can't wait until I get to be a manager, I get to be a leader. What I will tell you is, and I was told this by some really incredible women leaders that I had the pleasure of learning from and still have the pleasure of learning from. They reminded me that you don't have to have a title in order to have authority or leadership. Leadership, I think, comes in so many different forms. And when I was, you know, kind of coming up through the ranks, you know, we didn't have social media, we didn't have iPhones, you know, Twitter came out when in my early career, my mid-career, just to kind of date myself a little bit. But I guess I would just, you know, tell you, especially as women, we are often told to slow down. Slowing down, I would say, is fine, but don't internalize it as make yourself smaller. And that I think is an interesting nuance. And it's an observation I've had. And I was actually just talking with one of my wonderful friends who um we worked with at Front Point, and now we work together again at Married. We were just talking about this yesterday, is how How do you slow down in a business environment as a woman who might be earlier in her career or entering mid-career without making yourself smaller? It is so hard. And it's it is not something I have a good answer for. It is not something that, you know, I have this beautiful PR sound bite for. It's messy. It's so messy. And it's it's so it comes to trial and error, and probably a lot of error that feels like real deep trial. But what I will tell you is find a way to exercise variable speed for yourself. And if you are humming and you are cranking and you are crushing it, go faster. Like go do more. Like we are all here celebrating you, saying, we've got your back. Keep going. Simultaneously, if you need to take a sidestep and take a breath and collect yourself, I would still say, we've got you. We see you. Take that deep breath. Take another one and then get back out there when you're ready. I guess at the end of the day, what this comes down to is check in with yourself. You know more than anybody else what you're capable of, what you want to be doing, and what you don't want to be doing. So as you're finding your voice or as you're fine-tuning it along the way, use that speed to your advantage. Speed doesn't always have to be faster. It can sometimes be slower, it can be reflective, it can be that rest we were talking about, or it can be that anticipatory. Like, I've already come up with this, I've already got it done. One of my favorite things personally, and I'll share this with you in secret, even though you have many, many people listening. I love when my chief revenue officer comes to me, or chief revenue and technology officer comes to me, is like, hey, like, do you know about this? I'm like, it's already done. I've got it. I love being able to say that to him. But that doesn't mean I have to have everything everywhere all the time. He doesn't need to be managed. He's an executive. He's gotten to where he is in his career because he is extremely capable. There's also a lot of fun in being able to be like, hey, can you sit down and talk with me about X? That is also slowing down. That's also a speed where you get to reflect, you get to have someone else talk about what they know. Use both of those speeds to your advantage. I think as women, we are expected to know everything, be everything, do everything, be everything to everybody, everywhere, at all speeds all at once. But if you can kind of come home to yourself between those moments of variable speed, I think there's so much power in that. And I think there's so much power in the collective of being able to vocalize that. So I would just encourage every listener here. If you see a woman or a teammate or a colleague of any gender, have the strength of and the home of self to reach out to that person and say, I see you or I hear you. What do you need? That collective, I just can't tell you how many times I have come back to that again and again and again. And I have been so blessed and so energized by the women who have come before me and more the women who are serving with me. I often refer to two of my teammates as sisters and ox. If you are listening to this, you know who you are. And the women who get to come after, right? I see a duty of care in not protecting them, but exposing them, lifting them up with me because I had that opportunity ahead of me as well. So I think there is just this just incredible coven, I think, almost of women leaders out there. And they come in all sh all sizes, shapes, and forms, and they come in all kinds of speeds too. Wow. That's such a nice note to end this podcast with. Thank you so much, Megan. Before we close, is there anything you'd want to leave our listeners with that we haven't covered yet? Anything that you'd like to promote? Sure. I am on LinkedIn. I'm Megan.clein. If there is something I think that you heard here today that you really loved, please reach out. If there is something you're like, what on earth were you talking about, lady? I definitely want to hear from you. That feedback truly is a gift. But I love that in a form of conversation and debate and discussion. So please do find me, send me a message on LinkedIn. I really would love to hear about you and really activate and grow my own collective. So, Joy, thank you so much for the invitation and having me on. This was just an incredible, incredible Friday for me. So thank you so much. It is our honor, Megan. Thank you so much for guesting in today's podcast. You gave our listeners a lot to think about and a lot to actually do. That's combinations pretty rare. And it's exactly what this show is for. So if today's conversation got you guys thinking about how your organization connects with its people, how you communicate, how you build culture, or how you help your employees do their best work. We at Line Zero, we can help you figure out what's next. We offer a personalized employee experience assessment to all our listeners. Our consultant will spend some time with you and your team to understand your ecosystem and the specific challenges you're navigating. You can learn more at linezero.com. The link will be on the description. You can also give Megan a follow on LinkedIn. We'll also put that link on the description. She's worth adding to your feed, I promise. Follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and LinkedIn at Line Zero for more conversations from the women who are transforming employee experience. Until then, keep elevating, keep inspiring, and let's keep building more places where people truly thrive. Thanks everyone.