Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Every person needs to also have an understanding of their mission, their values, their vision for where they want to go. Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I'm your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please log on to iTunes and Spotify.
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and leave us a rating and a review. Let's get communicating.
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Now, since we focus so much on communication skills and leadership skills, my guest today, Ross Romano, who is a coach and a consultant for education leaders, is here to talk to us about what makes a leader be successful and what qualities he should possess. And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Ross. Hi, Roberta. Thanks for having me.
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Thank you for being on the show. Welcome. Where are you in the US? I am just outside of Washington, DC. I'm in Arlington, Virginia. If I turn in this direction and throw a stone, we can throw it into DC. Can you throw it to one of the politicians? Maybe. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Sure. And I was reading recently how they say when you're on the video call, it really makes people feel more comfortable when they can see your hands. And my camera zooms in so much that it's
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My hands don't really show up, but I'll show you that I do have them. So to tell you a little bit about myself, as I said, I'm here in DC. I live here with my wife, Janet and my son, Noel. He's two, almost two and a half. Oh, he's still tiny. Yeah, right. And so he's enjoying nap time right now. We've got multiple businesses and
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He's my colleague too, my personal assistant, right? It actually has been an interesting transition over time because at my prior company, before my consulting work that I'm doing now, I worked remotely as well. So it's been almost seven years now of working from home. So we've seen the pre-pandemic and then the pandemic era where everybody was home and then kind of the post-pandemic where some people have gone back, some haven't. And it's given me a chance to kind of navigate the different phases of that. But...
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founder and CEO of a consulting firm called September Strategies, in which I work with leaders and organizations in the education space, tech companies, publishers, events and conferences on primarily determining and articulating their vision and then continuously making the strategic decisions that connect back to that vision. Mission, vision and values are really critical to everything that I do, whether it's with an individual and organization, we always want to track back to that.
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Also co-founder of a podcast network called the BE Podcast Network. As of today, we have 22 shows, but that's all focused on education from K-12 to higher ed. We also have some content for parenting and organizational learning and development in the corporate space, but all education focused and a lot of other things. But we'll talk about what's more interesting to our listeners here. Have you always been interested in education when you were charging your career path?
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I had a lot of plans. I initially thought I was going to major in political science and then go to law school. I ended up studying psychology, thought about getting a doctorate in that area, ended up going in the direction of having a master's in sports business. And I started out in the professional sports industry in a variety of roles, but I always had the interest in education. It was always valued as I was growing up. My wife is a teacher. So when she started teaching.
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She had had a few years of experience at that point, and an opportunity came up for me to take a role in a communications department in a education leadership association nearby in the DC area. And it was the right thing at the right time and the right opportunity. And as soon as I started, there was a lot to learn, but I learned quickly and it was a great role because a large percentage of it was doing publicity for authors and consultants.
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in K-12 leadership. So working with dozens and dozens of great authors and speakers, learning their ideas, getting connected to their audiences was a really accelerated course in learning all about the industry and the people and the objectives and the challenges. And that was a great learning opportunity for me as I've gone on and really built on that. And now for almost the past decade really worked in that space. So the communications department, what was
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the key things that you needed to do in order to fulfill that role. Sure, so the interesting thing was I basically originated the publicist role. The organization, for anybody who might be familiar, is called ASCD. It was a membership association of about 140,000 educators of all roles, a lot of district level superintendents, principals, teachers, college professors, really a diverse group. And the association did a bit of everything.
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Large conferences and events for 10,000 plus attendees, published somewhere between 40 to 50 book titles every year, magazines, newsletters. We did legislative advocacy. We did other mission-oriented work, online courses. So I had the benefit for a good chunk of my time there of being a direct report to the CEO. So that of course gives you insights and access to a lot of what's going on.
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And one of the things that I was able to differentiate what we were doing in communications versus even the marketing department, for example, but in an organization like that, where there's a lot of departments that are considered quote unquote, non revenue generating, marketing might not see it as their purview when they're focused on selling books and digital courses and things like that, right? So there's those opportunities to really connect the different sides of what's going on and the other piece.
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is I really believe in communications as being a two-way dynamic. And I think a lot of times it's thought of as, okay, the organization decides what they're going to do. And the communications job is to make it sound nice and to send it out to the media. But ultimately, the communications department are also the ones who are having direct interactions and touch points with reporters and podcasters and other media members, or even just others in the community that you're interacting with.
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There's a lot of information gathering that should be coming back as well to say, Hey, here's what people are responding to. Here's what they're not. Here's what they want to hear from us. Here's what they don't. That should influence the decisions we're making and the way we're communicating. But it was something that we had the opportunity to build and to really turn that into a strength. Yes, of course. Because if you're going to make decisions on where the company is going and what we should offer to the market.
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you should at least have some information on what it is that they're looking for. Right. I've seen it a lot recently and other listeners, this may sound familiar in some of the technology startup world where they have developed the technology and the capabilities before they have determined what the market demand is for those things or who is it for and what do they actually want, which should be the first step, right? But in so many ways,
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get so exciting sometimes that they just want to create something that the technology can do that's new before they've decided, well, but who is this for? What do they want? What do they need? Or they'll have a team of founders, none of whom has any experience being a member of their target audience. Even once they've created it and they bring it to the market, they're going to say, this is going to do what for you. Right. And then sometimes they don't even necessarily realize that.
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until it's kind of the question is asked, or they're trying to fill in the blanks later. It's even the case with the, you know, larger companies like open AI with chat GPT, where because of the resources they had, they were able to achieve a scale of users. But then it largely was, is the users who are defining the applications for the technology, right? It wasn't put out there with any real guidance or understanding to say, Hey,
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These are the people we have in mind. These are the challenges you have, and this is how it solves it. If you're a smaller company, think about defining your niche, really profiling that audience and understanding, okay, what are the demographics? What are their interests? What are their persistent challenges? What are the things that they are looking for? Because when I think about the tools that I use, I don't think about what the underlying tech is. I think about what it helps me with. I'm not thinking about the backend to say, wow, these
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developers and engineers must be so smart that they made this work. That's what we're looking for, that's right. So you work in the education space. Basically you work with people who create education online versus anybody going to public school. Is that what you work with? It's everybody. My traditional clientele has been any company or nonprofit organization or individual.
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who creates programs, products, and services for schools and educators. So it can be the traditional brick and mortar environment. It could be textbooks, most of that is digital now, but those classroom resources and materials or other tools that are used in schools for student safety or data privacy and management to...
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online courses, online professional development for educators, digital content to events that are virtual or in person. So really the entire gamut there wherever teaching and learning is taking place, there's companies that are working in those spaces. When you do public relations for them, what does that entail? So typically that would be helping to connect the message and the value proposition of what they're doing with
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the influencers and decision makers in the school. So in most cases, it will be made at the school district level here in the US. So you have your superintendents, curriculum directors, technology directors, CTOs, professional development directors, all those kind of folks. A lot of times also at the school level, principals, assistant principals, all those kinds of people. Now it's a new media landscape, especially anybody who's in the PR and communications world must be aware,
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trade industries or niche industry media. There's been aggressive contraction over the past several years where you have publications that have one or two people who were really on staff and the rest is filled in by freelance, right? But now there's one, it's a lot of new media, it's podcasts, it's blogs and bloggers, it's social media influencers, it's the people who are in those jobs, who are educators, who are also building a presence in other ways.
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It's also a lot of you need to create your own content and tell your own story. Sometimes that may be ghostwriting and publishing articles with third party media outlets, but sometimes that is working with companies to create their own podcast series, to have really high quality, frequent content on their own blog, to do case studies and success stories and other types of storytelling content that really give a...
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qualitative understanding of what we do, who we work with, what it could mean for you. There's a lot of different needs out there, different environments, right? Even if we're just talking about schools, you have urban and suburban and rural and different state laws and regulations that are going on, different student needs. You know, you need to speak to a lot of different people and it's better to do it directly and to not try to say everything to everyone all at once, but to say, look, we do a podcast twice a month.
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And we speak to a variety of people who can help us to speak to these different parts of our audience. So we have blog content, we have educators that contribute blog content that we can then send out to our channels and all of that. It's a really comprehensive blend between I would say PR and corporate communications and content marketing. They all really go together in this day and age because, you know, they're all the ways that you get your word out.
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So you help organizations or leaders with their vision. A visionary selects the jobs. If you are a visionary and then Ross comes and says, I'm gonna help you with strategic direction of your company. Do I need Ross or? Because being a visionary means that's my strength and I'm not strong on how we gonna get there. I see the promised land, but they say that visionaries sometimes don't know how to get to the promised land.
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Yeah, I mean, I think that's true and totally fair. Hey, I would say that, yeah, Steve jobs did fine without me. I would say in 99% of cases there is a need because their job is to, to motivate, to inspire and to create and guide the direction so that everybody in that organization, whatever they're working on is going toward the overall objectives and goals. And that's where.
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breaks down. I had a good conversation on my podcast recently with Mark Miller, who is the VP of high performance leadership for Chick-fil-A. And he was, I think corporate employee number 13 or something in the seventies for Chick-fil-A. So he was very early and he's been through a bunch of roles since then, but his new book is called Culture Rules. And it was a Wall Street Journal bestseller. And it's all about based on a lot of research, the rules that they have developed for.
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what it takes to build a high performance culture in a company. And part of our conversation was about, well, let's say a company leader and we're defining leader here as somebody who has a leadership title. If they have all of the different competencies of a leader, they're smart, they're strategic, they make good decisions, they care about people, right? They know how to put people in the right position, success and so on. If they're good at all those things, but they are uncommunicative.
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they fail to tell their company and the individuals within their company about the things that they're doing. So like, I'm doing the right things, but I'm not telling anybody that I'm doing it. What can be done about that or how can they improve that? And the answer was that person's not really leading because that's what leadership entails. And it truly is the case because realistically, if you aren't articulating the narrative, telling the story.
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articulating the vision and then demonstrating how you are doing things that are leading toward that vision and your mission and the values of your organization and what you're trying to achieve, then everybody is going to fill in their own story about it and draw their own conclusions. And some people may just trust you just because, but other people are rightfully going to say, well,
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I'm not really sure what's happening here. I don't really know what we stand for. We say, we have these nice words on our website, but I never really hear from leadership. So I don't know, do we really mean any of that, right? I mean, yes, it's important because it is a great opportunity to get better buy-in, better performance, better understanding, to have everybody really increase the level of how they can help to enhance adherence to that vision. It's a baseline measure of
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demonstrating to your staff that you believe it's important for them to know, that you believe they're important enough for you to communicate through them, right? That you value them, that you respect them, that you see them as an important part of the organization, that within whatever the, you know, the C-suite or leadership circle of an organization is that there's far too much information that is considered privileged. Just, ah, they don't need to know that they just need to do their job.
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If you're not telling people, if they think, what are they hiding? Or they're just saying, well, they don't really think we're that important. Especially sometimes when they find that you've been going the wrong direction because they didn't tell you in the first place, then they end up micromanaging you. But have they been open to, this is where we're going, it would have been a different story altogether. Yeah, yeah. And I always had this perhaps exaggerated ratio, but it kind of was my way of making the...
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point about this in a sense of when you make a new hire, it's 20% about hiring the right person and then 80% about what you do afterwards, 80% about, do I put them in a position to succeed? Do I communicate to them what they should be working on, what they're doing? Am I giving them timely and useful feedback? Am I ensuring their success? Now people can quibble with those numbers, but the point is that if as the leadership of that organization.
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you are failing to communicate all of these things, then it doesn't matter really how talented anybody is because they're only working in their own sandbox, right? There's no cohesion. So you help leaders with their vision and decision. Do they struggle to make decisions? I think what happens a lot is that anything from...
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the mission, vision, and values of an organization to even the strategic plan, they become these words and documents that we put on the website or we publish in a nice binder, and then they stay there or they go on the shelf. We're not consistently on a daily basis going back to that when we come to a fork in the road with the decision to make and saying, okay, well, which one of these takes us closer to our vision for the future and which one doesn't?
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So it makes it a lot harder than it has to be, right? It's not even that we're actively trying to work against those values, but it's that every time we're having to evaluate an entire decision or opportunity based on all of its own individual siloed factors and considerations and not saying, okay, well, let's take a step back and let's look at our entire organizational vision or the strategic plan that we just worked on.
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And which of these opportunities is aligned to that? You know, cause one of the things when I'm coaching an individual leader, every person needs to also have an understanding of their mission, their values, their vision for where they want to go. Most people don't do that. Right. It's not commonplace, but that makes our lives a lot easier when we have some sense to say, if I have these top three values that I believe in, and I have these opportunities in front of me, which of them is going to help me.
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be the person I want to be or move in the direction I want to move and which one isn't, even though it sounds good on the surface, it's a lateral move or it's taking me off of the path of where I'm going and ultimately it's not really going to be the right thing. Yeah, the personal mission statement because what it does also when we talk about career decisions, does everybody have to climb the ladder going up?
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If you don't like managing people, maybe that's not your forte. Can you move laterally? Right. To give like a very simplified kind of baseline example, right? I mean, one of the things for me that is really important to me is that I need to really work for mission driven organizations. And so for my work in the education space, it's really been about equity access and opportunity for students and all the different things that create that by working with educators and schools to do that. So.
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Let's say I was in a position where I was looking for a new job opportunity and I see a posting for something with this really exciting sounding startup that I mean, all the descriptions of the job role is exactly what I love to do, right? Yeah. And they have great benefits, they, you know, great perks, all this kind of stuff. And it's like, okay, I'm really excited about that. If I don't then take the time.
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to really look into, okay, well, what's their mission? What are they really working toward? I can go and work there. And if it turns out that there's not alignment on that piece, I'm going to be unfulfilled and unhappy there no matter what all the other stuff says, right? How many of us have been in that position where it's like, you know, I was in a job, I was burned out, I was unfulfilled, I knew it was time to move on. I moved on to the next thing. And then a few months later, I...
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okay, this is not any better than where I was before, because I missed out on that, you know, on really saying, okay, what's really personally important to me? What are the things I care most about for some people that's autonomy or it's collaboration or it's purpose, or, you know, there's any number of values, but if we're not finding that in the organizations and then the people we work with, all the other stuff doesn't replace that.
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And we've seen a little bit shift during the pandemic as well. We actually had time to sit down and think, it's a, wait a minute, do I really want to be here? Right. In a good way. Even things like people who have made a decision one way or another regarding, I want to keep working remotely or I don't, or I want to ensure I've gotten a new perspective on the amount of time that I can have available to be with my family and I want to maintain that.
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So I want to be in a position where I don't have to travel a certain amount. Things of that nature. We can't make the right choices around that stuff until we define it and have clarity on it and say, you know what, this is important to me. And so it's a non-negotiable. What you may find is that there's some flexibility on the other end. And they say, you know what, we really do want you here. And that thing is not that important. So we can kind of compromise on that. Or.
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It may not, and you may have to find the next opportunity, but again, you are not going to be fulfilled down the road once you realize, oh, I've compromised on my other values and priorities because I got excited in the moment or I had a fear of missing out. And now the thing I'm missing out on is something that I value more highly. The thing is fear of missing out on what you think you're losing. Sometimes there's just so much more to lose if that's not a fit for you.
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We can only control certain things. We have our intentions and then we have our commitments that we can make that we think are the things that we can control that will help us get to those intentions. But there's certain things that are out of our control. I can say I wanna go work for an early stage company where I can earn equity, but I can't control whether or not down the road the company ends up getting acquired, is the equity worth anything? So unless I have a sound decision-making process and I'm...
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happy there, regardless of the result. If I'm only happy, if that outcome happens that I can't control, then it's probably not such a great choice. No, it doesn't sound like it at all. I've met a lot of podcasters on this show, but you're the first one who has a podcast network. I've never heard of that before, before we met. So please explain that to us and how that came about.
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Sure, yeah, so my co-founder, Jethro Jones and I, Jethro is host of the Transformative Principle podcast, which he's done for more than 10 years, about 700 episodes, I believe. And he also has hosted and co-hosted a few other shows. We had known each other for a number of years and collaborated on a variety of things. And we got to talking about a year and a half ago, and we each had this vision in mind for the potential to.
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expand on what we each had done in the podcasting space. He had done the podcast for a long time. I had created, developed, produced, sometimes hosted about 12 to 15 different series of branded content, you know, series for different companies. And so we each had done a lot in the podcasting space and we were looking through, okay, what are the opportunities where having a true collaborative integrated network is beneficial? Anybody who's done podcasting or anybody who's thought about it and maybe said, eh, that's too much.
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is familiar with some of the challenges, right? It's isolating, you're doing it by yourself. It's a lot of work. It takes a lot of time and perseverance to kind of build your audience and to reach new people and to figure out who's listening, who's not, am I doing a good job? What are other people doing? Is this unique or not? Because the technology doesn't necessarily make it easy, right, the different platforms don't make it easy to really find out what else is going on out there, especially when you're trying to work in somewhat of a niche.
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The recommendations are just very general. You know, we have people who are not full-time podcasters. Many of the folks in our network are still active educators, principals or others in schools. And this is something they love doing. They believe in the content. They believe the content is helping people, but you spend money out of your own pocket. But how do we generate some revenue so I can at least offset my expenses and maybe make a little profit for my time and effort?
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How do I reach more relevant audience members who might be interested in my content? How do I get connected with guests that I would love to have? How do I learn some new best practices, right? So that was our vision for it, is to bring everybody together across the spectrum of that education space, everybody whose work is relevant to one another. How do we learn from each other? How do we pool our resources? How do we centralize some of those business operations so that as a creator, you just have to worry about
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creating your content and you don't have to worry about all the other stuff that is either not your expertise or you just don't have time for. And that way when we represent two companies who are potential partners or sponsors, they have similar pain points where the podcasting space is huge, right? It's a large medium. There's a lot of podcasts and a lot of listeners out there, but it's highly fragmented. Most individual shows don't have a huge number of listeners. If they do.
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They're probably not in a niche. So we don't really know much about the demographics. So unless I'm a consumer brand, it doesn't matter. But if they're all together, okay, now I can talk to this one person and think about what are creative ways where I can reach all of those people if I have something that's of value to them. And then we can say, yes, this is something we believe in and we think is valuable. No, it's not, but it would be a full-time job for somebody in a marketing department to.
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figure out what are all the podcasts out there and who can I talk to? And you know, it wouldn't really work. Right? Such a huge pool, yeah. Right, and we have audience survey data saying that they're interested in these things. In our case, the majority being school leadership positions, they're interested in learning about technology products and professional development opportunities for their entire school. They want to know about things that are valuable to them, but they need...
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us to do the work to find those things, to share it. And so it helps the listeners, it helps the creators and it helps the companies who want to work with us as well. We do production services, custom content for companies if they want to have their own series. I call it the triangle of pain points because it's the listeners, the creators and the companies, each of whom there are certain things about the way podcasting usually works that makes it difficult on them.
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And in this case, we can just make it a lot more relevant, a lot more accessible, easier to find. If I'm a listener and I find this new show I really like, and then it just stops publishing episodes because the host got busy or frustrated. Yeah, because a lot of us are one-man shows. Yeah. Right. I think the stat was only 50% of podcasts make it past three episodes. Fewer than 10% make it to 20. So as a...
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podcast creator, I understand why that is because there's a lot that goes into it. As a listener, that's not really serving you. And the listeners are asking themselves, why is that my problem? Well, you're right. Or as long as that's the case, you're disincentivized from committing to something too early. It's important to those people as well. And then to say, if I like this show, what's another show I also might like.
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okay, I can go to the network and see what else they have versus relying on Spotify or Apple, whomever to recommend something that might not really be relevant at all. You know, when you explained this fragmented idea, somebody said, you have so many veterans, assistance organizations, nonprofits, why don't they just all come together and help veterans? And instead of one man shows and people say, I ran a nonprofit helping veterans.
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it's a similar idea that you just come to this where everything is all under one roof. Yeah, yeah. So before you go, is there anything that I didn't ask you that you were hoping to share with our listeners today? I don't know, I think we had a great conversation. I think I would, you know, reinforce to the listeners. And I mean, I really do believe in communication as being that number one fundamental leadership skill and that it determines the success or failure of.
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what else you're doing. And it doesn't require being the Steve Jobs type visionary that's out there able to inspire the masses, but it really is important to connect with your colleagues and collaborators, potential partners. It's the way in which we demonstrate that we are thinking about what's important to them, what's valuable to them, finding those connections, right? And speaking to that greater.
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mission and vision that everybody has. Everybody wants to do meaningful work and make a difference and they want to be in a place that is helping them to do that. And when we feel like we're in the dark, even if we have a high feeling of personal competency, we don't feel a lot of efficacy if we don't really know if what we're doing is making a difference or if anybody notices it or anybody cares. Especially that person who thinks I'm good at what I do.
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I know what I'm doing, but I don't think anybody else here really does. Okay. I'm out of here. I would tell that person, yes, go somewhere else where you're valued. Exactly. Usually when people reach out and say, they want to be on this podcast, they just say, I have a great guest for you. If it's a PR company or I would like to be you one of the first people in a while, especially who actually said, hi, Roberta. So that still exists. Because.
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Yes, I understand we're in a rush, we copy and paste and a lot of things, you just want to get it out of the way out of your desk. But you stood out for me by actually calling me by name, because a lot of the time, you don't receive that and I understand people are busy. I'm not judging anybody. But thank you for that. That's a communication skill, soft skill, leadership skill, you know, the little things that make people feel seen, heard and valued. So thank you for that.
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Thank you for mentioning that. And that's another good takeaway for the listeners is just take the little extra time to take the extra step to think about who you're speaking to and what would make a difference. And it could be as small as that. You don't need to have a whole bunch of data and market research, but there are things in this day and age of the internet that we all can take five minutes and learn a little bit about it and make better connections and it's mutually beneficial.
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There's so much more power in collaboration and that takes thinking about, okay, who else is out there that's interested in the same thing I am? Yeah, let's come together just like you created the network for sure. Ross Romani, thank you so much for being on our show today. I've enjoyed my conversation with you. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me, Roberta. I believe this is in the show notes below, but I'll just note as well there should be a link there. I put together just for the listeners here.
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Or if anybody is interested in any of this stuff or has to ask you for your socials, your website, everything. Yeah. Anybody has a pain point around this. So I put together a Calendly link there just created for whoever's listening here. If you have something you want to chat about or something you've been struggling with, I just want to talk about, feel free to connect with me and social media. I'm on LinkedIn. Just search for Ross Romano or on Twitter at Ross B Romano.
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those are the best places to connect. And there's a link there to my podcast as well. But if we connect on social media, you'll figure that out eventually. For sure. Are you verified on Twitter? Just kidding. Nevermind. I used to be. Discussion for another day. Thank you so much, Ross Romano, the coaching consultant for education leaders. This was an amazing conversation. Thank you for being on the show. Thanks so much for having me.
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My pleasure. Don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review on iTunes and Spotify and stay tuned for more episodes to come.