In this next episode of The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast, Heidrick & Struggles’ Paula Davis is joined by Sally Susman, the chief corporate affairs officer of Pfizer. Susman, who recently published her book, Breaking Through: Communicating to Open Minds, Move Hearts, and Change the World, shares her insights on what skills are most important as a leader, particularly a communications leader, as well as the value of humanity, humility, and humor. She also discusses navigating professional boundaries and spotting a healthy corporate culture.

Below is a full transcript of the episode, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Welcome to The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of diversified solutions across senior-level executive search, leadership assessment and development, team and organizational effectiveness, and culture shaping. Every day, we speak with leaders around the world about how they're meeting rising expectations and managing through volatile times, thinking about individual leaders, teams, organizations, and society. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Paula Davis: Hello, I'm Paula Davis from Heidrick & Struggles in the corporate affairs and communications practice here, and we are excited to talk about communications and how you move from good to great as a leader. So this podcast is for communicators, it's for CEOs, it's for everybody who leads people and wants to be more effective in what they're doing.

And who better to talk about communications than author, board member, business leader, mentor, advisor, mom, wife, daughter, sister, Sally Susman, who literally wrote the book on this topic. Sally is chief corporate affairs officer of Pfizer. She leads engagement with all of Pfizer's external stakeholders, including communications, corporate responsibility, global policy, government relations, investor relations, and patient advocacy. She also serves as the vice chair of the Pfizer Foundation. So Sally, thank you for being here today. 

Sally Susman: Oh, Paula, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really excited for our conversation. 

Paula Davis: Great, thank you. And so we're going to dive in. We're going to jump right in about how you broke through communications as a communications pure play into leading a much larger role at Pfizer. So, how would you describe what you do today? 

Sally Susman: Well, today, as you so kindly described, I have a broad portfolio that covers most of the important constituencies that Pfizer engages with outside the company.

So, government leaders, policymakers, the media, thought leaders, patient groups, investors, and other people who care a lot about global public health. But I think to your point, I didn't start that way. When I came to Pfizer, I was offered a position that was very narrow in my mind. It was straight CCO, chief communications officer, and I remember arguing at the time with the person who was recruiting me into the company that I had done more, I could do more and I learned a very important lesson right off the bat with that, and that was the person who recruited me said, Pfizer's a large, global complex, highly regulated company. You're going to be better off to come into Pfizer with a more narrow remit, but one that you can succeed at, and then things will grow. As you know, an ambitious candidate, I wasn't sure that was going to work, but it did. And it was actually really sage advice that when I was going from a mid-size company, the Estee Lauder companies, into Pfizer, a behemoth, having a narrower role was actually a blessing, and having these pieces come under my purview as I've been with the company for 18 years has been a much more comfortable way to expand my horizons here. 

Paula Davis: That's fantastic. So, it's something where we work with people, with candidates, who are looking at opportunities. So, to think through what might not be readily in the job description, understanding and seeing the potential for growth is really important to consider, and important aspects of making a career decision of where you choose to go. But what skills are most important today that allow you to grow your areas of responsibility? 

Sally Susman: The ability to connect with the rest of the executive committee. Over the course of three companies, I have reported to nine CEOs and each one was different. They're all very talented, but you know, being able to express a vision for the company that you're representing to understand how it works—and that can be very hard to do—to show a commitment to preparation, which I really believe in, and having a series of skills that you bring to every new role. Probably the most important one, in the beginning at least, is active listening. I didn't come into Pfizer telling people, by any means, what to do. I wasn't even sure I would make it here because I am not a scientist, but I had to learn the moves of science, the language of science, the ability to work with scientists, and so all these things, you know, come together, and hopefully you also find a good culture. You know, when I talk to young people or people in transition, it's less about what the company does and more about how the company feels to you.

Does it feel like a place where you won't just survive, but thrive? That's what we all want. 

Paula Davis: Did you have any questions that you remember asking and the different opportunities you took to evaluate a culture coming in from the outside? 

Sally Susman: That's a very good question, and I'm going to turn it on its head because I'm not sure you get a good answer to that by asking a question. You know, if you ask someone, ‘Well, how's your culture here?’ You know, they're all going to tell you that it's great. I look for cultural clues, you know, are they respectful in setting up the appointment or if it's required the travel? Do the administrative assistants seem like they're well-treated? Are the people there smiling? So I describe it as: Can you hear the music in the background of the place? Is it a place where you just get that vibe that ‘I think I could be happy here, I think I could contribute here.’

Paula Davis: I love that, good things to look out for. I think we'll move to your book to talk about that and Breaking Through. What resonated with me in reading it were the aspects of, to break through humanity, humility, and humor. And so, I imagine as you look at people to work with, work for, to partner with, those are things you look for. So, can you talk a little bit? Let's just go right into it. What does breaking through mean? 

Sally Susman: Well, breaking through means that you are able to pierce the umbrella that is covering up a lot of us, that we just go about our daily lives and don't think about things differently, don't change our mind about things, remain really committed to the point where many of us are stuck, and the things that you were just raising, humor, and humility, and humanity. 

Paula Davis: I think this phrase I've heard a lot about how do you thread the needle in communications, the delicate dance of how vulnerable to be without seeming weak or inauthentic or, dare we go into the territory of the humble brag, which I think your phrase was, you know, how to sabotage your credibility and likability with the humble brag. So, I agree there. How do you kind of assess how much as a leader yourself, and as you counsel other executives and senior leaders, how much to give? 

Sally Susman: That's a really good question. Finding the balance for executives between sharing an appropriate amount versus being too locked down is at times very difficult. I worked once with a tremendous executive. She was really highly effective—a superstar—but she had trouble expressing the humanity or opening the door a bit to being more authentic. And I remember once she called me to her office, closed the door, and she said, Sally, I need you to hire a PR specialist for me.

I said, okay, but why? And she said, to make me more authentic. I just laughed because no one can make you authentic. You become more authentic as you have more confidence and so you're less anxious about exposing any vulnerability. You become more authentic as you share from your true life. When you're contemplating sharing something, I believe it's important to think about: Can this be part of a larger narrative that I'm trying to convey anyway? I don't think everybody needs to bring all of their best self to work every day. I don't need to know what you had for dinner, what you cooked 10 times over the weekend, but if there's something you want to share about you that explains maybe why you're at that company or why you're striving for something greater, then I really want to know, and that becomes deeply authentic. 

Paula Davis: I love that. And for the person who asked you to help them become more authentic, maybe what they were trying to communicate is that they felt misunderstood. I've seen very thoughtful people, good people, but they came off in a very different way because they were uncomfortable speaking or giving of themselves.

It was just that insecurity or you know, not having the skills to do that. And I'm sure you've worked for people who, people confuse charisma with being an effective communicator—or confidence. Do you have any stories or advice of how you've helped leaders or yourself gone from a good to great communicator and I think breaking through those steps are probably an important recipe for that.

Sally Susman: Thank you. I've thought so much about this. I don't want to go on for too long. One of the key concepts that I write about is called ‘Pitch,’ and some people make the mistake when they see the word pitch in a book written by a person who's primarily a communicator. They assume it is, I'm pitching a story to the media, or I have a sales pitch, or the dreaded elevator pitch. When I talk about pitch it is none of those things. My concept of pitch relates more to a quality of sound, a way of being. It's less about the precise words that you use. It's about the way that you are. You know, do you come in with a smile on your face?

Do you look people in the eye when you talk to them? Do you listen carefully? And I find too many people are caught up in, you know, memorizing a phrase or trying to rehearse their remarks. I don't think any of that is nearly as important as the intention that you bring to the experience. 

Paula Davis: So, you have served many roles—[and] you continue to—one of them is as a board director and we're seeing more communications people on boards, which is great, and would love to learn a little bit about your experience and the qualities that you believe prepared you for that role and your experience.

Sally Susman: Thank you. I have very much enjoyed the opportunity to serve on public company boards. I've been on three, one at a time, because they are time-consuming, and you want to give things your focus. The first one was a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) that was then sold successfully. The second was a British advertising and marketing company, many people in our field, Paula, know, WPP; I was on their board. But in England, after nine years, you lose your independent status, and it forces a refreshment in rotation that I think is very healthy. And so now I serve on the board of directors of UL Solutions. It is a testing, inspecting, and certifying company with a fantastic purpose statement, working to make a safer world.

They actually became a public company within the last year, and I believe that the board felt that having been a long time quiet, private company with this dynamic CEO, with this public offering, with a, you know, world where safety is getting more and more complex,—they do everything from testing electric vehicles to ensuring credit cards are secure—that they would have more stakeholder engagement, and that that was a skill that they valued alongside all the other skills they value, but I think you can find in the most thoughtful and innovative companies a fresh desire to have people who have dealt with the complexity of a highly regulated public company. And so that's been a really wonderful experience for me. I've learned a lot, and I hope I've contributed as well. 

Paula Davis: What have you seen are the biggest indicators or cultures of the most successful and effective boards?

Sally Susman: I believe that boards work best when they possess two things. The first is a knowledge of the business that their company is engaged in.

In fairness to directors, you come maybe once every two months or once a quarter, and you sit in meetings for a day, maybe a day and a half, you've read all your pre-read materials, but you need to ensure that you have a very transparent management team and that you ask a lot of questions because if you don't understand the essence and the core of the business, you're not really adding value.

And then the second thing is to be a collaborative board member. It is not a board member's job to manage the company. It is not a board member's job to weigh in on every debate or question, but to really collaborate with other board members and to collaborate with the CEO and senior management. They manage; we in essence, oversee—and getting that line right is important. I've seen some board members who try to get in there and run the company, and that's not our job.

Paula Davis: Can you talk about humor and its role in your effectiveness and connecting to people?

Sally Susman: One of the four values we have here at Pfizer is joy, and for us, joy means that we take our jobs seriously, but not ourselves. And even though we're a big biopharma company, we know that laughter is good medicine too, and it's important to keep a perspective. So, I try to share some thoughts in the book about how to be humorous in today's world, and certainly rule number one is always to only really make a joke about yourself. I mean, you never poke fun or take it out of another person. Self-deprecating humor pretty much is a winning strategy. 

Paula Davis: If you can just share a little bit about, because I think at that point, breaking through and building trust with so many diverse stakeholders about vaccination was really hard, and might have been very hard even internally with different points of view at Pfizer.

Sally Susman: The company was on a real mission. Albert Borla, our CEO, had declared that we would bring forward a drug before the end of the year, and that was an incredibly bold, bold, bold ambition. I then saw Albert do something I haven't seen any of the other eight CEOs I worked for do. It was time to appoint a project manager for this incredibly demanding project, and he appointed himself. And that's when I thought, wow, maybe—just maybe—we are going to do this thing. And so we went about working incredibly differently, crushed the bureaucracy, had no time for any sort of hierarchy within the company, did what usually is a linear process of drug discovery, all at once.

It was fascinating. It was gripping. We were working as a team every day. Long, long hours. And I thought if Albert is going to have a mission that bold, so too will I, and I determined that this would be the moment when I would seek to turn around the reputation of at least this big pharma company. And we also did things differently.

We embedded media along the journey. We put things that before were considered treasured intellectual property up on our website. And in the end, not only, as you know, Pfizer found that vaccine first and incredibly quickly, but Pfizer became a most admired brand during this period. 

Something also happened for me personally, which is all the thoughts that have been rumbling around in my head about leadership and communication—they crystallized. It's a book that was written during COVID, with COVID in the backdrop.

But it's really a book about my belief that it is a big mistake to consider communications a soft skill. It's a rock-hard competency as relevant to success as any other discipline. And this all came together at this time and resulted in this book. 

Paula Davis: You know, it's interesting because when you were talking today about communications, that potentially the most important part of communications is action. And we know the statistic, you know, in public speaking, 95% of it is visual and 5% is what you're actually saying. But words matter, for sure. You talked about pitch and looking at cultures, and how you hire based on action, and look at cultures for action of organizations you want to join, of effectiveness of boards, etc.. Is there any other key takeaway, if you remember nothing else about breaking through, no matter what role you have? If you work in an office, at home, wherever you're working, what would that be? 

Sally Susman: Yes, I do. Thank you. I wrote a final chapter in the book on Seeking Harmony, and you know, that may sound a little kumbaya for a business book, but we live in a world that is increasingly divided and unkind and lacking in civility. And I like to follow Adam Grant, and Adam says that harmony is the pleasing arrangement of different sounds—and that is very meaningful. So Paula, you and I don't have to agree on everything. I suspect we agree on a lot, but we may have different views on who we like, who we support, and the choices we want to make in our lives.

But, because we're both professional communicators, we have the skills to be able to discuss this in a civil way and potentially agree to disagree. We can listen for understanding, not for rebuttal. So I am passionate about building these core skills. Maybe because you want to become a CCO somewhere, or maybe because you're the CEO of a company, but also maybe just because you're a person trying to get by in this world and build relationships and create communities and having rock hard communication skills is essential to doing that, and I'm passionate about that. 

Paula Davis: There it is. I'm going to end there. That's our mic drop. Sally, thank you for joining us today.

Sally Susman: Thanks, Paula. It's been great fun, really.

Thanks for listening to The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. To make sure you don't miss the next conversation, please subscribe to our channel on your preferred podcast app, and if you're listening via LinkedIn or YouTube, why not share this with your connections? Until next time.

About the interviewer

Paula Davis (pdavis@heidrick.com) is a principal in Heidrick & Struggles’ New York office and a member of the Communications and Corporate Affairs practices.