Thank you, Passle, for all you do for our community and for including my thoughts here: https://blog.passle.net/post/102i517/cmo-series-special-your-guide-to-taking-on-2023🐙

Roy Sexton: “I’m Roy Sexton, Director of Marketing for Clark Hill and I am also the 2023 International President of the Legal Marketing Association. The one piece of advice I have has been hard learned and it has really been galvanised in the last four years of working at Clark Hill and it’s going to seem both counterintuitive and a bit twee at the same time. Slow down, pause. Listen to the people around you.

“We often are there in support of people who have their hair on fire for good reasons and we sometimes want to be doers and we want to respond and we want to react. And we take that chaos energy into ourselves and we just start doing stuff. Lean into your team, lean into the people around you and even if someone’s coming at you with heightened energy you don’t have to be dismissive of that, be empathetic, say, I hear what your needs are.

“State a timeline back to them and say, could I do some digging on this? Work with the team. Can I get back to you in a week with a recommendation? Nine out of ten times, unless it’s a media crisis or something, people will always understand, but then follow up. Meet the timeline that you suggested.

“And I also tell the folks that work for me, don’t screw up the easy stuff. If someone needs an update on the website, just do that quickly and get back to them and show them that you did it. Because that makes the harder conversations that much easier later because you’ve earned the credibility.

“But in short, I would say take a pause, take a breath, assess the situation, and then figure out a solution in collaboration with the smart people that you get to be around every day.”