Recruiting and Retaining Young PR Professionals with Kim Ades

In this episode, Kim Ades, founder of Frame of Mind Coaching and co-founder of The Journal That Talks Back, joins host Jason Mudd to discuss why there is a high turnover rate for young PR professionals and how to slow it. 

Tune in to learn more!

Watch the episode here

5 things you’ll learn during the full episode:

1. The four things companies need to have to slow turnover
2. Why organizations lose their top talent
3. Improving mental well-being in work and your personal life
4. The myth of work-life balance
5. Why empathy is not a good idea

Resources

• Listen to more episodes of the On Top of PR podcast
• Find out more about Axia Public Relations
• Find Kim Ades on Twitter
• Connect and learn more about Kim Ades on LinkedIn
• Visit Frame of Mind Coaching for more information. 
• Contact Kim at kim@frameofmindcoaching.com.

Additional Resources:

• The Journal That Talks Back

Additional Resources from Axia Public Relations:

• How to stay positive when working in PR
• Leadership’s responsibility of mental well-being with Vance Meyer | On Top of PR podcast

Disclosure: One or more of the links we shared here might be affiliate links that offer us a referral reward when you buy from them.

Highlights

[02:15] Why companies lose talent

• Companies lose young talent because these young professionals are overwhelmed with information and stress.

Kim: “I started to understand that young people are faced with a whole bunch of challenges that perhaps I wasn't faced with when I was young, or I saw them a lot differently.”

Kim: “They're experiencing perhaps an overwhelm of information. Maybe it's from social media, maybe it's from their friends, maybe it's from the world at large. They're much more exposed than I was at their age to the news and to what's going on in the world. And so, I mean, from a physical physiological standpoint, it's hard to deal with; it's stressful.”

• These young adults are more sensitive to stress but are also more talented.

Jason: “There are very talented people available in the workforce. I worry sometimes that they don't feel challenged or they might feel like there's certain stuff that is above their pay grade.”

• Young professionals may feel bored with their jobs or experience burnout.

[13:18] The four things companies need to have to slow turnover

Kim: “A young person really looks at visibility to the future. What does that mean? They want to know what their career plan is. They want to know what's next.”

• Young people are looking for growth in their careers and look to their leaders at the organization to help them get there. 

Kim: “Young people, it really matters that what they do makes an impact. So they want to be able to contribute, they want their voice to be heard, they want to be part of a good community.”

• They seek validation that what they do matters and they are on the right track. This validation is not always public; instead, they may want to be appreciated and recognized privately. 

Kim: “They really need a good leader. And what I've discovered is a lot of leaders don't have very, very basic coaching skills. And so what we want to do is we want to make sure leaders are equipped with those coaching skills.”

• Know how to have those complicated or difficult conversations. Great coaches know how to bring a person from point A to point B in a positive manner, and they know how to build up their team but also address things that aren't working.

Kim: “Young people need support. They need support outside of the workplace.”

• Young people need a place to work through challenges. And a lot of times maybe there's something going on in their personal lives and they bring it to work, so they need a safe third-party place to work through it.

[17:22] The myth of a work-life balance

• With a lifetime of stillness, you may not be able to handle it when times get rocky, but life is full of rocky times. 

Kim: “We like that moment of stillness, but we don't want a lifetime of stillness.”

Jason: “So embrace the clutter and chaos of life.”

• If you're expecting that balance all the time, you will always be disappointed.
  
  

[19:38] Why empathy is a bad idea

Kim: “Empathy is putting yourself in someone else's shoes and feeling their emotional state. So empathy is not an action you take, empathy is an emotion, where you feel what somebody else feels.”

• Feeling empathy can debilitate us when we need to feel compassion instead. Feeling the emotions of someone in panic or crisis puts us into a panic or crisis, and then two people are struggling. 

Kim: “I need to have compassion. I need to see this person as drowning. I need to say, “Oh my goodness, they need help.” But I need to have the presence of mind and the wherewithal to stand on the side of the pool and reach in and pull them out.”

About Kim Ades

Our episode guest is Kim Ades, the founder of Frame of Mind Coaching and co-founder of The Journal That Talks Back. She's a pioneer in leadership coaching and thought mastery. She uses her unique philosophy and direct coaching style to help leaders identify their blind spots and learn to direct their thinking to achieve extraordinary results.

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Transcript

- [Narrator] Welcome to On Top of PR with Jason Mudd, presented by ReviewMaxer.

- Hello, and welcome to On Top of PR. I'm your host, Jason Mudd with Axia Public Relations, and today we're joined by Kim Ades. She is the founder of Frame of Mind Coaching and co-founder of The Journal That Talks Back. She's a pioneer in leadership coaching and thought mastery. She uses her unique philosophy and direct coaching style to help leaders identify their blind spots and to learn to direct their thinking to achieve extraordinary results. Kim, welcome to On Top of PR.

- Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here and looking forward to this conversation.

- Thank you, Kim. I'm glad to be here and glad you're here too. And today we really want to focus on how to recruit and retain young PR professionals at our organizations. I think this is a very timely and important topic. Generally speaking, it tends to be younger professionals who are working in PR, especially at the entry level. And even on up to mid-level, it seems to be a young person's profession. It seems to be a profession that is mostly dominated by females in the workforce. And so of course both or any of those combinations require unique consideration of how do you create a great employment experience for those individuals. And as the generations change they're looking for different things. So I think this is a timely topic. We're recording this in September of 2022, and right now it's still hard to find people and especially hard to retain the people you find. Kim, does that sound like a good topic for today?

- I love that topic. It's one of my favorite topics ever.

- Okay, perfect. Well, would you like to start us off by just kind of giving some general advice, keeping in mind that our audience is public relations, corporate communications professionals that are working at a brand or company who is looking, obviously, to build awareness in the marketplace through PR strategies and tactics, and would be looking for ways to recruit and retain top talent at their organization?

- Yeah, I mean, let's start with this. I want to kind of go a little bit backwards and give you a little bit of my experience in terms of what I've been seeing recently. In as far as a year or two years ago, a lot of my clients were complaining that they were losing their top talent. And most of that top talent happened to be in the younger generation. I was hearing things like, hey, we had a meeting, we were sitting in a meeting, everything was going well, and one of our younger employees got up to go to the bathroom and never came back. I was hearing things like, we just hired an intern, super excited to have him join our team. And on the day that he was supposed to start, he never showed up. What happened? He broke up with his girlfriend, he was curled up at home in a ball and couldn't himself to work. And so I was hearing a lot of stories like that, and they were not unusual, like I'm telling you perhaps the extreme stories, but really they were very common. I was hearing them frequently and I started to investigate what exactly is going on here. And I started to study the issue of retention. And I was looking at several sources of data. I was looking at the young generation, and I have access to a lot of them. I have five kids of my own who are all in the age range between 23 and 29, and they have a lot of friends. But I started to ask them a whole bunch of questions around like, why aren't you staying in your jobs? What's stopping you from enjoying your position and staying over a long period of time? And I was also looking at the stats, just out there trying to understand what are the trends, what's going on? And then the third thing was I was hearing from these employers. And so I started to understand that young people are faced with a whole bunch of challenges that perhaps I wasn't faced with when I was young, or I saw them a lot differently. So they're getting a lot of data coming in at them. They're experiencing perhaps an overwhelm of information. Maybe it's from social media, maybe it's from their friends, maybe it's from the world at large. They're much more exposed than I was at their age to the news and to what's going on in the world. And so, I mean, from a physical physiological standpoint, it's hard to deal with, it's stressful. So their sensitivity to stress is a little bit higher, but so is their talent. Like there's no question that these people are significantly more talented than we were when we were that age. Like, it's astonishing actually. And so the question becomes like, why are these people leaving? And we notice that there are areas that are very, very important and specific where they have a lack of satisfaction.

- That's interesting. I think that you're right. There are very talented people available in the workforce. I worry sometimes that they don't feel challenged or they might feel like there's certain stuff that is above their pay grade and I have teenagers and they're just not willing to pay their dues in the entry-level roles that they're able to get as teenagers in the workforce and all that stuff. So, I think there's a lot of elements at play here, Kim, but my understanding is that this led you to create or launch a coaching program called The Journal That Talks Back. Can you tell us more about that?

- Absolutely. So again, going back, we've been coaching leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, like the highly driven population for the past 18 years. And when we started to notice this problem, this turnover problem, and even, let's call it a mental health issue among this group of people, we said, how can we serve them a little bit better? And so we created The Journal That Talks Back, and essentially what it, it's a coaching program that is unlimited, accessible, affordable for this group of people. So let's say you have a young person in your life, they get assigned to a coach, they come onto our platform, and the coach is a real human being. It's not a bot, it's not a robot, it's not AI, it's human-to-human contact. They go onto our platform, they select a journaling prompt if they want, and they start journaling. And every time they journal, their coach reads and responds to their journal. So they're communicating with their coach as often as they want. They can journal once a week, once a day, 12 times a day, doesn't really matter. Their coach will be reading and responding to their journal within 24 hours. So it's a huge amount of intimate conversation that's going back and forth. So their coach really gets to know them very well, and we invite them to discuss all of the things going on in their lives, not just professional, everything, whatever's on your mind, nothing's off the table. And so there's a place for them to unload that stress. There's a place for them to discuss the bumps that are happening at work, maybe the interpersonal conflicts or the frictions they're having, and to work through them to understand them with greater clarity.

- And Kim, is this, you mentioned, I think you alluded to this, if the individual doesn't feel up to or doesn't feel inclined to journal, are there other ways to interact? Or are you really looking for them to journal?

- We're looking for them to journal. Now here's the thing, if you look at how younger people communicate with one another, they're always texting or Snapchatting or Instagramming, right? Like that's what they're doing or TikToking now. But so we are leveraging their modality of communication. They don't want to get on a phone and talk to somebody. Every time I tell my kids, hey, why don't you just call? They say, mom, we don't do that.

- Right.

- Right. So we're leveraging the way that they are comfortable communicating in a private and secure way.

- So Kim, why is it that when these individuals who don't want to make phone calls, when they finally do make a phone call, they admit, “Gosh, that was so much easier and quicker and more productive.” But then they don't go back to the comfort of using a phone again-

- Because it's not comfortable.

- Yeah.

- That's the whole point. Like when you call it the comfort of using a phone.

- Yeah.

- It's not actually a comfortable thing for them.

- Yeah. No, that's-

- It's very uncomfortable.

- Yeah. I'm sorry. That's what I mean is that they're not comfortable using the phone.

- Yeah.

- But they do come back and say, that was so much easier to just get somebody on the phone and have a conversation with them.

- Because they have anxiety about getting on the phone and the anxiety- So what it boils down to is this every single person that you know, that I know, we all have a dialogue that runs in our head, and that dialogue will determine what we do, how we do it, how successful we are at doing it, doesn't really matter. So I'll give you an example. Every time I do a presentation, I ask for a volunteer. Well, I had one yesterday, and it was a virtual presentation, I asked for a volunteer. There's a group of let's say 40 people – only one person volunteers. The question is why? When I ask for a volunteer, it means you're probably going to learn something. It's probably going to be a memorable moment for you in your life. It's probably going to stick with you a little longer than usual. So why isn't everybody volunteering? Because they have a dialogue in their head that says, “I don't want to embarrass myself. I don't know what she wants from me.”

- Right.

- This is a risky experience, right? And so when we look at being on the phone, it's the same dialogue that takes place. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what they're going to say. I don't know if I'm going to have the words to answer back. This is a risky experience. And so when we perceive risk, what do we do?

- Avoid?

- We avoid, we don't take action, right? Yeah. We any, right, It's normal to shield ourselves from risk. And so OK, great, it was a good conversation this time with this person, but next time it's another person and the risk still stays the same. So that dialogue, even if it's fabricated, is what runs our lives. My job is to understand what is the dialogue that's taking place for you and how is that dialogue aligned or misaligned with your goals. Does that dialogue help you move forward? Or does it actually hold you back?

- Is it reasonable to think that after a certain number of reps of having positive experiences and productive experiences making voice calls, that the person will then warm up to it and no longer have this anxiety?

- Of course. I mean, it's like being a speaker, right? I'm a speaker, I've been speaking for pretty much my whole life, but when I was young and I had a speech to do at school, well, you can bet I was in the bathroom for the 30 minutes prior to my speaking engagement. Look at me now, right? No problem. Let's go, let's get the show on the road, right? But of course, with exposure and experience, you lower your levels of anxiety of course.

- OK. So why are the emphasis on journaling, Kim? Why is that important and does it go beyond the young professionals as you described them that you work with?

- Yeah, absolutely. So for me, journaling is a way to access the thoughts that are going on in your brain on all subjects. So I find that a lot of coaches never necessarily get enough data or know enough about their clients to coach them effectively. When we are reading someone's journal on an everyday basis or understanding how they think, how they respond, how they react across a variety of situations. So the data we're receiving is much, much higher. And that data allows us to start to pick up patterns of behavior, patterns of thought, beliefs they have. And that's extremely powerful.

- Gotcha. OK. Well that's very good, Kim. We're going to take a break now, and we're going to come back on the other side talking about, a little bit of, and I don't want to misquote, but the myth of work-life balance and also why empathy is not a good idea. So I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts about that. Is we, it a little bit more provocative on the second half. So those of you tuning in, stay with us, we'll be right back after this break.

- [Narrator] You're listening to On Top of PR with your host, Jason Mudd. Jason is a trusted adviser to some of America's most admired and fastest-growing brands. He is the managing partner at Axia Public Relations, a PR agency that guides news, social, and web strategies for national companies. And now, back to the show.

- Welcome back to On Top of PR. I'm your host, Jason Mudd, and I'm joined with Kim. And Kim, we're going to talk about just a few more things as we're wrapping up here and one of the things I wanted to get to is just the bottom line of why are people quitting and what do companies need to do to slow the turnover.

- Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about that. What I look at it in terms of four buckets. What are the four things that a company needs to keep their eye on in order to increase their retention rates? So the first one is that a young person really looks at visibility to the future. What does that mean? They want to know what their career plan is. They want to know what's next. If I do all the things you tell me to do, will I get that promotion? Will I get the raise? Will I be able to move up through the organization? Is there a plan laid out for me? And is that plan clear? And are you guiding me to the next steps? And more importantly, are you keeping your promises? In other words, if I do what I say, will you actually bring me to the next place? Or will you delay? Will you, make it difficult for me? So that's number one, visibility to the future. Number two is that young people, it really matters that what they do makes an impact. So they want to be able to contribute, they want their voice to be heard, they want to be part of a good community, right? So they want to be part of an environment where they are accepted, validated, and appreciated. They want their work to count in the grand scheme of what they're doing at work. And so noticing what they are doing, noticing their contribution is very, very important. When they are under-noticed, then that's a problem for them. Number three-

- And notice doesn't always mean recognized, right? Meaning that I've learned that some people don't like to be publicly recognized for their work. That's a big turnoff, almost as bad as you were describing, as picking up the phone or public speaking to them. There are some personality types that want to be appreciated and recognized privately, but definitely not publicly.

- Yeah, I think a really good term is validation. So sometimes it's public, sometimes it's not, but they want to know they're on the right track, right? They want to know that you're paying attention to their work. They want to know that you're appreciating their contribution and that's so important.

- OK, good. And what's the third bucket?

- The third bucket is that they really need a good leader. And what I've discovered is a lot of leaders don't have very, very basic coaching skills. And so what we want to do is we want to make sure leaders are equipped with those coaching skills. They know how to have those complicated or difficult conversations. They know how to bring a person from point A to point B in a positive manner, and they know how to build up their team, but also address issues that aren't working, right? So many leaders are put into a leadership position without really having the background or the skill set to coach their people effectively. So that becomes super important. And then the last bucket is that young people need support. They need support outside of the workplace. So when they're feeling that anxiety, when they're feeling that turbulence, when they start a new job and they're unsure of themselves and they're not reading the room properly, or they get feedback from their boss and they think it's the end of the world, they need a place to go and work through that. And a lot of times maybe there's something going on in their personal lives and they bring it to work, so they need a safe third-party place to work through it. And this is why we've brought The Journal That Talks Back to a lot of corporate environments to help with that piece as well. We also teach leaders how to coach, but this element cannot be overstated because you can- A young person cannot go to their boss and say, “Hey, I'm feeling uncomfortable at work,” because that creates a really strange dynamic.

- Yeah.

- It's not unbiased in that case. So they need a safe, unbiased place to work through that discomfort, and that's really important. So those are the four buckets that we want to make sure are addressed.

- And where might our audience go to learn more about The Journal That Talks Back in your corporate program?

- Yeah, thejournalthattalksback.com really easy.

- That's easy.

- Yeah.

- Yeah. Perfect, perfect. And then we were talking earlier about work-life balance. I've heard other speakers say that it's a myth. I think what you're saying is that it shouldn't be overly focused on, but I don't want to speak for you, Kim. Tell us what you think about work-life balance.

- Let's talk about balance for a minute. So have you ever been to a park where there's a seesaw? Yes?

- Of course.

- Okay, so what is a seesaw? It's like this, right? And it's a one, two kids, I can't straighten out my arms here. When two kids are on a seesaw and they're in perfect balance, what is happening?

- Nothing

- Exactly. Exactly. Nothing's happening. So do we want a lifetime of this stillness? No, we want moments of stillness, right? We want, we like that moments of stillness, but we don't want a lifetime of stillness. We want a lifetime of the of... And what we're really trying to do with the people we work with is we want to help them enjoy the ride, not white knuckle the ride.

- Yeah.

- So we're building their resilience so that when the bump goes up or down, they're having fun, they're enjoying it, they're not scared out of their minds, they're not terrified, they're not so anxious that they just want to get off. They have the wherewithal to be able to handle the ride when it gets a little rocky, right?

- Turbulence, yeah.

- The idea, exactly. The idea is not to have a lifetime of stillness, a lifetime of balance where everything is exactly in order, things get out of order in life, you have kids, right? Things get out of order in life. And the idea is, do you have it in you to handle the disorder when it comes along?

- So embrace the clutter and chaos of life.

- Well, and clean up sometimes, but you're not going to spend your whole life cleaning up.

- Right, Right. And I guess to your point, if you're expecting that balance all the time, you will always be disappointed.

- Well, you'll always be in a state of discomfort and right, and anxiety when things aren't in order. And things aren't in order in life. That's just not the way it works.

- All right. So we're going to close on empathy is not a good idea, you say. So fill me in on that because I feel like everyone else has a contrarian opinion. So I appreciate it when our clients and individuals have a unique, provocative, or contrarian point of view. So let me hear yours.

- Well, let's define empathy for a moment. What is empathy? I think a lot of people don't understand the real term. So empathy is putting yourself in someone else's shoes and feeling their emotional state. So empathy is not an action you take, empathy is an emotion, where you feel what somebody else feels. So now let's back up. Let's say I'm walking by and I see someone drowning in a pool. How are they feeling?

- Panicked.

- Panicked, desperate, breathless, hopeless. Whatever all those words are. And if suddenly I am empathetic, then I feel those feelings. In the moment I feel those feelings, I have disabled myself, I cannot help them. What I've done is I've jumped in the pool and started drowning right beside them, right?

- That's not productive.

- Not productive. I need to have compassion. I need to see this person as drowning. I need to say, oh my goodness, they need help. But I need to have the presence of mind and the wherewithal to stand on the side of the pool and reach in and pull them out. But empathy in this moment is not useful. And this is what people don't understand when we talk about empathy. They think, yes, we must be empathetic. No, we can be compassionate, we can be understanding, we can acknowledge that someone is suffering, but jumping in the pool beside them never serves them. Never does.

- Yeah. That's good. OK. Very interesting. Thank you for sharing that, Kim. So if our audience today, or I'm not if, because our audience today really enjoyed hearing from you and learning from what you shared, what would be a great way for them to connect with you? Is it LinkedIn?

- It could be LinkedIn, it could be just go to our website frameofmindcoaching.com or send me an email. I love hearing from people. It's kim@frameofmindcoaching.com.

- Perfect. And when you do reach out to Kim, please be sure to let her know you heard about her on On Top of PR because that's our job here is to help you stay On Top of PR and on top of whatever challenges and issues, topics, trends that are happening in the public relations business. So with that, that's another episode of On Top of PR and I appreciate you tuning in. We thank Kim for joining us, and if you found this episode to be valuable, please take a moment and share it with a colleague. And also be sure to check out Kim's website and see if her solutions might be helpful to you and your workforce. With that, this is Jason Mudd from Axia Public Relations signing off. Be well and I hope something great happens to you today.

- [Narrator] This has been On Top of PR with Jason Mudd, presented by ReviewMaxer. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And check out past shows at OnTopOfPR.com.

Sponsored by:

• On Top of PR is produced by Axia Public Relations, named by Forbes as one of America’s Best PR Agencies. Axia is an expert PR firm for national brands.
• On Top of PR is sponsored by ReviewMaxer, the platform for monitoring, improving, and promoting online customer reviews.

About your host Jason Mudd

On Top of PR host, Jason Mudd, is a trusted adviser and dynamic strategist for some of America’s most admired brands and fastest-growing companies. Since 1994, he’s worked with American Airlines, Budweiser, Dave & Buster’s, H&R Block, Hilton, HP, Miller Lite, New York Life, Pizza Hut, Southern Comfort, and Verizon. He founded Axia Public Relations in July 2002. Forbes named Axia as one of America’s Best PR Agencies.

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