How to Succeed in PR Quickly

I’ve been in public relations for a number of years, and I’m often asked by young professionals starting their careers at PR agencies how to succeed quickly. I begin my advice to them with one word… initiate.

I learned at an early age that demonstrating initiative was the key to it all. You can be a great writer, strategist, and speaker. But if you start out as an order taker, you will remain an order taker. I became a PR director of a publicly traded company at the age of twenty-six. And the primary reason I was given that opportunity was because I demonstrated to the company’s CEO that I exercised initiative.  

My predecessor was strictly an order taker, waiting for direction from the CEO. And I was an assistant to the PR director. Bob would always wait for the CEO to tell him what to do. Not the way to get ahead. On the other hand, I was ambitious and impatient. I read the scenario very carefully and made my way into the CEO’s consciousness by initiating a major idea that was the moment in my new career when I first scored a bull’s eye.

The idea was carried out flawlessly and one day I was summoned to the office of the CEO who told me that he was making a change in my department. He told me that he was transferring my boss to another department and making me PR director. What guts on his part? And what massive anxiety on my part. I was relatively new to public relations but came up with an idea that caught the attention and respect of the CEO. And that was my first lesson in the concept of taking the initiative.

I learned that you can be the best writer and thinker in the world. But if you remained an order taker rather than an initiator your career would remain stagnant.