CCO Podcast: Megan Noel On“Bringing All The Storytellers Together” At Covista

(MENAFN- PRovoke) After a career spanning roles at Edelman, PwC, and Golin, Megan Noel made the decision last year to take on a new challenge at what was then Adtalem Global Education, leading a corporate affairs function that spanned investor relations, government relations, internal and external communication, enterprise brand, social responsibility and more under CEO Steve Beard, who was determined to“bring all the storytellers together,”

Last week, Adralem rebranded as Covista, a change that went beyond a new name and a new visual identity to new positioning and mission. Amid a major transformation, Noel sat down with Paul Holmes to discuss her career and the commitment to purpose that has guided it.

Below are some of the key highlights from that discussion, but we recommend that you listen to the entire 30-minute conversation here.

On her commitment to purpose:“I have always looked for a career that's grounded in purpose. When I was in business school, I was in an ethics class in Georgetown, and we were talking about the idea, do business have a responsibility to give back? And it was in the late 90s, early 2000s and you saw a lot of companies getting in trouble for environmental issues or labor issues, and I was fascinated, and I really wanted to dedicate the first part of my career to helping companies do good in the world, while also doing well by their business.”

On her career before Covista:“I was always fascinated in business. I thought I wanted to be a finance major. Took two classes in finance and accounting and switch quickly switched over to marketing, international business.” She joined Edelman where she was part of starting a corporate social responsibility practice and worked in Europe, before joining PwC on her return to the US.“”I got there, and immediately we revamped the entire organization. So, you know, let a bunch of people go and rebuilt the comms team from the ground up” before being named to lead the communications team in her early 30s.

On restructuring the communications function at PwC:“We took that function from a very downstream, tactical media relations function that was essentially a service provider for press releases and Twitter posts and made it into something that was a true strategic partner across the business. We combined internal and external comms. We had change management and a project management team under us.”

On returning to the agency world:“After a decade, I wanted to go back to the agency world and had an amazing opportunity at Golin, where they had a role as global president of corporate affairs and I wanted a chance to get broader exposure to more clients and different industries. And I loved my time at Golin. Being at the cross section of so many clients was so interesting to see how different industries and organizations handled such tricky business and societal challenges.”

On what convinced her to move back to the client side:“I got a call from the CEO Steve Beard. He is fantastic. I've known Steve for a long, long time, and he came with an offer that was quite special, to be the chief corporate affairs officer of Coista, and to have comms, IR, GR, thought leadership, enterprise brand, and sustainability and impact all part of my portfolio. To say that those jobs come around often, it would be a complete lie. And so it was just an amazing offer.”

On what made Covista-Adtalem Global Education at the time-so exciting:“We have 10,000 colleagues. We educate 97,000 students a year. We have 385,000 alumni. And if you think about a business and societal challenge, this is what was so interesting to me, we have a healthcare workforce shortage. Every month there are more than 700,000 healthcare jobs that are posted, and only 300,000 healthcare workers to fill those jobs. Healthcare executives tell us they have to reduce patient capacity because they can't find the right types of workers. And so that was what was attracting me to the role.”

But Adralem was a holding company with five subsidiary institutions and very little name recognition:“What we really wanted to do for the past several years is have the enterprise brand be behind the scenes and allow the consumer brands or institutions to shine. Nut we're at a point in our trajectory where, given our size and scale, and what we think is an opportunity is to have a meaningful impact in both a business and societal challenge, we want to shift the enterprise brand, not to replace the consumer brands, but to go out and showcase the power of the enterprise brand.”

On why a multi-stakeholder approach to corporate affairs makes sense:“The role was set up specifically, and Steve Beerd gets all the credit for this, he wanted to bring all the storytellers together, and so he thought that you can't have storytellers for the investment community sit over here, or storytellers for the media community sit over there, and storytellers for our people sit in a third place that you had to bring them all together, so they're able to tell a better a more cohesive and more consistent story across our entire stakeholder group, and in turn, that will help build trust.”

On how storytelling fits into the C-suite:“I can't do my dog job successfully unless I partner very closely with everyone else, whether it's with finance on IR, whether it's with legal on GR, whether it's with HR on internal communications,. It requires strong partnership and strong collaboration and understanding each other's strengths. I rely on the finance team for the numbers and the performance of the company. Our job is then to architect that into a story for our investors beyond the numbers.”

On metrics:“We have a strong reputation management system in place. It's around outputs, impact and outcomes.... Ultimately, we have perception metrics of where we want, how we want to be perceived, with each of our different stakeholders, and then a strong tracking system against that. And while I may shepherd that process, it is something the entire management system is held responsible for, because it is something that if we do, we all share in the credit of success.”

On the rebrand:“It was in the early days when I got to the company, both Steve and our CMO were working on it together, and so I had an opportunity to jump in right from the positioning stage to say, how do we redefine who we are and what we stand for in the marketplace? So we worked on the repositioning, the same time as we worked on the brand and the visual identity.

“We also worked on all of the the assets that come with it. So refreshing our website, refreshing our purpose, vision and values. For the first time, we had an employer brand, and so worked with the CHRO on elevating and crafting our employer brand and who and how we want to stand for in the marketplace with talent.”

On what's next:“We will continue to work with each of our stakeholders to bring the message to light. We are really excited, around our impact work, to work directly with hospital systems, healthcare partners, and also to get our people involved. We have amazing colleagues, from academics to nonprofit leaders to government leaders to nurses and doctors, and they are itching to be able to go out and work in the communities, to be able to support students and clinicians. And so that's a really exciting but also very meaningful part of what's next to bring this commitment to life.”

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