Dining with Della: Sarah Temple at L'Artista
January 11, 2016
Sarah and I met at L'Artista in Burnaby. It is a lovely little family-owned Italian restaurant close to my home and en-route to downtown from SFU where Sarah is currently employed.
Sarah has been Executive Director of Communications and Marketing at SFU for the past two years, and is now on special assignment with the City of Vancouver for the recent climate conference in Paris and GLOBE 2016 scheduled for the spring.
She has done amazing work over the years, particularly during her time in Washington D.C. as a senior VP with Ogilvy PR. She has hobnobbed with presidents, scientists and fashionistas.
What worked...
What one bit of communication impacted your life?
There are two:
"It is PR not ER" is a favourite saying. People are always getting their knickers in a twist and have trouble stepping back from situations and calming down. However, some PR is ER such as when dealing with death, big crises and wars. But overall, most PR issues are not emergencies. The best colleagues and clients are those who take a rationale approach to PR no matter the situation.
A moment that sticks out for me is when Rosemary Brown was speaking at a "women in media" event in 1991 in Vancouver. Rosemary was the keynote speaker and she totally let us have it. There had been a sexist comment made on an earlier panel and she lectured a room of 300 women for getting distracted by that speaker.
She stressed we should never let it happen again. We needed to keep our eye on prize. Like the civil rights movement, we needed to speak up and speak out about the long view, not the predictable critics.
What did not work...
a) What great idea did you never communicate to anyone?
We were working on a campaign and a large national organization was trying to turn it into a money maker. Aside from the unethical tactics and personal affront of a population not being served they just wanted to use the program to generate funds. We wanted to communicate what was happening in a transparent way and planned to document their lack of ethics. We never did speak up about it as we realized it was not black or white or that simple. We were concerned but it may have hindered some good work in the end.
Note from Della: Sarah and I discussed this issue at length. There are times in our lives when we see something unethical or inappropriate but know making it public would do more harm than good. It never sits well to feel compromised and both of us have worked hard to deal with those situations behind closed doors.
b) What is the one idea you tried to communicate but it flopped?
Partnerships that we thought would be a perfect, natural alliance but did not work as we hoped... perhaps they were never meant to be. One example was trying to bring together our red dress campaign, a woman's heart health awareness program with CBS's 100th anniversary of the I Love Lucy show. Lucille Ball died from heart disease, she had that beautiful red hair and personified a strong independent woman who had her own production company. We tried and tried but just could not make this happen.
Also, the times when your team responds to an idea you share and says "did you actually say that out loud?"
c) What moment did you not say what you wished and should have said?
Not speaking truth to power usually means you and your team won't be able to do what's right for your organization and its mission, or your best work. My favourite people to work with are the ones who embrace complexity, discourse and candid truths.
What if...
What advice would you give to your younger self to enhance your ability to communicate with others – and why?
Take a chill pill.
The ethic of being the Type A workaholic where everything has to be perfect is so crazy. Be perfect or be nothing is crazy. Work is only one part of who you are. You should want to do good work that matters and has an impact on something useful but work is work. You are not your job.
One of my favourite moments with Sarah was at her wedding to her ever so lovely and brilliant partner Peggy on Saltspring Island. Peggy was trying to have a quiet moment with Sarah in a nearby field before the ceremony when my husband walked by en route to get sunglasses from our car. Sarah called out to him and to Peggy's chagrin the three ended up chatting, hijacking the special moment.
I know there are no hard feelings as Smitty and Peggy have since developed a special bond. We still laugh about that #awkward communications moment.
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