Debra D. Peterson, APR
Vice President - External Communications and Community Relations
CenturyLink
New Century, Kansas
Applying for: Chair-Elect
Alternate Position(s): Treasurer, Secretary
Biography
Debra Peterson, APR, leads external communications and community relations for CenturyLink, a global communications, hosting, cloud and IT services company that currently ranks #159 on the Fortune 500. Debra previously held management positions with EMBARQ and Sprint. Her professional experience includes major corporate events and sponsorships, governmental affairs and employee communications.
Currently treasurer of the PRSA national board, she serves on the national Board of Directors Executive Committee, chair of the Finance Committee, board liaison to the Investment Committee and oversees the Audit Committee.
Her extensive PRSA national, section, chapter and committee experience includes serving on PRSA’s national Revenue Model Task Force and the national Audit Committee.
She served on PRSA’s national Board of Directors from 2011-2013, serving on the Finance Committee all three years, in addition to her role as the board liaison to the Accreditation Marketing Committee in 2013.
She served for two years on the national Board of Ethics and Professional Standards, two years on the national Nominating Committee, and was national Section Council co-chair. She served in several leadership positions on the Corporate Communications Section Executive Committee, including chair, chair-elect, past chair and secretary.
She also served for five years in leadership positions with the Greater Kansas City chapter of PRSA, including president, president-elect, past president and secretary. She has served as an Assembly delegate seven times.
She is a recipient of the Roger Yarrington Public Relations Professional of the Year award by the Greater Kansas City chapter of PRSA.
PRSA Accomplishments
PRSA National Board of Directors, 2017
- Treasurer
- Executive Committee
- Chair, Finance Committee
- Board liaison, Investment Committee
- Oversee Audit Committee
National Revenue Model Task Force, 2014
National Audit Committee, 2014
National Board of Directors, 2011, 2012, 2013
- Finance Committee, 2011, 2012, 2013
- Board liaison, Accreditation Marketing Committee, 2013
National Board of Ethics and Professional Standards, 2009, 2010
National Nominating Committee, 2008, 2009
National Section Council Co-Chair, 2009
Immediate Past Chair, Corporate Communications Section, 2009, 2010
Chair, Corporate Communications Section, 2008
Chair-Elect, Corporate Communications Section, 2007
Secretary, Corporate Communications Section, 2006
Member, Corporate Communications Section Executive Committee, 2004, 2005
Immediate Past President, Greater Kansas City chapter, 2008
President, Greater Kansas City chapter, 2007
President-elect, Greater Kansas City chapter, 2006
Secretary, Greater Kansas City chapter, 2004, 2005
Assembly delegate: 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2013
Governance Skills
For the past three years, I have served on the Board of Directors for Growing Futures Early Education Center, a not-for-profit organization serving more than 250 primarily low-income children and their families with Early Head Start and Head Start programs. Because Growing Futures is funded only in part through federal and state grants, it is required to raise private and community funds to meet matching requirements for federal grant funding. The organization is also subject to numerous federal and state government regulations. In addition to serving on the Executive Committee, my service also includes the Vision, Mission and Strategy Committee and the Ethics Committee. My work on the board includes a variety of leadership responsibilities, including planning, fundraising, building community awareness, as well as assessment of the executive director.
I have served in a variety of governance capacities with PRSA, including at the national, section and chapter levels. My leadership roles have included a three-year term as director on the national board, serving all three years on Finance Committee, and then as treasurer during 2017, national Audit Committee, national Board of Ethics and Professional Standards, national Revenue Model Task Force, national Corporate Communications Section chair and various officer positions with the Greater Kansas City chapter, including president. My PRSA leadership experience has been extensive, from developing strategy, decision-making, determining critical needs, reviewing and rewriting bylaws to overseeing finances and monitoring budgets.
My corporate leadership responsibilities include development and execution of my organization’s strategy, decision-making, organizational design, employee development and assessment, measurement and reporting, and budget development.
My extensive leadership and management experience at some of the world's largest corporations has prepared me to serve as PRSA chair-elect and the four-year commitment I would be making as chair-elect, chair, immediate past chair and chair of the Nominating Committee.
Leadership Skills
Since 2009, I have served in executive leadership positions at CenturyLink, a company that has grown to about $18 billion in annual revenues (#159 on Fortune 500) and employs about 40,000 worldwide. Our company has made a series of acquisitions, and the employees from the acquired companies bring with them the cultures from their respective organizations. Integration of these companies requires leadership, with extensive communication, collaboration and compromise. Adding to the complexity is the fact that our corporation is global, with employees located in all 50 states as well as throughout the world. We also are in the midst of a major transformation as we now are a global communications, cloud and IT services company. It is our goal to ensure employees understand our strategic direction and be engaged and committed to doing their part in helping our company achieve its goals and objectives. CenturyLink operates in a very competitive marketplace in our business, consumer and wholesale segments, requiring strong leadership to ensure our success.
By learning how to be successful in a competitive and dynamic environment, this and other leadership experiences equip me to serve as chair-elect and help guide PRSA's strategic direction. As a global organization with sections, districts, chapters, and committees, it is important to have leadership, communication and collaboration across these organizations. PRSA is also operating in a dynamic and competitive environment. Leaders that understand the importance of innovation and how to remain relevant will ensure PRSA can strategically adapt to changing market demands.
Strengths
Throughout my career serving in management and executive positions for major corporations, I have worked closely with top executives. The insights gained by working to solve business challenges and seize opportunities have prepared me to serve as chair-elect. I also earned my MBA to enhance my business knowledge.
In addition to this business experience and development opportunities, I have perspective gained from my worldwide travels, beginning at an early age due to the fact that my father spent his career in the U.S. Air Force. To this day, I continue to travel domestically and internationally to broaden and enhance my knowledge and experiences. Having lived and traveled around the world, and worked for corporations that operate globally, I understand the importance of diversity and how it helps ensure better decision-making.
I also have extensive PRSA leadership experience at the national, section, chapter and committee levels. In addition to my PRSA leadership experience, I am currently serving in a board leadership capacity for a non-profit in the Kansas City area, providing additional experience in this area.
My leadership expertise can strengthen PRSA by seeking opportunities for different and innovative approaches to address challenges and opportunities, with the goal of ensuring PRSA remains relevant and the organization of choice for communications professionals.
Volunteer Commitment
I am committed to fulfilling the chair-elect duties and my executive responsibilities leading my corporation’s external communications and community relations departments. During my current term as treasurer and my previous three-year term on the national board, I attended and participated fully in all board and committee meetings, related assignments and continual outreach to membership and chapter, district and section leadership.
This year, I’m serving as PRSA treasurer while my company is engaged in key projects: a $34 billion acquisition of a company and a $2 billion sale of some of our assets. While there are substantial responsibilities associated with these projects and the day-to-day leadership responsibilities, thanks to tremendous company support of my PRSA leadership, strong work ethic, effective time management, comprehensive planning and organizing skills and substantial career experience, I’ve been able to commit fully to my role as a member of PRSA’s Board and Executive Committee.
These strengths, in addition to being responsible and dependable, allow me to commit the time needed to manage these responsibilities in a timely and responsible manner throughout the four-year PRSA leadership path of chair-elect, chair, immediate past chair and chair of Nominating Committee.
As a longtime PRSA volunteer leader at the national, section, chapter, and committee levels, I understand how important volunteers are to our success and the importance of balancing competing demands. I appreciate those who fulfill their obligations, and hold myself to that standard of keeping commitments I have made.
Position Statement #1
Prompt: The lines continue to blur among the disciplines of public relations, marketing, IT and customer service, and the need increases to create more collaborative teams and hybrid professionals. PRSA has continued to evolve and respond to these issues in support of our members, partners and colleagues. What do you believe are the strongest components of PRSA’s strategic plan that will help our members address these challenges, and how will PRSA remain relevant and sustainable for the future?
I am a firm believer in the importance of lifelong learning in career development. The “enhancing professional growth” section of our strategic plan is a component that helps our members adapt to the enormous changes in our profession. I am pleased to see the focus on helping members through all stages of their careers.
The report issued by our brand task force validates how important learning is to our members and prospective members, with the large majority of respondents citing the importance of keeping current with new developments and issues as well as the ability to network and share knowledge with peers.
The strategic plan also addresses the impact of the evolving communications industry. Expanding our membership promotes broader representation with more diversity. Additionally, the focus on elevating knowledge through thought leadership increases member access to best-in-class models and how those concepts can be adopted.
Expanding our membership community enhances member ability to tackle our changing profession. More diverse professionals in PRSA results in greater diversity of thought and experience within chapters, sections and districts and expands participation and widens discussions and content in our professional development courses. Our members learn from each other not only in formal training sessions, but also in informal conversations when we share our work-related challenges and experiences. Having a broader membership base is an integral part of that learned and shared experience.
Given the extensive competition for training dollars, we should continue to expand best-in-class programming opportunities. The remarkable interest shown in PRSA’s Reputation Management course demonstrates the potential of expanded learning.
With organizations increasing their focus on social media, this offers an opportunity to educate members on this rapidly evolving part of our toolbox, both as a strategy and tactic. We have an incredible opportunity to help our members understand, interpret, make sense of and best adopt and align social media to achieve their organizational goals. For example, while many social media courses focus on B2C, we can demonstrate leadership using best-in-class B2B case studies and the changing role and expansion of analytics, data and artificial intelligence.
Our professional development delivery methods also are key to our success. Given budget pressures, time demands, and time shifting, we should continue to offer courses that members can view at times and places most convenient for them, often in their office or home. While in-person professional development is still an important part of the mix of our offerings, we should also ensure we have virtual courses that meet member needs. Also importantly, we must partner with our educators to broaden our activities of lifelong learning, beginning with the college experience.
As we continue to implement our operating plan based on the three-year strategic plan, it’s critical to continually revisit our current offerings and what we are doing that is a differentiator for PRSA, given the extensive competition. It’s my goal to help ensure PRSA remains the organization of choice for communications professionals at all ages and all stages of their career.
Position Statement # 2
Prompt: PRSA has become more complex and diverse in recent years. While the Society must become nimbler, we also are cognizant that we must help prepare our members to meet tomorrow’s challenges as leaders at every level. The role of the communications professional will continue to evolve, and PRSA will anticipate future trends, and support our members at every stage of their career. As a member of PRSA’s national board, what do you see as your role in contributing to helping our membership meet tomorrow’s challenges as leaders?
To help meet tomorrow’s challenges, one of my primary roles is to listen to our members and share their thoughts, needs, challenges, opportunities and aspirations with the PRSA board and staff. Membership input is critical to our ability to demonstrate value. It’s important to understand what is going well and what may not be going well, and then discuss as a board how we can identify trends, strengths and challenges. With members at different professional stages and positions within an organization, this is not easy, since what may be of great value to one member may not be to another. We should address the challenges, enhance segmentation strategies and amplify and share success stories. Our board’s outreach to PRSA leaders is critically important and should be expanded. In addition to maintaining formal outreach, let’s also maintain our informal network of contacting those within the profession.
Just as important as listening is the need to continually assess the external landscape. Let’s initiate more discussions with those who are not members to learn what we can do to encourage their membership. If there are common themes, let’s identify innovative solutions. We also should continually evaluate and understand the competitive landscape with other professional organizations and other professional development opportunities all vying for member attention. Our recent research in brand and other areas can be an important yardstick as we celebrate our 70th year as the world’s leading communications organization. While PRSA is valued and respected, we must ensure we are viewed as innovative and inspiring. Any perceived lack of innovation—often typical of very large organizations—should be quickly addressed given that the world is quickly changing and ever-adapting to newer and different forms of strategies, leadership, tactics and technology.
Ongoing internal and external assessments help ensure we keep PRSA relevant. A fascinating case study is Amazon’s evolution from its origin as an online bookseller to an online retail and cloud computing powerhouse. Its success caused many other companies to rethink how they do business. Having a culture of innovation like Amazon’s is essential to ensuring we maintain PRSA’s relevance.
Even if the board listens, assesses and recommends appropriate courses of action, effective implementation depends upon PRSA staff support. It is vital to maintain a high-performance culture that allows staff to learn, assess and innovate. We must provide staff the resources they need to do their jobs, which makes increasing membership--and thus revenues--critically important.
I have worked for major corporations for almost my entire professional career, and understand the variety of challenges facing businesses, including those caused by technology changes, security issues, competition, changes in consumer behavior and cost pressures. PRSA faces similar issues, and it’s important to collaborate and address the challenges facing us. Together—with our 31,000 professional and student members, magnificent staff, hundreds of volunteers and leaders at the chapter, district, section and committee levels--we can turn our dreams into realities, thus advancing the profession, the professional, organizations we serve and our communities across the globe.
Debra D. Peterson, APR
Category
Chair-Elect