As part of our blog series based on this great panel of in-house practitioners – featuring Leidos’ Henrique Canarim, Etsy’s Jennifer Card and Intel’s Alex Shukhman – here’s a blog that addresses the question of: “Any other disclosure tips to offer?”
Leidos’ Henrique Canarim
1. Read Broc’s blog as it’s really good. That’s the best tip you can offer anyone in the space for disclosure practices.
2. Team culture is super important. Pay attention to detail and make sure that everyone feels like they have ownership of the work product so it’s not just the legal department leading the way. Allow others to participate as a formula for success.
You want open communication as a way to foster teamwork. Allowing people to voice their suggestions. You might be amazed if you let your HR lead address the question of “what do you think we should do better?” or “should we consider different ideas?” They might have really good thoughts to add. You might have a lot of wealth on your team and then you’re not doing it alone. It’s a team sport.
3. Give yourself a little bit of grace. You’re not going to be able to achieve absolutely everything on your list every single year. There might be things that you will have to wait another year to be able to accomplish. To convince people to give you the support – the proper resources and processes – to be able to deliver gradual improvement.
4. Try to have fun during the process because it’s pretty cool to see your work product in the end. When you see an executive coming in for an interview with your document in their hands, you realize that this is good stuff that you do. You feel like you’ve accomplished something. So give yourself credit and give your team credit for the good work in the end.
Intel’s Alex Shukhman
5. I think that’s a great one, to find humor wherever you can, because if you’re not laughing, you’re going to be crying.
6. It’s really important that disclosure drafting isn’t a one-time transaction. It’s an undertaking where people really need to kind of think about the culture around disclosure. It’s not only about consistency, but it’s also about being evolutionary.
Disclosure evolves and it keeps going so you know even if you can’t do something in a particular year – or at a particular point in time – it’s okay to put it in the bucket of “this is going to be something that we’re going to actually try to take on next year when we’ve got a little bit more time or we have a little bit more knowledge or there might be a little bit of a more receptive environment.”
7. Don’t think about effective disclosure necessarily highlighting all of your good things. Think about it also as the opportunity to provide context for you. For any places where you may find humility or perhaps the situation is “I don’t know if I feel good about this” but sharing the “why” and where you are on that journey.
It’s important to inform your stakeholders even if they disagree as they may appreciate your candor in terms of understanding the “why” – and then it will help you when you go on your journey and you’re trying to sell your messaging to kind of say “okay well, this is why we had it like that before” – and as you hopefully improve, you have a story to tell versus you trying to hide the bad stuff or them suddenly seeing all of this wonderful stuff that you haven’t given them any information or warning about during the journey.
Building up that credibility with your stakeholders as you deal with problems may help you anytime you have a new problem that comes up where you don’t have a magic solution where you can say “okay, here’s what we’re going to try to do.”
Etsy’s Jennifer Card
8. Staying connected with your key stakeholders during the drafting process and being open to feedback is really critical. The disclosure is a “partnership” disclosure as it’s constantly evolving. Connecting with your key stakeholders and being open to what is said during shareholder engagement can be really valuable in your efforts to continue evolving your disclosure.
