№ 07The Faculty
Padraig Whelan.
Communications Adviser, Formerly Group Communications Director, two FTSE 100 companies.
On the senior letter, the bad news memo, and writing under pressure.
The memo has three readers. Most people write it for the first one. The career is decided by the third.
The work
Padraig advises chief executives, chairs, and a small set of senior communications directors on the things they have to write themselves. He does not run a firm. He takes one major engagement at a time and never more than four a year. He runs the Communication Under Pressure masterclass with Hannah Sieghart and the Speak Plainly day with her in November. He writes a short monthly note that goes out to about ninety senior comms directors. The note is paid. The fee is uncomfortable, by design.
Background
He was Group Communications Director at two FTSE 100 companies between 2009 and 2022: first an industrial conglomerate, then a consumer goods group. The industrial years were the years in which the group lost two factories to fire and one chief executive to a slow corporate scandal. He drafted the relevant shareholder letters in each case. He has the redlined originals in a folder and uses them, with permission, as teaching material in the masterclass.
Before the group communications work he was a parliamentary press officer for five years and, before that, a sub-editor on a Cork morning paper. He still reads proofs with a soft pencil and a steel ruler.
Signature contribution
Padraig is known for what he calls the bad news memo, which is the senior communication you write when you have something difficult to say to a board, a regulator, or a press lobby that already knows half of it. His argument is that the memo has three readers: the person it is addressed to, the person it will be forwarded to, and the person who will read it in three years’ time and judge what you knew at the time. Most communications training, he will say, is written for the first reader. His training is written for the third.
He is also known for a particular refusal to release a draft. Once he has written the senior letter he reads it aloud twice, at full volume, in an empty office. If it sounds, on the second read, like something written by a committee, he tears it up. He has torn up his own work, by his own count, eighty-three times in his career.
In practice
On any given crisis week Padraig is on the phone for fifteen minutes at a time, four times a day, to a chief executive who has not slept. He does not write the executive’s communications for them. He asks them to send him a draft, by email, within the hour. He reads it. He sends back about four lines of revision and three questions. The whole exchange takes ninety minutes. The executive learns to write under pressure because the alternative is worse.
Read your senior letter aloud in an empty room. If you would be embarrassed to read it aloud, do not send it.
Outside the work
He lives in Dublin and in west Cork in roughly equal measure, walks the same stretch of beach most weeks, and is married to a barrister who he met in the 1990s on a job neither of them now likes to discuss in print. He reads American crime fiction, mostly nineteen-fifties, and, on the desk, the long diaries of nineteenth-century editors.
Plain prose is not the absence of style. It is style under enough pressure to have stopped being decorative.