Assistant Director - Corporate Reputation

Summary:

Responsible as a leader in strategic planning, socialization and execution of the company's corporate reputation communications strategies focused on proactively and reactively managing and mitigating risks that could have a corporate or brand impact to Northwestern Mutual. Partners with others across the Strategic Communications team and the business to identify potential issues and develop recommendations designed to protect and shape the company's reputation among internal and external audiences. This role reports to the Senior Director, Corporate Reputation as part of the company's Strategic Communications team.

Primary Duties & Responsibilities:

• Supports the Senior Director in the creation of an annual Corporate Reputation strategic plan that outlines quarterly objectives, strategies and tactics to protect the company's reputation and minimize reputation risk.

• Creates and maintains an annual team planning calendar that maps issues on a macro and micro level across national trends, industry milestones and key dates for the company. Reviews planning materials monthly and quarterly to ensure the team's efforts are on track to meet team goals.

• Writes and executes strategic communications plans and written materials that support business partners including Government Relations; Insurance Products, Sales and Service; Campus Events and Experiences; Real Estate; and Law to manage and mitigate issues (e.g. public policy change, legislation, litigation, etc.)

• Keeps communications leaders informed of emerging issues, status and resolution.

• Leads the formalization of an issues management group consisting of business partners across Strategic Communications, Law, HR and Government Relations, including development of the group charter, responsibilities, regular touch points and executive reporting mechanisms.

• Develops group materials to map reputation risk issues on the horizon, aggregate enterprise reputation risk, consider reputation risk scenarios, develop reputation risk playbooks and share knowledge and capabilities.

• Creates and maintains a dashboard of emerging issues of importance to Northwestern Mutual, leveraging insights from industry resources, news sources, external agency partners and internal business partners.

• Ongoing surveillance of the national, trade and local news landscape for new or notable developments on short-term and long-term issues scenarios to identify opportunities for enhanced communications preparedness measures.

• Vets and assesses a variety of internal and external business requests, including media inquiries, and provides written summaries with comprehensive details and clear, actionable strategic communication recommendations for swift decision-making.

• Guides external agencies in the development of research and strategic communications materials that support the corporate reputation function, as needed.

• Supports the tracking and merchandizing of team efforts to showcase the value of reputation management.

• Assesses team trends over time and identifies strategic opportunities for improvement. Recommends best practices to improve processes and creates new mechanisms to demonstrate the value add of corporate reputation management for the company.