Hey! Happy Birthday!

July 27^th, my birthday, is even more special to me now because I share it with one of the brightest, hardest-working women I know. In addition to sharing a birthday, we both have six brothers (guaranteed to help a girl learn how to grow up tough) and three kids (guaranteed to help a woman develop a tender heart).

The celebration of our birthdays reminds me always that commitment to improving human relations can help overcome even the hardest situations.

When I became  Director of Communications for the Minister of Health, my counterpart as Director of Policy was Dr. Jo Kennelly.

Jo  is easily one of the most brilliant policy minds in Canada, having worked previously for the Prime Minister of New Zealand and as adviser to Department of Health in the UK. Her Ph.D  from Cambridge made my high school diploma look like a piece of Kleenex, and her political connections – especially in the Prime Minister’s Office – were intimidating . Our Minister loved her and respected her opinion above all others. She is a force of nature.

I got off to a rocky start in my new job, beginning  with  the very  first speech I wrote: I had been unable to nail the Minister down to work on it, which left me writing a speech based on guesswork, hoping to get his changes after he’d read it.

At 11pm the night before he was to deliver it, he called Jo and told her he hated the speech.

First thing the next morning, Jo approached me and told me that the speech  had to be changed.

“Fine,” I replied. “I’ll change it.”

“No,” Jo said. “There isn’t time. You don’t know enough about the policy. I want someone else to write it.”

My “precious ego” (as Dale Carnegie would describe it) could not possibly allow such a thing.

“Absolutely not,” I insisted. “I am the Director of Communications; I will re-write the speech.”

My balkiness stressed Jo terribly: every line, every word of a policy document matters to her tremendously, and she was frantically concerned that my speech would contain inaccuracies. I resented her lack of faith in my abilities. We eventually got the speech corrected and finalized, but the process was painful and it drained away much of the good will that might have automatically developed between us. The next few months at work were pretty rough.

Jo  kept the entire staff  too busy to think about anything but the task at hand; she was a policy machine, developing new programs, securing funding for new initiatives, meeting with stakeholders.  I had to be in awe of her intelligence, her diligence and her energy level.

Every couple of days she would turn up at my desk and say “Hey.”

“Hey” meant: “I’ve finished work on a new policy initiative and I need you to put together an announcement rollout.”

As I had to respect Jo’s brilliance in all things related to policy and stakeholder relations, she came to admire my ability to get announcements approved and delivered. Some of the largest rollouts in Canada’s history – including Canada’s new Food Guide, the Chemicals Management Plan, and the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer – involved the two of us working together in lockstep. We held some kind of record for having the Prime Minister at more of our announcements than any other portfolio, the highest compliment in our industry.

Along with my 30 Carnegie principles, I posted a quote on my office door by famed speechwriter Peggy Noonan: “Great speeches are based on great policy.”

A major turning point for us took place at a Federal/Provincial/Territorial (FPT) meeting of Health Ministers.  I wanted our Minister’s  opening remarks to be inspiring and to show leadership. The bureaucrats at Intergovernmental Affairs, however, insisted he deliver the same old boring non-offensive non-remarks every Federal minister had been delivering since the dawn of time.

Knowing  my preferred remarks would never get approved, I took a different tact. I wrote up one simple page of ideas, which I handed to the Minister in the car on the way to the airport. He stuffed it in his briefcase, and it was never mentioned it again.

When it came time to open the conference, the Minister pulled out some papers.

“Like you,” he began, “I am an elected politician. Every one of us here was elected by our constituents, not to argue over what can’t be done, but to envision what CAN be done, and to work together to make it happen for Canadians…”

He was using my notes! I was delighted. Then I noticed our Deputy Minister – the highest ranking official in the room – glowering  at me. He glared at me with absolute venom in his eyes for several minutes. If looks could kill, I was a dead woman. Uh-oh. My mouth went dry.

My blackberry buzzed. It was a message from Jo  – sitting across the room, she had seen the Deputy cast me the evil eye.

“How DARE we be inspiring!” Jo wrote. “Great remarks, Rita!” I looked up to see her smiling.

That year, on February 14^th, I was at my desk late – and Jo was too. At 8:30pm she showed up in my door.

“Hey,” she said. “What are you doing for Valentine’s Day? Do you want to go out for a drink?”

“That is a GREAT idea!” I laughed. We shut down our computers and flew out the door, the last two people in the Minister’s office, heading out to celebrate Valentine’s Day. We dropped into a local pub, where we talked  for hours. It truly was “the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” which endures to this day and has only grown stronger with time, as we continue to work on projects together now that we are both out in the private sector again.

 “If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I will tell you who you are,” Dale Carnegie wrote.  “That determines your character. That is the most significant thing about you.”

Both Jo and I are completely committed to being excellent and productive, in our jobs at work and at home as mothers. These are the most significant things about each of us. Because of this, we were able to overcome our early tensions,  and support each other in doing the best job possible.

Hey! What could be better than that?