CorpComms Magazine

Charlotte Lambkin's favourite story about her six years at BAE Systems regales how she lost her breakfast after enduring the death-defying loops of a Red Arrows flight in a Hawk jet.

'The pilot said, Where would you like to go? and I just said, Oh, please take me home,' she recalls.

'As we got to the ground and I sheepishly handed the pilot my sick bag, he said, Don't worry Charlotte. The Bishop of Lincoln did that too.'

Lambkin's six years as BAE group communications director have involved the world's second largest defence company surviving equally stomach-churning corporate events, beginning from the period between her appointment in October 2004 and starting date six weeks later.

While she was holidaying in South America, the Serious Fraud Office launched an investigation into alleged payments to Saudi princes to promote arms deals that, together with a separate US Department of Justice probe, led to BAE paying £288 million in a global settlement last February.

Then, on her arrival to head a corporate communications function that now spans 300 staff worldwide, Lambkin found she had cultural transformation in addition to crisis management on her hands.

On the chart

'We have something called the operational framework, which is how the organisation runs,' she explains. 'My role and function weren't in it and frankly if you're not in the operational framework you don't exist.

'So there was a whole piece of work to do around that at the same time as dealing with what was to become a pandemic of an issue. In hindsight, the job completely changed in those six weeks before I started.'

Operating through this period, she says, involved always taking a pragmatic view and keeping open lines of communication.

But there were times when she was frustrated that the issue was preventing BAE Systems moving forward from the low it had hit prior to her appointment when the defence contractor frontssuffered heavy losses on its Nimrod programme and saw its share price plummet.

'I started basically to try to restore media confidence in the company because the in-house team before me had stopped answering phone calls,' she says.

'I thought my job was to build a proactive campaign to positively position BAE Systems, build a brand and get on the front foot. Of course what actually happened is that I've been in the bunker fighting a rearguard action over the years whilst at the same time trying to establish the brand and trying to build the multinational organisation.'

Straightforward approach

Lambkin says her approach is to be 'direct and fairly straightforward' - something she learned in her ten years at Bell Pottinger Financial, where she represented clients including luxury goods group Richemont, property developer Chelsfield and insurer Sun Life & Provincial.

At the beginning in agency PR, she confesses that people were using so many corporate buzzwords and 'PR-speak' that she didn't understand what she was supposed to be delivering to the customer.

She also reacted against the style of some colleagues who, she says, would offer five options to their clients and ask them to pick one.

Lambkin's view is that it is the role of corporate communicators to instead assess the horizon, understand the business, give a clear, firm recommendation and then have the confidence to engage the team around it and stick to the plan.

When she joined BAE, following a 'bolt-out-of-the-blue' offer when she was negotiating to join another of her clients, emerging markets bank Standard Chartered, she admits to 'missing a trick' by overly priding herself on being objective in an attempt to guard against going native.

'I didn't realise that you can't be that objective,' she recalls. 'You're actually one of the company. You've got to talk about us, not them.'

Then there's Lambkin's belief in transparent communications, which she says didn't exist at BAE Systems on her arrival. She found a strong secrecy culture in which the need to protect competitive advantage in commercial contracts was used as an excuse not to be transparent in many aspects of its operations - something the BAE board acted to rectify after recommendations from Lord Woolf in his 2008 report on ethical business behaviour at the company.

Transparency matters

'There were lots of recommendations from the legal department that we should say No comment to requests from journalists for really quite anodyne pieces of information,' surmises Lambkin, who says BAE's default position was to insert non-disclosure clauses into contracts. 'Now the default is the other way so we're transparent unless we have to be otherwise. That's taking a lot of effort and I won't say that we're there yet but I think we're on a really good journey.

'The more secretive you are, the less people understand you and then the less sympathetic they are. Of course there will always be things that we can't talk about but we challenge it and say, Really? Talk me through why we can't talk about that.' Being more open is also important as BAE Systems moves from being a pure defence manufacturer to a more serviceoriented contractor and the company now makes a proactive effort to promote a human face in publications and on its website.

Lambkin admits that such initiatives have been easier since she obtained a seat on BAE's executive committee, which is chaired by chief executive Ian King and sits under the board of directors.

When she joined, in contrast, she was only an in-attendance member of the executive committee, authorised to attend but not to speak unless by invitation. Her approach to personal communications is similarly direct, encouraging her department not to demonise the media and asking for similar treatment from the nongovernmental organisation lobbyists that she views as BAE's largest communications audience.

'I always say to them at our AGM, I'm just a human being,' she states. 'I say You're making a difference and you have a valid argument as an external NGO but I'm trying to make a bit of a difference from the inside out.

'My dad's a farmer, my mother's a nurse, my sister's a midwife. I'm not a demon. Feel free to demonise me but actually we're all just doing our job.'

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