Services
Fractional Communications and Public Affairs Executive Leadership
Visioning and Strategic Planning
Leadership Coaching
Leadership Retreats
Fractional Communications and Public Affairs Executive Leadership
Finding the right communications partner to help you tell your story as you grow your business or advocate your cause can be the difference between limping along and igniting the rocket. At Bannon Communications, we offer all the support you need to help you tell your story to in ways that let you reach the right audience at the right time with the message they need to hear. But for business leaders who want a more strategic partner – a true counselor who works shoulder to shoulder with you and helps to elevate the effectiveness of your leadership team without the expense of hiring another full-time executive – Shawn Bannon brings to your board room and strategy discussions more than two decades of experience providing counsel to Fortune 500 leaders including the heads of some of the United States’ largest employers.
Most organizations don’t need a full-time Chief Communications and/or Public Affairs Officer — they need CEO-level communications and public affairs judgment at the moments that actually determine reputation: a crisis, a merger, a regulatory fight, a leadership transition, an AI rollout that raises hard questions about trust and jobs. Those moments don’t happen every week, but when they hit, they’re too consequential to hand to a junior team or a generalist agency, and too infrequent to justify a six-figure full-time seat sitting idle between them.
At the same time, there are more demands today on a CEOs time than ever before. Your investors expect your full-time focus, and your clients deserve your full-time attention. Yet there are so many additional places where you want and are expected to show up as an industry, civic and community leader. A fractional communications and public affairs executive gives you that senior counsel exactly when you need it — someone who has sat beside CEOs through the highest-stakes moments of their careers and can walk in already knowing how to protect a narrative, brief a board, or navigate a statehouse — without the overhead, the ramp-up time, or the permanent headcount of a full-time hire. And, as the member of your team charged with executing your vision for leadership beyond the business, a fractional public affairs leader frees you up to focus your time and attention where it is needed most without sacrificing the relationships or the opportunities that allow you to make a meaningful difference in the communities you value.
Shawn Bannon has spent more than 25 years as the person Fortune 500 CEOs trust most when the stakes are highest — not just the executive who manages the team that writes for the leader, but the one the leader calls directly — building the narrative strategy, crisis response, and stakeholder trust that have carried CEOs at companies including Truist, Lowe’s, and PNC through major mergers and acquisitions, the disruption of a global pandemic, activist investor uprisings, high-stakes media appearances and Congressional testimony. He has helped nonprofit leaders attract millions of dollars in funding for issues from early childhood education to healthcare, patient advocacy, and the arts, while also serving as a registered lobbyist who helped drive $1B in statewide policy wins. Today, he brings that same counsel to a fractional roster of clients, giving nonprofit, growth-stage and market-leading organizations alike senior-level communications and public affairs judgment — including on the reputational and workforce implications of AI — without the overhead of a full-time hire.
Think a fractional communications and public affairs executive engagement might be right for you and your organization? Let’s talk!
Visioning and Strategic Planning
Vision is the hallmark of leadership potential – the ability to look at your organization or your region, to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, to consider the competition, to identify near- and long-term opportunities, to see over the horizon and clearly define where you intend your company or your community to be in five, 10 or even 20 years.
Strategy and execution are the means by which your vision – and your leadership potential – are realized. But interpersonal conflicts and competing agendas among people who are very familiar with one another can undermine serious efforts to define your long-term vision and to successfully plan to achieve it. These discussions often break down into operational issues and get stuck in detail instead of staying focused on the big picture. Participants fall into common patterns and aren’t sure how to look for new perspectives. Meetings get off track and often don’t produce action items or a way to assure the planned actions really take place.
As an objective facilitator with relevant experience and a record of success, Bannon Leadership Consulting Founder Shawn Bannon is able to keep the group focused; ask probing questions; encourage full participation; balance personalities; promote mutual understanding; foster inclusive actions; enable the group to tap its collective wisdom; and help create sound, sustainable agreements.
Workshops
If you’re ready to get serious about the visioning and strategic planning process, Shawn is available to lead one- and two-day intensive, fully customized workshops that will take you and your business, civic or community leadership team through the critical steps of visioning and strategic planning, including but not limited to:
- Assessing the Present
- Defining a Brighter Future
- Understanding the Strategic Gaps
- Developing Plans for Bridging Those Gaps
- Common Obstacles and Hurdles to Prepare for and Avoid
- Critical Factors in Successful Planning
- Organizing to Give Key Players a Seat at the Table
- Developing Detailed Work Plans and Assigning Responsibilities
- Drafting Vision Statements
- Soliciting Community/Client/Employee Reaction and Revising
- Strategic Planning to Realize the Vision
Community/Regional visioning is a process that may take upwards of six months, depending on the commitment of those involved and the complexities of gathering input from important civic and community partners along with the general public. Shawn’s one- and two-day workshops will prepare you to lead your community through this process, but Shawn also is available to discuss longer-term engagements to serve as a consultant throughout the process in order to facilitate ongoing development and execution of the vision and resulting strategic plan.
Leadership Coaching
Being born with leadership potential is not enough to ensure success as a corporate executive, chamber president, mayor, schools superintendent or nonprofit director. Rather, a leader must work hard to develop the skills to match her will to lead. And that’s what the Bannon Leadership Consulting Leadership Coaching program is all about.
Our Leadership Coaching program offers you a confidential, one-to-one relationship with Bannon Leadership Consulting Founder Shawn Bannon. Over the years, Shawn has worked with C-suite executives of Fortune 500 companies, chamber and community leaders, and elected officials at virtually every level of government. In this special Leadership Coaching program, he’ll work directly with you through in-person meetings, phone calls, videoconferencing, e-mails and occasional observation sessions to help you deliver the core competencies common to every great leader, additional skills that draw on your unique leadership potential and any other leadership qualities that you may want to develop (e.g. confident public speaking, media awareness and polish, etc.).
Leadership Coaching delivers invaluable returns to the leader who:
- values honest feedback;
- is open to new ideas;
- wants to develop new skills and improve upon existing proficiencies; and
- sees his own potential and wants to realize it.
This service is highly individualized and completely confidential. To begin your journey from good leader to great leader, contact us today.
Leadership Retreats
Bannon Leadership Consulting Founder Shawn Bannon is available to guide your executive team (or candidates you’ve chosen from your staff for leadership skills development) through half-day, 1-day and 2-day Leadership Skills retreats.
During these sessions, we will:
- discuss the core competencies common to every great leader;
- conduct exercises to assess existing skills and natural leadership qualities among participants;
- identify areas for development;
- role play scenarios that challenge participants to examine how they lead;
- provide feedback to one another in an environment that removes political or hierarchical barriers to honest dialogue;
- improve team cohesiveness;
- establish long-term Leadership Skills development plans for each participant; and
- define lasting mentorship and support relationships among participants to encourage ongoing dialogue, observation, feedback and improvement for every participant.
