Two former IR team members talk about the ways in which their stint in IR continues to benefit them today
Lynn Antipas Tyson, Ford’s high-functioning IR chief, has spoken in the past about the benefits of the rotational program she put in place when she joined the auto giant back in 2017. Since then, she tells IR Impact that around 16 people have been through the firm’s award-winning IR team – with the program consistently oversubscribed.
These rotational IR people come from across the company but there are team head slots specifically for ‘high-potential communications people – typically picking up the ESG workload – who do a two-year rotation before returning to communications’. Another team head comes from Ford’s Business Leaders Program, ‘where we recruit high-potential people out of business school,’ she continues. These people typically do three one-year rotations in the company, ‘one of which has to be finance, with many participants choosing IR’.
Tyson also talks about what these people do when they move on from investor relations. ‘Virtually all leave IR and move into our business segments in finance, planning and strategy roles,’ she says. ‘They learn a breadth of skills and really sharpen critical and strategic thinking, true analytics, as well as influence skills and executive communications.’
We spoke to two of those people to find out more about their experience of IR and how they use that investor-relations skillset in their roles today.
‘I have a deep understanding of how Ford creates value’
Many who find investor relations fall into the job – it’s not necessarily something they set out to do. For Brian Rockwell, who came through the Ford rotational program in 2022 and 2023, moving into IR was more about the who than the what.
‘I was in my strategy rotation and starting to look for other rotations,’ he says, explaining that when they come into the firm on the Business Leader Program, employees run through three different rotational roles at the company. ‘I’d gotten to know Lynn a little bit and eventually asked her to be a formal mentor,’ continues Rockwell. ‘She told me there was an opportunity with her team and, honestly, I did not really know what investor relations was when I said yes – but I knew Lynn was somebody I wanted to spend time with and learn from. So I very much stumbled into investor relations. If Lynn had been doing something totally different, I would have ended up there instead.’
In the end, Rockwell spent a year and nine months in IR. He says it probably took three months to fully understand the scope and reach of the function – or the value it delivers across the company.
‘The biggest surprise to me was that the investor relations function is not a one-way flow of information out of the company to investors,’ he says. ‘At Ford, 50 percent of the role is the flow of information the other way.’ This, he says is ‘totally obvious’ in hindsight. ‘We spend so much time talking to these incredibly brilliant people, who spend all their time thinking about our company, thinking about our industry, talking to us, talking to our competitors: there’s so much wisdom and insight to be garnered from those conversations. A big part of the function is bringing that information back in and infusing it into the organization to help make us smarter and better at what we do.’
He also talks about opportunities like going to NYSE or being part of a capital markets day as especially memorable. And when it comes to challenges, Rockwell points out that the most difficult aspects of his rotation also became the biggest learning and growth experiences.
‘One is that pretty much anywhere else you sit in a company, your horizon is the function that you sit in: you’re focused on delivering that piece of the business. In investor relations, you have to understand the whole company. Then there’s the adage that, if you really want to understand something, try teaching it to somebody else. I feel like that’s what investor relations forces you to do: if you’re going to explain how the business works, what the major issues and initiatives are, what the strategy and operational considerations are, you have to understand all that very deeply yourself.’
Rockwell – who studied mechanical engineering at Stamford before doing an MBA at Harvard – finished his stint in Ford’s IR team in September 2023 but says he continues to use that experience daily.
‘My IR experience has been invaluable in my current role, both in my daily communications and as I’ve prepared materials to help internal audiences like the board of directors and the executive leadership team understand key issues and make decisions,’ he says. ‘Understanding Ford’s business model and the factors that drive the company’s valuation has given me a unique perspective in navigating competing priorities and focusing our time and resources on the greatest opportunities to move the needle for a business with almost $200 bn in revenue.’
‘You’re interacting with the C-suite much more than in many other roles’
IR is still part of Christina Twelftree’s remit. Having been through the Ford rotational program from mid-2021 into the second half of 2023, she is now based in Victoria, Australia, where her role covers executive communications and investor relations.
She explains that she entered the program from communications – another avenue the company uses to find the right candidates to rotate into IR. And that’s also the department she returned to, though with a newfound portfolio of IR skills.
‘We worked very closely with investor relations on certain events,’ she explains. ‘I was fortunate to work with the IR team on a capital markets day in 2021, where we did video production with Lynn and the team, for example.
‘I was supporting from a communications perspective, but it enabled me just to get to know Lynn a bit more as well as some members of the team.’
That initial toe in the IR water prompted Twelftree to reach out to Tyson, offering her support whenever needed. Tyson’s response was that, having not taken anyone from communications into the IR rotation scheme for some years, Twelftree could be a great fit to ‘pick up that communications rotation program again’.
‘I ended up joining her team in August 2021 and stayed for just over two years,’ explains Twelftree, who – like Rockwell – talks about that initial settling in period into investor relations. ‘It does take a while – maybe three to six months – to get up to speed and really feel like you understand the role,’ she says. Which is why a two-year rotation works well: you then have 18 months ‘to really add value and get into it’.
There is of course overlap across Twelftree’s specialism in corporate comms and IR – something she says attracted her to the work in the first place. She also talks about the need for IR to also take a more active role in modern communications, as ‘even investors and sell-side analysts are increasingly wanting to watch videos or access shorter releases and those quick nuggets of information.’ That was the skillset she felt able to ‘plug in pretty well to investor relations’.
It was the financial side of the function where the real ‘ramping up’ happened: soon Twelftree could understand the financial results and then turn that into an earnings script or press release, or was able to get on the call with investors and answer some of the more technical questions they had about Ford’s results.
She talks about attending the NIRI conference and taking training courses as having been a big help in refreshing her financial literacy in this area – but it’s also what she describes as the biggest learning curve of her time in IR. ‘Finance has its own language and the finance team have their own ways of talking to each other, their own way of putting documents together – often with a huge volume of acronyms!’ she says. ‘You really have to spend that time learning the language.’
Mentoring to the max
Brian Rockwell, a former Ford rotational IR team member, talks about the ways in which Lynn Tyson, the firm’s IR lead, works as a mentor.
‘Lynn [Tyson] is, at her core, a teacher, mentor and coach,’ says Rockwell. ‘This permeates every aspect of how she runs the team. She shares wisdom gleaned from her own experiences and often pulls the team aside to provide a window into teachable moments, like why an initiative succeeded or failed or why a Ford leader made a particular decision.
‘But what’s unique about Lynn is that, like a true teacher or coach, she doesn’t take the test or step onto the field. Instead, she provides space to make mistakes and learn by doing. She rarely intervenes and, when she does, it’s for just long enough to provide crucial information, targeted feedback, or a push to aim for the next level.
‘I learned working for Lynn that I was capable of things I hadn’t imagined, but more than anything, I learned about the type of people leader that I want to become.’
Like Rockwell, Twelftree also talks about the company-wide scope that IR offers – something that was, for her, different from being a communications expert in a specific area.
‘When you’re in investor relations, you really see across the company, you understand the strategy and all the business units that build into that long-term value creation,’ she says.
That exposure to the full breadth of the company’s business also brought with it the opportunity to meet the heads of the business and the leadership team, she adds: ‘you’re interacting with the C-suite a lot more than you would in many other roles.’
It was through that expansion of her external and internal network – and through her interactions with the CEO, the CFO, with business leaders at Ford – that Twelftree says new doors opened. ‘Now that I’ve rotated out of investor relations, I’m in the executive communications team – where there is thankfully still a lot of interaction with the IR team, because there needs to be so much alignment on the strategic messaging across the company,’ she explains.
Twelftree recognizes that her time in IR remains hugely beneficial to her work today, where she might be putting an executive briefing together one day, a script for the CEO another.
‘I feel like I wouldn’t be as valuable in this role if I didn’t have that investor relations experience,’ she says. ‘I just know the business so much better than I did before.’
