Yes, with limits. On day two of a two-day session with a federal agency in Washington DC, the communications team learned to prepare other people, including senior principals they do not manage and experts from outside organizations. The method needs no slides: pair up, record one answer, play it back, and make the speaker say what is wrong first.
Day one of this engagement was the experts themselves, which I wrote up separately in the case study on scientists who became spokespeople. Day two was a different room and a genuinely different job.
These were communicators. Most of them were perfectly comfortable in front of a camera. What they wanted was not to get better at interviews. It was to get other people ready for interviews, usually with very little notice, and usually without any authority over the person they were preparing.
That is a harder skill than it sounds, and it is the skill an in-house team actually needs, because they are the ones who are there.
Can a communications team run media training in house?
Let me answer the commercial question honestly, since I am the person who sells the alternative.
For the frequent, low-ceremony work, yes, and they should. Nobody is flying a trainer in for a fifteen-minute call with a local reporter on a Tuesday. If short preps only happen when an outsider is in the building, they mostly do not happen. An in-house team can own the quick preps, the repeat practice exercises, and the upkeep of the messages between formal sessions.
There are three situations where I would still bring somebody in, and none of them is about knowledge.
- When the person being prepared badly outranks the communicator. A specialist telling a very senior principal that the answer was too long is spending capital they may need next month. A visitor spends none.
- When the note is genuinely unwelcome. Somebody has to be able to say "that came across as defensive" and then leave the building.
- When you need volume, with unfamiliar questions. Five or six recorded rounds per person is a different exercise from one, and it needs an interviewer whose questions the participant has not already heard in a staff meeting.
Everything else belongs in house. Day two was about handing that everything else over properly.
What is different about prepping someone you do not manage?
The room sorted its own work into three tiers, and I have used their version ever since.
| Who you are prepping | What you have | What actually works |
|---|---|---|
| Your own principal | Relationship and standing | Direct notes, and a history they trust |
| A senior principal you do not control | Information, no authority | Questions, never instructions |
| An expert from another organization | Neither, and often no introduction | Questions, plus a very fast reason to trust you |
The through line is that authority is not the tool. A question is. Instructions get resisted by anyone senior enough to resist them, and questions get answered by almost everybody. That is not a soft-skills nicety, it is the only mechanism that works across all three tiers.
How do you prep an expert in five minutes in a hallway?
The best material of the day came from a real situation somebody described: an expert from a partner organization was about to speak at a press conference, and nobody from that organization's communications side was on site. So the prep happened in a hallway, on the walk over.
This is not ideal. It is also enormously common, and pretending otherwise is how communicators end up with no plan for the situation they are in most often.
Here is the five-minute version, and it holds up because it is only three questions plus a rehearsal.
- "What is the one thing you want someone to remember tomorrow?" Listen for a sentence. If you get a paragraph, say it back to them in one sentence and ask whether that is right. They will correct you, and the corrected version is their headline, in their words, which means they will actually say it.
- "What are you hoping they do not ask?" This finds the exposure faster than any prep document. You will not solve it in five minutes and you should not try. The goal is that they have said one sentence about it out loud to a human being before they say it to a camera.
- "Who else's job is it if they ask about something outside your area?" This gets you the handoff by role, so that under pressure they route the question rather than either guessing or freezing.
- Last thirty seconds: have them say the headline out loud. Not think it. Say it, walking, to you. The mouth has to build the sentence once before a lens is pointed at it.
That final step is the one people skip, and it is the one that does most of the work. A sentence you have only thought is a sentence you have never actually made. For the longer-form version of the same thinking, see how to prepare for a media interview.
What do you add with ten, thirty, or sixty minutes?
The teams that struggle with prep are usually the ones running a completely different plan depending on how much time they have. That is why preps collapse when the schedule slips. The fix is to make the tiers additive, so every version is the previous version plus something, and a prep that gets cut short still ends at a sensible place.
| Time | What you add |
|---|---|
| 5 minutes | Three questions, then the headline said out loud once |
| 10 minutes | The hardest question answered out loud, then answered again shorter |
| 30 minutes | One answer recorded on a phone, played back, revised once. Plus the two sentences they will not be saying at all |
| 60 minutes | A second interviewer voice, one interruption mid-answer, the closing line, and confirmation of what they are cleared to discuss |
Notice what does not appear anywhere in that ladder. There is no briefing book, and there is no deck.
Why does the trainer have to stop talking first?
The clearest finding of the day, and the one the group pushed back on hardest, was that you do not need slides. You need to get people to do a thing.
So the in-house method is small enough to run in a conference room with no equipment beyond the phones already in the room:
- Pair them up.
- One person answers a real question. The other records it on a phone.
- Play it back immediately, once.
- Then, before anybody offers an opinion, the person who answered talks first.
Step four is the whole thing, and the order of the questions matters:
- "What did you like?" Ask this first, and mean it. Skipping to what is wrong trains people to brace, and a braced person cannot hear the second question.
- "What would you change?" Almost everybody names the real problem here without help. If they name three things, ask which one they would fix first.
- "What was your point?" Then the follow-up that does the damage: was it in there? This is where people discover their main message never left the building.
The uncomfortable part is the silence. After you ask, hold it for a slow count of five. Communicators are professionally allergic to dead air and will fill it every time, which is exactly how a person's own self-assessment gets replaced with yours. Tell them to count.
This also solves the political problem from earlier. A communicator who asks a senior principal what they would change has not criticized anyone. The principal has.
What goes in a go-kit, and why does it keep changing?
One idea in the room was too practical not to steal, and I have recommended it to three clients since. It is a go-kit: a physical kit kept ready for a specific principal.
The contents are unglamorous on purpose. The current one-page message sheet. The most recent numbers with their sources and dates printed on them, because a stale number is worse than no number. A printed list of what that person is and is not cleared to discuss. A lint roller and a spare tie or scarf. Water. A card with the name and mobile number of whoever answers if a reporter goes around them.
Here is the part that makes it worth writing about. When the principal changed, the contents changed. Not the format, the contents. The messages, the numbers, the cleared list, and even the spare tie belonged to a person, not to the office.
That sounds obvious written down. In practice, a kit built for one leader and quietly inherited by the next is a kit that is confidently wrong, and nobody discovers it until somebody is reading a superseded number in a parking lot. The strongest version of this has an owner's name and a review date written on the outside, because a kit nobody owns goes stale in silence.
What should a communications team take from this?
- Prepping others is a separate skill. Being good on camera does not make you good at getting somebody else there.
- Use questions, not instructions. It is the only approach that survives a rank gap or an outside organization.
- Make the tiers additive. Five, ten, thirty, and sixty minutes should be the same plan with more added, never four different plans.
- Make them say the headline out loud. A sentence only thought is a sentence never built.
- Let them find the problem. Ask what they liked, what they would change, and what their point was. Then count to five.
- Rebuild the go-kit when the principal changes. The contents belong to a person, not to the office.
If you are standing up an in-house capability, our overview of media training for government agencies covers how a two-day structure like this one is usually built, and the Social Security Administration case study shows what the participant side of the same approach looks like.
If your communications team is being asked to prepare people they do not manage, tell us about it here or call (646) 233-1424. Speak with Jess about a train the trainer day built around the preps your team is actually running.
Client details in this case study have been generalized at the client's request. The agency, its technical domain, the partner organization, and all participants are unnamed. Dates and session structure are accurate.