Communicator spotlight: AbbVie's head of corporate affairs Tracie Haas
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Tracie Haas has spent roughly three decades in the pharmaceutical industry — most recently at AbbVie, which spun off from Abbott in 2013.
Why it matters: As senior vice president of corporate affairs, her job is to enhance and protect the reputation of the research-based pharmaceutical manufacturer.
🗣️What she's saying: The volatility of the last few years has shed a light on the role corporate affairs plays, Haas told Axios.
- "There's also a respect and acknowledgement of the positive, proactive work that the team does. I think if you asked somebody 10 years ago — when we started as a company — they would have thought we were the people who managed crisis and rolled out announcements. And that was certainly my perception before I took the role. We're now recognized at AbbVie as a team that brings significant value because of how the company is viewed internally and externally."
📍How she got here: Haas' career path has not been linear, and she brings a business eye to the communications function.
- "I am a champion of the jagged career path because you never really know what lies ahead," she told Axios.
- She started her career working in Abbott's commercial function in sales, marketing and general management.
- When AbbVie split from Abbott, Haas was presented with the opportunity to build the new company's corporate responsibility function and later, the corporate affairs team.
🏗️ How it's structured: Haas manages all of the functions that fall under the banner of corporate affairs and reputation, including internal and external corporate and brand communications, corporate marketing, global philanthropy, ESG and corporate responsibility.
💡Every CEO should know that if you don't talk about your company, someone else will — and the narrative will be created for you.
- "My advice is to proactively define what you want that narrative to be and then let your corporate affairs function run with it, because that's really going to shape the perception of the company."
📈 Trendspot: AI tools and how they can help communicators work in a more efficient way.
📚 Content plate: She's a big fan of biographies, having recently read books about Matthew Perry, Andre Agassi and Jennette McCurdy.
- You can also catch her listening to true crime podcasts and gathering news from her Bloomberg terminal and internal media monitoring feeds.
- "If anything happens outside of that, it's usually somebody on the team alerting me to it," she added.
🧠 Best advice: Focus on the skills you have.
- "I think we're pretty hard on ourselves as women, and I often find [that] a lot of women focus on what they're missing when moving to the next level," she said. "They think they have to check every single box. And so I always tell them to figure out what they're good at and prioritize uplifting those skills."
