City woman helps deliver right message for GM
For the past four years, Jordana Strosberg has known she would spend portions of every work day with the same two people. Her eight-year-old son Max and General Motors CEO Mary Barra. “I never envisioned a career in the auto industry,” said Strosberg, who until a recent promotion served as Barra’s executive communications manager. “That this happened to a kid from Canada is amazing.” Strosberg said she had always wanted to be a lawyer but switched career paths after working a summer job in public relations for the Niagara Parks Commission. After being named on PRWeek’s Top 40 Under 40 list of people in the U.S.’s public relations and communications industry this summer, the 39-year-old Windsor resident clearly made the right call. Her work with Barra also earned her a promotion to become GM’s global advanced technology communications manager. That division is overseeing the company’s cutting-edge work in electric- and autonomous-vehicle development.
“I was shocked when Mary asked me to come into her office to tell me I was on the list,” Strosberg said. “It was the team I’m working with that had nominated me for consideration. That was the real honour because it was a rec- ognition of the work we’d done together.”
When every word Barra says is analyzed and can send the company ’s stock price higher or lower, the responsibility for delivering the right message is great. The spotlight was especially intense with Barra becoming GM’s first female CEO in January 2014. It was also a shift for Strosberg in that her work was no longer focused on a plant or a new product line.
“Mary is a genuine person, so there’s no need to craft a message for her,” Strosberg said.
“My responsibility was for the visibility of our CEO. We also built up her profile on social media through LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
“We wanted to lay out a vision of our company and what she stood for.”
That meant sorting through the thousand requests Barra gets annually for external appearances, helping her write or edit her communications and prepare her for those appearances.
“What drew me to this career was I loved having an impact, being able to tell stories and shape the message,” Strosberg said. “I like to take complex situations or problems and simplify them. The strength of my relationship with Mary is she trusts me.” From her 29th floor office, Strosberg has a view down the Detroit River towards her home in east Windsor.
It’s a view she never envisioned when she was hired as GM’s Windsor transmission plant communications manager in 2004. “I could’ve taken a communications job in tech in Detroit, which had been my background when I was working in Toronto,” said Strosberg, who is originally from St. Catharine’s and graduated from Western University before earning an MBA from the University of Windsor.
“I knew the GM job was slightly uncomfortable for me. You have to take some risks to fulfil your ambitions.”
Strosberg admitted there is an irony in her now inhabiting the glass towers of GM’s world headquarters.
The automaker has played a role in her life since she was five, when her parents, Gary and Sandra Nepon, started Seapark Industrial Glove Recycling 34 years ago in St. Catharines.
“General Motors was my father’s first customer,” Strosberg said. “My parents’ willingness to take a risk to achieve something has been ingrained in both my younger brother (Harris) and I.” Strosberg credits her willingness to take on new challenges for her steady rise up the corporate ladder. In mentoring GM employees, she stresses taking the opportunity to work in a plant if possible. “It was an opportunity to learn about how the business worked at the most fundamental level,” Strosberg said.
The next phase of her career in electric and autonomous vehicles promises more unknown challenges.
“I truly feel like I’m part of something that’s on the cusp of changing history,” Strosberg said. While a career in the upper echelons of the corporate world has provided professional fulfilment, Strosberg makes sure she gets home for dinner with her son each night, unless she’s travelling. As a single mother, Strosberg credits her parents and her exhusband, Jay Strosberg, and his wife for playing important roles in Max’s life.
“Max and I have breakfast together and I get him off to school and we have dinner together,” Strosberg said.
“I embrace the support of other people. We all work together. “GM has also been very supportive by being flexible. I’m grateful because I’ve never felt held back at GM because I’m a single mother.”