"If 2020 was a career, it would look like a gaping hole," leadership author Julie Winkle Giulioni told a PR audience during the pandemic. The observation stuck because the pattern outlasted the event that produced it. Every disruption cycle — economic contraction, technology shift, restructuring wave — puts employee development and internal advancement on hold at exactly the moment they matter most. AI restructuring is now doing to communications what the pandemic did to broader knowledge work. The framework Giulioni built for one applies cleanly to the other.
Giulioni's acronym is GRACE: Growth, Relationship, Agility, Creativity, Equity. It reads as a career-development taxonomy for any period when the ground is moving under employees faster than the annual review cycle can keep up.
Growth
As companies struggle to bring stability to the workforce, Giulioni argues leaders should discard the old questions — where do you see yourself in five years, what do you want to be. Discussions should switch to growth-focused conversations: how are you growing, what do you want to learn, how do you want to contribute now, what kind of work do you want to be doing. Questions built around growth are easier to answer honestly than questions built around ambition, and they produce cleaner development plans.
Relationship
Relationships are more critical than ever, and they build the trust that survives instability. Simple questions — what do you want to do more of, what do you want to do less of, what do you wish you had more time for, what's most interesting about your current work — enrich the manager-employee relationship in a way formal reviews cannot.
Agility
Quarterly, six-month, and twelve-month development plans are often too long to be relevant in a fast-moving environment. Shorter timelines and realistic goals — six-week sprints, three-month checkpoints — track better against the reality of disrupted work.
Creativity
Originality and fresh thinking are the leverage in disrupted periods. Mentoring and coaching relationships identified inside the company are usually the fastest way to move employees forward without heavy formal-training investment.
Equity
Leaders should take a serious look at who is being developed and who is not. Development access is where equity either compounds or breaks down. Identifying conscious and unconscious bias in development decisions — and building corrective mechanisms — is what separates real DEI practice from performative DEI.
Why this applies across cycles
The pandemic exposed the framework because the disruption was universal and forced. The AI restructuring wave is doing the same for communications teams — production of routine work is collapsing into AI, senior judgment is compounding, and the middle is being asked to prove new value quickly. Companies that use disruption to accelerate development for underrepresented talent outperform ones that freeze plans and wait for calm. The pattern is durable. The window to act is narrow.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
