By MARTY LEVINE

Despite growing up in northern Virginia, Rachel Richelieu had never been to Pittsburgh before coming to Pitt, in the early months of 2023, to interview for her current post as vice chancellor of university communications and marketing.

“I’d always heard amazing things about Pitt and Pittsburgh,” Richelieu told the latest Coffee and Conversation event on Sept. 3, sponsored by Staff Council. However, in preparing for the interviews, she said, she discovered new things about the University that were “really quite dynamic and interesting,” but about which she had never heard. They ranged from Pitt’s community engagement centers’ work in local communities to the extensive research in the health sciences and other areas.

Richelieu was then working for Mitre, a nonprofit tech and R&D concern, running federal research and development centers. So Pitt’s research prowess, for one, “should have been on my radar, and it really wasn’t,” she said. “I think part of that, as I’ve learned, is a bit cultural — the norms of not necessarily being so proud and being perceived as not wanting to be overly boastful. But I saw a huge opportunity to lead an organization that was building on a lot of this work but also a huge opportunity (to tell Pitt’s story), because it really hadn’t been done at the level that I thought was required.”

Even when working in the corporate sector, early on, she said, she had always gravitated to the public mission of any organization.

But ending up in communications was not always the obvious path for her, she explained.

Her father was a long-time George Mason University faculty communications member, so she started her college career there, expecting to transfer elsewhere. But she ended up loving GMU and communications, as well as anthropology, both of which have been a large influence on her career, she said.

“My dad was teaching in communications and public policy, and (was) the debate coach, so to say that I knew all of the faculty was an understatement. … I ended up loving it because I was able to work all four years in internships — mostly unpaid at that point, because that just was the vibe then — but got a lot of experience in journalism and communication roles. … That really helped me to spur into more public sector-focused, mission-oriented roles.”

Her anthropology emphasis, she added, “really helped me in communication, even still, as we think about different kinds of groups, understanding different team and cultural dynamics.”

Spending a semester at Oxford also was “absolutely critical,” she said — curating her own study program, spending time in the old libraries, bicycling to her don’s house for tutoring, handwriting her essays. “I enjoyed the romanticism of all that — it was pretty incredible just to understand the history and the heritage of the university,” Richelieu said.

She has had many mentors throughout her career, she added: “It’s really important to have a group of mentors, both formal and informal, as well as — I call it a board but it’s former bosses and colleagues that I’ve worked with for a very long time. Over the course of my career, when I’ve had leadership challenges or trying to decide what do I want to do next, those are the folks that I definitely have reached out to and collaborated with and bounced off ideas.

“Early in my career,” she continued, “I had a few folks that took chances on me when I had a little bit less experience than other people. So I’ve tried to do the same, to think about giving folks an opportunity that maybe don’t have all the right levels of experience or relevant experience, but they have a fire in their belly.”

Asked about her leadership philosophy, Richelieu said that she aims to “lead collaboratively — to try to set a strong vision and understanding of priorities, which I think is really important here at Pitt … but also trying to then get out of the way as much as possible and to let people do their jobs.

“It’s been quite challenging too,” she said, “because we have some pretty aggressive timetables in support of the Plan for Pitt.”

Her strategy has been “to provide guidance and be available but also to let people flourish in that environment. … I try to not take myself too seriously. It’s important to have perspective that even when we’re all in a time-crunched environment — there’s a lot of priorities that are happening, there are things that are coming from a million different directions — to just take a deep breath, to laugh a little and to also just know that it’s all going to be OK.”

Her other tactic, she explained, is “to try to give people opportunities that might be outside of their comfort zone and to challenge them to lead the team with inclusivity and try to bring people together in unexpected ways. … (and) give folks opportunities that they might not otherwise have to see whether or not it’s something that they might want to do more full time.”

Richelieu noted that “We just have completed phase one of our pretty major undertaking for our brand,” based on Chancellor Joan Gabel’s early emphasis on “It’s possible at Pitt.”

“As a brand-new person to Pittsburgh, a brand-new person to Pitt, it spoke to me. … whether you’re a first-year student. whether you’re a long-time staff or faculty member or even in the community where you live …”

The monthly meeting of all Pitt communication professionals and the 50-plus members of her department’s advisory committee from across the institution, as well as continuing discussions with administrators and key University departments, are all central to telling the Pitt story most effectively, she said: “This is only the second time in our 237-year history that we’ve done a brand effort. So we’re relatively new at really talking about ourselves, thinking about brand, thinking about storytelling, considering what a history and heritage we have as an institution.”

Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.

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