Communicate with purpose
Today Jennifer Rankin Byrne runs MERIT Coaching Communications Consulting, a practice she founded in Cincinnati, Ohio to help leaders and communicators sharpen their voice, build executive presence, and lead in a way that actually sounds like them. The work is one-on-one and unglamorous by design: goal-setting, message-building, the slow craft of turning a capable manager into a leader people want to follow.
It is a deliberate turn for someone who spent more than 20 years inside large institutions. Byrne describes her method in six words - "Communicate with purpose. Grow with confidence." - and she means both halves of it. Purpose comes from clarity about what a leader believes. Confidence comes from practice. Her role is to sit in the gap between the two and ask better questions.
She resists formulas. MERIT's whole premise is that there is no cookie-cutter template for leadership presence, that coaching should start by listening rather than prescribing. Sessions are built around an individual's goals, style, and values, and she leans on curiosity before advice. Clients describe the sessions drifting, usefully, from career strategy into something closer to life coaching.
The through-line from her corporate years is trust. For most of her career, Byrne was the person organizations relied on to speak clearly under pressure - to reporters, to employees, to the public. Coaching is the same instinct pointed at a single person in a room instead of a national audience.
Before MERIT, Byrne served as Vice President of Corporate Communications at PBS, a role she stepped into in 2017 after joining the network in 2011 as Senior Director of Media Relations. At PBS she owned the corporate communications function - strategy, press relations, internal communications, and the events team that managed the network's presence across the industry. She led national publicity for general audience programming and contributed to digital efforts including the launch of PBS Digital Studios.
Her path to public media ran through some of the biggest names in broadcast, tech, and government. She held communications roles at Turner Broadcasting and CNN early on, worked as a Communications Director at AOL managing PR for online content partnerships, and served as Deputy Chief Communications Officer at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Each stop was a different audience with the same underlying problem: people follow leaders they can understand.
In 2021 she earned a Certificate in Disruptive Strategy from Harvard Business School Online - a fitting credential for someone who would soon disrupt her own career, trading a corporate title for her own name on the door. The pivot from institution to entrepreneur is exactly the kind of transition she now coaches other people through.
Online, she practices what she teaches. She started "Touch Base Tuesday," a small, no-agenda networking habit that nudges people to reconnect with one contact each week, and she has drawn thousands of communicators into candid conversation with a pointed LinkedIn question: what do you do when your CEO does not value communications? It is a question the field rarely asks out loud, and typical of how she works - naming the hard thing, then helping people move through it.