Grit and agency are not soft skills. They are the difference between a firm that can only perform to the brief it was given, and one that can perform to the brief it should have been given.
Every PR practitioner will tell you the job is about relationships, storytelling, media relations, and brand strategy. All true. But underneath all of it sits a more basic requirement, one rarely named in job descriptions: the willingness to do unglamorous, unwitnessed work long before it’s needed, and the instinct to act the moment the ground shifts, without waiting for permission. The first is grit. The second is agency. Knowing your craft gets you in the room. These two qualities are what get you through it.
The industry doesn’t test this in theory. It tests it in real time, usually at the worst possible moment, usually without warning.
Nobody tells you when you’ve missed the memo. You just watch everyone else in the room act like they got one.
We’d been invited to what was billed as an exploratory sit-down with the team on a new project. First meeting, low stakes, the kind where people throw around ideas and agree to reconvene once things are further along. So my colleague and I did what any team worth its salt does before walking into a room like that. We read up. Searched around, checked the sentiment, made sure we weren’t walking in cold.
We got to the restaurant. The table was set for 20. That should have been our first clue.
The client arrived, and not long after, the event team pulled out laptops and printed decks and began walking the room through a full concept presentation: layout, entertainment, program flow, all of it. There was nothing exploratory about it. This was a working session dressed up as a courtesy call, and everyone else at that table had come prepared to perform.
We did not have a deck.
Somewhere between the appetizers and the first course, it became clear that a presentation would be expected of us, whether or not we had one ready. There are two kinds of people in that moment. One kind quietly panics, hopes the moment passes, and prepares an apology for later. The other kind excuses themselves from the table, gets on the phone, and starts pulling together whatever can be pulled together: figures, inclusions, past materials that can be reshaped for the client in front of them. Not from nothing. From what the team already knew, already had, already owned. That is agency. Not waiting to be told what to do. Just deciding what needed to happen, and making it happen.
And then it was our turn. Still no deck, and nothing to show. The presentation happened anyway, verbally, over a sizzling plate that kept interrupting at the worst possible moments, walking the room through the media strategy, the realistic timelines, the philosophy behind who gets invited to a launch and why. Not a slide in sight. Just command of the material, delivered with enough conviction that nobody noticed anything was missing.
My colleague then gave a thumbs up from across the table. Laptop already open, ready to go. A silent signal that simply said: It’s done. We have a deck.
What followed was a presentation, screenshots, timelines, levels of engagement, the whole architecture of a campaign, built with such command of the room that it read as something prepared weeks in advance. It was built in less than 60 minutes after the team realized what the meeting actually was.
Nobody at that table walked away doubting the agency’s readiness. If anything, the opposite happened. What could have been an embarrassment became a quiet demonstration of exactly the kind of partner this client was signing up for.
What the room didn’t see: six more people, at home, on their laptops, pulling old decks and numbers together while we sat through dinner. Two of us held the table, but it took a full team to give us something to hold it with.
People use grit and agency interchangeably. They shouldn’t. The deck built at the eleventh hour was not grit. That was agency, decisive action under pressure. The grit was everything that made that possible: months of unremarkable, unwitnessed work, building templates, staying current on client accounts, maintaining materials nobody thought would be needed on a random Tuesday dinner. Grit is invisible until the moment it gets tested. It is the reserve. Agency is the withdrawal.
And I’ll say the quiet part out loud: talent like this is getting harder to find. Not the kind that can quote frameworks in an interview; there’s no shortage of that. I mean the kind that stays calm when the ground shifts, reaches for the phone before anyone tells them to, mobilizes after hours to deliver what is needed, and can be trusted with a presentation on nothing but a thumbs up. You don’t stumble into that. You build it, hire by hire, over years.
Plenty of people in this industry know their craft. They can recite theory, quote case studies, walk you through a textbook campaign structure. But knowing your craft is only half the job. The other half is what you do when the brief changes mid-dinner, when the meeting isn’t the meeting you were told it would be, when there is no time left to ask for one. Some people freeze in that moment. Others reach for the phone, open the laptop, and get to work.
This industry doesn’t always reward the most prepared person in the room. It rewards whoever can still deliver once preparation runs out, the one who treats a curveball as just another task, not a crisis. Clients remember that. They remember the team that delivered composure at the exact moment composure was hardest to fake.
We don’t always get the lead times we’d like. Few in this business do. What we get, instead, is the choice of how we respond when the runway disappears. Grit builds the reserves. Agency spends them at the right moment. Put those two together, and you get the kind of PR person-and the kind of PR firm-that clients keep coming back to, long after the details of any one dinner are forgotten.
PR Matters is a roundtable column by members of the local chapter of the UK-based International Public Relations Association (IPRA), the world’s premier association for senior professionals around the world. Noel Rene Nieva, president and CEO of Perceptions, Inc., one of the country’s leading PR counsels, is the immediate past national chair of IPRA Philippines.