You know your stuff (AI, IOT, ML or some other hot specialty), have experience and just landed your dream job at that blue-chip firm. Or perhaps your company was just acquired by a larger firm with the intent of “adding much needed capabilities.” You get a nice new office, iPhone, and laptop and are off to conquer the world.
The first 180 days are great. You are on airplanes, sent into the field to “help close the deal” and asked into key decision meetings. You give your observations, draw on lots of whiteboards and share talks at conferences. You are also asked to write for the company blog and given a slot on key leadership meeting agendas.
Then it happens.
Slowly, and almost imperceptibly, you sense that something is not quite right. The person you met with just 60 days ago, the one who seemed to get it, does a 180-degree turn on funding the proposal. The product review board has not green-lighted your key change initiatives. The manufacturing team didn’t include your suggestions in the latest manufacturing roadmaps and the regional SVP of sales pushed back on your request to meet with key clients in their region.
You’re now a year in, and besides frequent flyer miles and some massive PowerPoint files, you’ve seen very little real progress in the firm on your specialty.
I hear a version of this story every week…
It’s Not Logical (well maybe it is)
Why would a firm invest in having this super hot specialty talent, and yet not take advantage of it by cooking the needed changes into its operations? How could they agree so strongly in those meetings, and not move forward with real implementation?
The answer is inertia. Large complex firms have forged a path based on deeply held patterns of processes, individuals and core technology. Org charts have enshrined this approach and goals have been established and baked into compensation plans.
One fundamental axiom of leadership is that all behavior is rational to those actors in the sphere in which it occurs. In other words, things that appear to be completely wrong when examined at their highest levels make complete sense to those who are making the decisions at runway level. To those who are charged with making the “micro-decisions,” it makes much more sense to bet on the thing that they know.
In the pace of today’s corporations, leaders are moving at light speed to simply process the day’s events. Deep changes in direction – the kind of change your specialty brings – meets with this deep momentum and barely leaves a mark.
Think of the enterprise’s momentum like that of a large ship, which can take miles to turn around at sea. Your role here is that of the tugboat, which is needed to guide the ship through intense effort at strategic locations. The key then becomes the strategic use of the intense – but also finite – effort that the tugboat can provide.
So What’s the Answer?
When you are learning your hot specialty, academic and professional preparation programs rarely have time to share a very important additional set of skills that you’ll need if you want to have a real, lasting influence on the firms that you’ll be joining.
Through decades of work, across dozens of projects in more than 20 countries, I have zeroed in on four essential capacities that are absolutely needed to connect your talent and insight to a large firm. When you use these capacities systematically, your firm will see the results of your work all the way onto its P&L, and by being operationally aligned, things that met resistance will now begin to flow.
The four capacities I’m referring to here are the architect, champion, catalyst, and anchor. By using these to form a deep knowledge of yourself and your firm, we are able to build a tailored plan for you to not only be an expert, but accelerate your path towards becoming an influential expert. We cover these under the individual equipping portion of the Complete Growth Leader Model. For more on the Complete Growth Leader model, see my posts here, here and here.
The patterns of inertia I’ve described above are predictable and repeatable. They respond to the skilled use of these capacities, which are required to work through the myriad of people styles, process steps, and the core technology of the firm you joined.
The truth is that to change the firm, you need to challenge it out of its normal trajectory. This influence is best generated with an intentional strategic approach that results in the best possible outcomes for you and the firm. Subject matter experts rarely get this coaching in their specialty and this deficit has derailed many careers.
So What Does This Look Like?
We begin with an assessment of your current Growth Leadership skill base that outlines your profile across the four key capacities. We then take this profile and develop a unique training and coaching plan that builds on your strengths and teaches you to shore up and mitigate blind spots. The goal, is to provide targeted, relevant coaching for you at the exact spots where you need to meet the resistance.
If you’d like to have a conversation on how this work could benefit you and your firm, please give us a call at 847-651-1014, or set up a 20-minute call using this link.
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