Executive Potential Means Shifting The Altitude of the Conversation.
Talk from your team's perspective, and your potential will be capped at the scope of your team. Think and speak from the company perspective, and you'll gain credibility as an executive. Here's how.
Hi! I'm Yue. Chief Product Officer turned Career Coach. My mission is to support more women and minorities to reach the executive level.
Welcome to this month’s (second!) free edition of The Uncommon Executive. Each week I tackle how-tos on building power and influence, navigating conflicts, and growing your career. If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed:
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(“It’s Too Bright MOM!”Teddy the Corgi, Bay Area, California)
A client of mine is a VP of a large financial services company running teams of hundreds. He’s looking to get promoted to the EVP level, and while he has consistently been delivering on his team’s goals, he has also been overlooked a few times for promotions.
While he was a very successful executive on many dimensions — he was generally well-liked, had solid functional expertise, and delivered on impact— his peers and managers did not think he demonstrated “executive potential”.
After working together for a few months, I realized that his framing of the problem or scope was limiting his potential as a leader at the company. He approached strategy, decisions, and conversations from his team’s scope and perspectives. He also considered the viewpoints of other partner teams, but often at a surface level. And rarely did he consider the problem from the CEO or Board of Directors’ point of view.
Below are two scenarios we worked through that illustrate how a reframing from the team+partner team level to the company level drastically shifts the type of conversation and the altitude of the discussion. And with it, increased credibility that you have the company’s best interests in mind, have knowledge and influence across functions and teams, and are, consequently, strong executive material.
Scenario 1: Three-year strategy development
This VP was working on a new three-year strategy for his area. He started with the idea that he wanted to bring more of the existing technology and platform in-house to create more customized experiences for the end customer. The strategy contained foundational technology choices and large ecosystem partnership deals.
After he went into some detail about the technology transition roadmap, I asked him a simple question: How does this benefit the company?
First, he told me that this decreased service time by 10%. This is good, However, it was limited to the scope of his team. I asked the same question again, specifically on how it impacts other teams. He told me it decreased the risk of scams and fraud. Better, but still very local and specific to a team. Finally, he told me it helped close larger enterprise deals. Again, good and relevant, but not “company-level thinking.”
While each of these is beneficial for the company, none of them felt strong enough to underscore a three-year investment for a team of hundreds of people.
From here, we took a different approach. I asked him to describe to me how his product made money and how it contributed to the overall business of the company. It turns out that his product is a loss leader. Similar to selling hot dogs at Costco, the idea was that his product was sold at a loss to increase spending on other products that were highly profitable for the business. From a company perspective, the goal was not to drive net new customers to his product but to drive a certain type of customer who will then come for his product and then spend money on other products. Driving more customers solely to his product would make the company lose money overall.
It was from this company-level perspective I asked him to reframe his strategy. Here’s where we got to:
The goal is to increase the profitability of the company by driving profitable customers to other products and reducing the cost of acquiring them. This prioritizes work in two areas:
Increasing conversion from his product to other profit-making products (+$XXM in Revenue each year for the company overall)
Decreasing the cost to serve his product (-$XM in savings)
This simple framing quickly answered why certain projects were prioritized as a part of the strategy, and others dismissed. The result was 80% the same as what they had, but the framing was 200% more clear and easy to buy into.
Scenario 2: A crisis resolution
In another session, we discussed a recent all-hands-on-deck moment where there was a large-scale issue involving a 3rd party vendor. The vendor provided critical data and services for the delivery of the product. He came to the conversation with two proposed fixes to prevent similar issues for the CEO and board of directors:
Accelerate a project to bring more of the technology in-house
Improve monitoring.
I probed further: what were the key organization or collaboration issues this issue surfaced? If he was the CEO, how would be he thinking about the impact of the issue?
This line of thinking raised two additional (and more company-level) problems:
The incident was too slow in being escalated to the right people within the company and at the partner company, losing both companies $XXM in the process.
There is a lack of clear accountability for driving the mitigation of the issue. It was inconsistent across the organization how issues like this were addressed.
These two issues are related — the lack of accountability leads to a slow escalation. However, even if there were accountability, the right systems need to be in place to execute well. We dove deeper here.
What was the current process at each company? What agreement was in place between them when issues like this came up? How does this compare to other agreements that other companies had with this partner?
Who was going to take the hit for the lost revenue? Was this the best outcome for the company? Is there anything we could do to change the default outcome and recover some of it?
What do we think the CEO would prefer in terms of accountability for an issue like this? What past examples could we point to that went well or didn’t go well? What could we learn from those in developing our accountability model recommendation? What would his peers think about the recommendation? What are the downsides for the company?
Notice I didn’t once ask about the impact on his team. All of these decisions will impact his team, but that is not the optimization function. We are looking at this issue from the company’s perspective. And that means even if it may not be the most optimal outcome for the team (or even a good outcome), it’s important to do the best thing for the company.
As I mentioned in a previous post about how to Think Like an Executive and in a chapter devoted to this in my book, The Uncommon Executive: Breakthrough to the C-suite as a Minority, this prioritization framework can be counterintuitive for many who rose through the ranks by fighting for resources and making sure their team outperformed others. In middle management, the job more typically revolves around ensuring your team is moving ahead and doing well, with less consideration for other areas. However, at the executive level, it is critical to the success of the business to put the company first.
Thank you for being here and supporting my work. See you next week at 3:14 pm!
Yue
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Thank you so much! ❤️ I am grateful for your support in engaging with this post to help spread the word to other women and minorities looking to grow their careers.
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