From Estranged Technologist to Trusted Advisor “. . . rule the world! But how?

Have you ever felt frustrated by having your well-thought-out recommendation completely ignored or rejected out of hand by enterprise leadership? You know you are right, and if only “they” would listen and adopt your idea, everything would simply work better.

Should this scenario repeat itself more than just occasionally, there are steps you can take to overcome this divide. To start with, you might consider asking yourself a couple of important questions.

1.Is being ‘right’ more important than being effective?

This is an important distinction. If you determine that being right is the most important factor, what follows will remain unimportant. I have witnessed countless individuals self-sacrificed at the altar of righteous indignance by placing greater importance on being "right"—and effectiveness, then, escaping out of the window.

If effectiveness is indeed the goal, consider the second question...

2.Why are your recommendations put aside without what you would consider studied consideration?

As I used to tell my kids so often they hated hearing it, “when trying to escape your troubles, keep in mind that no matter where you go, there you are.” If your ideas are not being given careful consideration and adopted ~70-80% of the time, the issue is, frankly, you. More precisely, how you are presenting your ideas to your audience or in what context you are presenting them.

The specific issue is that you are speaking at—or past—your audience, because your message is not framed in a context that resonates with them in a meaningful way. Ultimately, it is up to you to get your audience to understand what you understand. If this feels at all familiar, read on for solutions.

Align With Strategic Priorities

While belaboring the point that the underlying issues likely lay with you isn’t necessary, it must be addressed in order to be owned and subsequently solved. If effectiveness is your goal, everything you do must be aligned with the strategic priorities of the company. Dig deep to fully understand the company's strategic priorities and build a set of recommendations that align naturally and obviously.

Study the top-level corporate strategic priorities and objectives and the response by the next-level business leaders in their strategy and execution documentation. If you find that the documentation at this level is little more than parroting back what is written in the corporate strategy document, do not be alarmed; this is common. Never-the-less, this will give you a detailed understanding of the priorities, provide you with great insight into what the leaders of the company are thinking, and just as importantly, how they see their role and the role of their organization within the company.

Speak In the Dialect of Your Audience 

You will recognize the response from the second level leadership begins to follow one of three distinct themes; economic, operational or strategic. There is a different language for each focus, of course there is a local dialect at play as well and paying attention to and understanding the taxonomy specific to each leader’s response is crucial!

Economic objectives generally revolve around two themes, increasing revenue/value or decreasing costs. Your response to either or both will represent “the how” toward achieving the objective(s). The taxonomy associated with economic objectives has to do with increasing revenue and/or revenue equivalence.

Operational objectives are those which concern themselves with becoming more efficient across the operational lifecycle increasing throughput or decreasing time to delivery. Speaking specifically to how the operational lifecycle can be shortened or executed using fewer or less expensive resources is language the COO and line managers will understand clearly.

Strategic objectives from the second level (and lower) level leadership is most often a response to the corporate strategic objectives whether organic growth (achieving a greater percentage of a current vertical market) or venturing into an adjacent market. This can also include mergers, acquisitions and divestitures.

Once you understand this, you can align your messaging and your recommendations in a context that is meaningful and directed toward the dialect of your intended audience. This is to say that what you are recommending should be clearly intended and understood by the leaders as a means to enable and achieve their desired outcomes whether economic, operational or strategic and be presented using a taxonomy in the local dialect, meaningful to each leader.

The importance of aligning your recommendations with the strategic priorities of the company cannot be overstated and doing so in the language of the leaders is the key to broad acceptance and approval. The power of doing so effectively becomes immediately apparent when presented.

Further, prioritizing your recommendations and the associated spend plan around the critical components of the business (i.e. those business systems, applications and supporting infrastructure that must operate or the product cannot be shipped, or the services delivered) adds a depth of credibility and strengthens your recommendation(s). In addition, providing a risk-based analysis as part of your recommendation helps everyone to understand the impact of not funding your recommendations, and how achievement of stated objectives might be impacted.

Rule the world

The bottom line is you don’t need to rule the world alone. You merely need to understand how the business really operates and where the enterprise leaders want it to go over time. Proposing a realistic means of accelerating the achievement of the strategic objectives moves the needle for the company on becoming more competitive in the marketplace and moves you from estranged technologist to trusted advisor and the part of the team who spends each day trying to figure out how to rule the world.