Influential Executive Lesson #4: How to Choose Your Message
Robert asks “Josh, in yesterday’s lesson you told me I need a message. I know what I want to do, but how do I turn that into a message?”
Welcome back to my series of lessons on how to become an influential executive. One lesson each day, for 20 days. Implement each lesson, each day, and after 20 days you’ll be well on your way towards increasing your influence and reaping the rewards by seeing your career grow.
Lesson #4: How to Choose Your Message (When You’re Not Sure What it Should Be)
Your message is your mission, your calling. Your calling should focus on your strengths.
Sometimes our strengths are obvious. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell showed how many of those whose talents we admire racked up 10,000 hours of practice in order to get to expert status. If you’ve spent 10,000 hours doing anything, you’re probably pretty good at it, and that’s a good place to begin looking when it comes to finding your mission. But practice isn’t always enough, and just because you’ve spent 10,000 hours doing something doesn’t mean it’s what you want to focus on as an influencer. When Jenny Bowen decided to do something about the plight of children in the 50,000 orphanages in China she didn’t know much about China, orphanages, or children, beyond raising a few herself, and she certainly didn’t know anything about running a non-profit charity. She was a filmmaker. Still, she went on to create an organization, OneSky, that has been credited with saving the lives of over 100,000 orphaned children. Sidenote: Jenny is also an expert influencer who uses video and writing to get her message out.
Economist Gary North said this about finding our calling:
Your calling is the most important thing you can do in which you would be most difficult to replace. — Gary North
So you’ve got 10,000 hours of experience as an executive, so what? So do a lot of other executives. The question is, what do you bring to the table which, when combined with those 10,000 hours, makes you different? What can you contribute that nobody else can? Hint: Focus. Drill down. Get specific by combining different areas of your life experience.
For example, I run Influencer Inc, an organization that helps people become thought leaders. Other people do that too, but I think it’s a space I can do well in, and perhaps dominate. But when I started doing one-on-one coaching I had to get more specific. Yes, I could coach individuals on how to become influencers, but there are a lot of people who can do that, and a lot of them are better at it than I am. So I focused more, I zoomed in. I asked “Rather than just helping anyone to become an influencer, who can I help better than others can?” Then I thought “Hey, I’m a CEO, I’ve worked with a lot of CEOs, I should be an influence coach for executives.” But there are still a lot of other people out there who do that. So I zoomed in even more. I asked “Is there a specific type of executive I’m best equipped to work with?” Why yes, there is. I wrote the book Chief Marketing Officers at Work and interviewed 30 CMOs for it. I’ve interviewed scores of others for my articles in Forbes and other publications. There aren’t that many coaches for CMOs, let alone influence coaches for CMOs. That is something I can do very well, with absolute confidence that there is no one else out there who can do it better than I can. And so at least when it comes to my executive coaching practice that is my calling, to work with CMOs. Do I still work with other executives? I do, but my main focus is on CMOs.
The overlap in my case was influence + coaching + CMOs which led to my calling. For you it may be CFO + Chinese American + US personal tax expert, which allows you to advise Chinese executives who move to the US on their personal taxes in a way nobody else can. Or it may be that you’ve been involved in 10 mergers of public companies + you’re an expert at electrical engineering, or you are one of the few American executives who has extensive experience creating business models that thrive in third-world countries. As an executive you’re one of many, but add one thing to being an executive, and you become rare. Add two or three things and you become one of a kind, and perhaps now you’re calling has become obvious.
Homework: Make a list of every role you have. It doesn’t matter if you’re the foremost expert at any of them.
It doesn’t matter if they seem related. Mine would be husband, father, CEO, marketer, entrepreneur, skater, ultra trail runner, student of the CMO role, author, executive coach, consultant, Mormon, technologist. I didn’t have to combine many to find a calling. If you make this list, you’ll find a calling for yourself in short order.
And tune in for tomorrow’s lesson.