We are HERE, we are HERE, we are HERE

I know cancel-culture has (partially) canceled Dr Seuss but can I still talk about him? Most of his writing for children is extraordinairy and I believe some of it would make great Corporate Development Programs. For example, Yertle the Turtle as a leadership program. Right? We should always think about the turtle at the bottom of our nine-turtle stack. That's a life lesson there.

If it seems I am talking in code, well, then you're not part of the Dr Seuss Fan Club, because evidently your parents didn't love you. That was a joke, don't report me. You were probably reading The Great Gatsby while I was reading about star-bellied Sneetches. Whose parents loved them more now???

Some of Seuss's books were turned into TV Specials. Back when I was a kid, there was no such thing as streaming (and we walked uphill both ways...) so when those specials came on, we were all glued to our televisions. Well, except the youngest of the family who was forced to stand behind the TV holding the atenna so the picture didin't get fuzzy. (... with no shoes, in the snow.)

One of those television specials based on a book by the same name was Horton Hears a Who.

For the unindoctrinated, I'll give you a summary: Horton is an elephant. Because of his giant ears, he hears things nobody else can hear. He heard people shouting from a dust-speck on a flower in a field of clover. Nobody else could hear it so they thought Horton was crazy and attempted to put him away wherever insane elephants were kept in those days. Ends up, a whole TOWN called Whoville existed on that dust-speck! The people of Whoville organized themselves and created as much noise as possible so others besides Horton could hear them. In the end (spoiler alert), the town of Whoville is SAVED all because the tiny Whoville population was heard.

It's a book about listening to the people who are often not heard. You can apply that however you wish to life - listening to children, listening to the marginalized, to those who lack political power or social capital. Apply it however you want, it's your life. For the sake of this article, however, let's apply it to corporate life.

There is a paradox about me, personally, that I've never shared before. I have both a superiority complex and an inferiority complex. How can both be true? I don't know, but they are. I supposed that's something to add to the list to work out in therapy.

Procurement has been my entire career. Many different roles, big and small. Global, regional, and local. Buyer, operations, sourcing, category management. Organizations of fewer than 100 people and organizations of more than 60,000 people.

Through all that, there is one universal truth: us back-office people are constantly shouting "We are HERE, we are HERE, we are HERE!" like the Whoville citizens did.

I'm sure Procurement isn't the only group doing this - other functions may have similar challenges, feeling unheard or unknown or under-utilized or under-prioritized.

This, then, is my Inferiority Complex. How in the world can I be so LOUD, so give-me-the-microphone, so roadshow-value-prop-performance-reporting, so look-at-us-look-at-us-we-are-here-we-are-here-we-are-here and still feel unheard or overlooked?

The stuff we need seems to live on the back burner. We try to be patient, but there are days I want to pour battery acid on the front burner so it melts away and then the back burner becomes the front burner. We want to be in front now and then! (We are HERE, we are HERE, we are HERE!)

This week, someone wise said to me "Get heard before you get mad."

Sometimes it's the simplest of sentences that breaks through and creates a new perspective.

I'm tired of this stupid complex, so I'm going to focus on getting heard better. Earlier. More often. Something.

So - tell me - in a world of competing priorities, where resource and budget constraints are pervasive, how do you get heard? What effective strategies do you have to get your needs met?

If your business-case is revenue-driven, I'd like you to go stand in the corner while those of us who can never write a revenue-driven business-case figure this out. Thanks!

Seriously, though. Who are you listening to? Who AREN'T you listening to? We all have a Whoville town in our worlds. Are we hearing them? How can we get better at that? And we are all trying to be heard by someone. If you feel like you live in Whoville, how do you approach getting heard?

Sound off. I'm listening.

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Linda Metzler writes on LinkedIn at very random intervals so she can keep you all on your toes. She imagines you over there thinking "Gosh, Linda hasn't written for a while." and then - BAM - surprise post! But she realizes the reality is more likely "Why does this weird lady keep clogging up my LinkedIn feed?"

Fine, be that way. She will let you get back to your important articles about Artifical Intelligence while you push real intelligence aside. She's not mad or anything; she just likes to be heard.

Linda read an article a long time ago stating that in the early days of Google, Fridays were for imagining and exploring and innovating. She doesn't know if that's true or not, but she likes to keep a little time on Fridays for that sort of thing, which occasionally results in her clogging up your feed. She's not even sorry.