I Heard You
“But I can’t do that because [insert some organizational cultural nuance excuse]”. Screw that excuse and the horse it rode in on. Get yourself in front of the another audience in your organization to validate your work and gather additional perspective.
**Full disclosure: I am not insinuating any strategy to go over anyone’s head. This is all about transparency for everyone that your work affects.**
I have been chugging away at our business strategy for our power generation team for well over six months. I have made strides in launching marketing campaigns that make sense, developing commitment to the industry, and creating meaningful relationships with organizations in the industry that can really help us get our message out. This has consumed anywhere from 30% to 100% of my day. Quite honestly, this is not really in my current job title, but it’s something my team is allowing me to do in anticipation of opportunities for the industry that have yet to come.
Reality check to all of you: I’m straight up exhausted. I sound like a broken record talking about our marketing and Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) strategy to anyone who will listen. I could talk about this topic for an entire work day if I had the proper time allotted for it. I’ve attended so many D&I events, conferences, meetings, etc. and after a while, I started to wonder if I was actually going to get traction and if anyone in my company’s leadership was ever going to really “see” what I’ve been so adamant about creating.
At our last D&I event hosted by traveling panel, I had the opportunity to sit in the same room as all of our VP level leadership. I had seen the internal Outlook invite, so I knew exactly who would be attending. As I was chatting away with one of the other attendees, our VP of our business segment came by to say hello. We had met in person when I was in sales and I made an inadvertent, interesting impression, so I was hoping he would recognize me.
It was the moment when he asked “You moved back into engineering, right? What have you been up to?” I realized, this was my shot for someone to really “see” what I had been working on. I WORD VOMITTED EVERYTHING as articulately and concisely as I could. What was more important was when he said he wanted to hear more about my efforts, so we scheduled a follow up session for a half hour about four days later.
I set to work crafting the most professional presentation I could muster based on my capabilities. Hindsight 20/20: you’d think I would have already had this presentation since I’ve been so freaking obsessed with it. Wrong. See, no one had asked for it, so I wasn’t going to bang away at a PowerPoint for no reason. I let both my business development manager and my direct managers know about the meeting and I am extremely grateful that they were so supportive.
Originally, I had set up time to review with my business development manager separately, so we could go through feedback on my deck. My one-on-one was cancelled, but he had something else in mind for me. Either he loved my deck and didn’t tell me or he legitimately trusted me to put me in front of our segment director just hours before my meeting with our business VP as another set of eyes.
Not only did I get in front of one leader that day but two. I can’t thank him enough for his confidence in my ability to deliver. Meeting #1 went really well with an action item to roadmap an implementation strategy to the remainder of the segment. I couldn’t have asked for a better response. What was weird about that meeting was that the presentation wasn’t built for that specific audience, so it was interesting to think about how I would have done it differently now.
For my meeting with our business VP, I had packed so much information into a half hour presentation, that I had a bit of anxiety on how I was going to get through it all. I think prefacing that I had a ton of information at meeting start helped my cause though. We ended up in discussion on my presentation for about an hour and a half; an extra hour than what he had allotted. Phone down, computer unattended, he had given me a large chunk of his day.
My biggest takeaway from our meeting was the validity in my efforts. He was really encouraging and let me know that I was heard. He even said “I heard you” in our conversation and I can’t explain how much weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Overall, I left our meeting feeling like I was on the same page as our business leader. I needed that. I needed to be told that I was doing the right thing, that my ideas were good, and to keep plugging away at it because it’s important.
For D&I efforts, we preach that we must have a diverse decision making team for our innovation to thrive, so why wasn’t I doing this already? My favorite quote from Brendon Buchard is “common sense is not always common practice”. This is a habit I will need to intentionally develop: When I start to feel that weariness, my new plan will be to start connecting at other contact points in my organization to gather different viewpoints.
I now feel like I can carry on with my strategy as I envisioned it, knowing that I have another advocate watching my efforts come to fruition. The words “I heard you” are more powerful than you think.
