Wrestling my nemesis: opaque executive expectations
June 17, 2019 11:04 PM Subscribe
I’m a mid-to-senior level professional in the digital space, and am struggling once again with a problem I have encountered a few times over, say, 15 years: the gap between what I understand about my job and the expectations of executive leadership. I don’t know whether this is common, normal, a me problem, and most importantly what to do about it.
Typically this is in jobs that are new to the organization, and the executive in question is explicitly uninterested in what he or she sees as managing people. Once I literally learned at my annual review that I was supposed to have fully instituted a program I was still designing (no, there had been no guidance or nudges or obviously a clearly written objective; leadership was apologetic but I still got a crap review.) More generally, I’ve heard more than once “you’re operating too tactically, but we want you to be operating strategically,” when this is a distinct change from previous expectations—and I should have understood this unstated change. In my current role, I’ve been starting from close to scratch, built a solid practice, and am hearing that I need to be “working up here,” (waves hands around)...without any particular objectives or goals.
How do you know when this change happens? How do you identify it if nobody says “we want you to start scaling up instead of business as usual”? I feel like everyone learned this in competent digital business-person class. Anonymous because of shame!
Oh and — I am a neurotypical cis female white early-40s person with reportedly great communication skills, apart from apparently this specific receptive...thing. If any of that seems important.
Happy to contact people on memail or otherwise if you drop a comment below.
Typically this is in jobs that are new to the organization, and the executive in question is explicitly uninterested in what he or she sees as managing people. Once I literally learned at my annual review that I was supposed to have fully instituted a program I was still designing (no, there had been no guidance or nudges or obviously a clearly written objective; leadership was apologetic but I still got a crap review.) More generally, I’ve heard more than once “you’re operating too tactically, but we want you to be operating strategically,” when this is a distinct change from previous expectations—and I should have understood this unstated change. In my current role, I’ve been starting from close to scratch, built a solid practice, and am hearing that I need to be “working up here,” (waves hands around)...without any particular objectives or goals.
How do you know when this change happens? How do you identify it if nobody says “we want you to start scaling up instead of business as usual”? I feel like everyone learned this in competent digital business-person class. Anonymous because of shame!
Oh and — I am a neurotypical cis female white early-40s person with reportedly great communication skills, apart from apparently this specific receptive...thing. If any of that seems important.
Happy to contact people on memail or otherwise if you drop a comment below.
Great advice in the previous answer. The only things I would add are first just to validate that this is something I've experienced as I've taken more senior roles and I don't think you should feel any shame over it.
Second, one thing I've come to realise is that this type of executive expects you to think like them without communicating that fact (because of course they wouldn't) and in your shoes they would immediately start delegating operational stuff as soon as they could because that's how they became a senior executive. I think some people (in my case because I've come into management from a hands on dev role) are more naturally drawn to operational management partly because we know how important it is to have someone doing that properly, and partly perhaps because it's an area where one can have some measure of control and knowledge about whether you're doing a "good" job. It can be a challenge to break out of that if it's not your natural mode to think that way.
posted by crocomancer at 2:52 AM on June 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
Second, one thing I've come to realise is that this type of executive expects you to think like them without communicating that fact (because of course they wouldn't) and in your shoes they would immediately start delegating operational stuff as soon as they could because that's how they became a senior executive. I think some people (in my case because I've come into management from a hands on dev role) are more naturally drawn to operational management partly because we know how important it is to have someone doing that properly, and partly perhaps because it's an area where one can have some measure of control and knowledge about whether you're doing a "good" job. It can be a challenge to break out of that if it's not your natural mode to think that way.
posted by crocomancer at 2:52 AM on June 18, 2019 [1 favorite]
Run your domain like it's a business. What service do you provide the overall org? How does that map to overall objectives? What are the KPIs you need to deliver to contribute to org success?
Sure, your boss not saying you needed to deliver program X is a problem. But you didn't actually need to deliver program X. You needed to deliver some outcome that supported the company direction. The failure was not determining how that would be measured and moving the needle a sufficient amount.
The biggest skill gaps I see in people described as tactical are not understanding why at a business level, and not knowing how to measure. The two are related. A good measurement is going to be measuring things leadership cares about. If you have specific scenarios, I'd be happy to workshop with you.
In general, a really good measurement will have units of money you're saving or generating, or how you're impacting senior leadership's kpis. (and the former is always one of the latter. It's called out for emphasis).
The other big thing is there are two groups of measurements for you to manage. One set is operational excellence. Things like driving up code quality. But quality is really defect reduction, which is less rework, which is labor hours saved, which is an amount of money in labor spent on new revenue generating features. $2MM in productive labor hours saved is a good end of year report.
The other is the strategic. This year we are focusing on X. The big gap I see in your specific case is this: when you were assigned strategic project X, you were also assigned reporting on it implicitly. The onus was on you to determine that project X is underway to deliver outcome Y. And be able to show that you delivered A percent completion, which delivered B percent of outcomes.
I can almost guarantee your review would have been different if you said "yeah, we only got to A percent completion of the project, but customers are responding well and we are ahead of our one year targets by 20 percent, so I accelerated the benefit by focusing on delivery of the critical work."
Yeah, you can insist on boss 1:1s, but that's really just trying to change boss's behavior. Control what you can. Learn the parts of your boss's job you need to. That's solid development for you AND you build relationships with boss's peers as you casually ask "so what's your group looking to achieve with this project?"
You're a manager. If there's something you "should" have done, it's on you to be able to articulate why you chose other work over the should. Measure so you can answer that.
posted by bfranklin at 4:44 AM on June 18, 2019 [8 favorites]
Sure, your boss not saying you needed to deliver program X is a problem. But you didn't actually need to deliver program X. You needed to deliver some outcome that supported the company direction. The failure was not determining how that would be measured and moving the needle a sufficient amount.
The biggest skill gaps I see in people described as tactical are not understanding why at a business level, and not knowing how to measure. The two are related. A good measurement is going to be measuring things leadership cares about. If you have specific scenarios, I'd be happy to workshop with you.
In general, a really good measurement will have units of money you're saving or generating, or how you're impacting senior leadership's kpis. (and the former is always one of the latter. It's called out for emphasis).
The other big thing is there are two groups of measurements for you to manage. One set is operational excellence. Things like driving up code quality. But quality is really defect reduction, which is less rework, which is labor hours saved, which is an amount of money in labor spent on new revenue generating features. $2MM in productive labor hours saved is a good end of year report.
The other is the strategic. This year we are focusing on X. The big gap I see in your specific case is this: when you were assigned strategic project X, you were also assigned reporting on it implicitly. The onus was on you to determine that project X is underway to deliver outcome Y. And be able to show that you delivered A percent completion, which delivered B percent of outcomes.
I can almost guarantee your review would have been different if you said "yeah, we only got to A percent completion of the project, but customers are responding well and we are ahead of our one year targets by 20 percent, so I accelerated the benefit by focusing on delivery of the critical work."
Yeah, you can insist on boss 1:1s, but that's really just trying to change boss's behavior. Control what you can. Learn the parts of your boss's job you need to. That's solid development for you AND you build relationships with boss's peers as you casually ask "so what's your group looking to achieve with this project?"
You're a manager. If there's something you "should" have done, it's on you to be able to articulate why you chose other work over the should. Measure so you can answer that.
posted by bfranklin at 4:44 AM on June 18, 2019 [8 favorites]
What you want are regular weekly checkins and SMART goals.
Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant/relativant, time bound.
So in your weekly checkins you can say ‘this week I’m reviewing designs for other social programs similar to what you’ve requested I build, and contacting their organizations with these specific questions. I’m also investigating the city zoning process to change the allowed uses for the building we own that you want to house the program.’ You can ask if the priorities remain the same and directly request feedback about your process and progress.
So you’ve got to force specificity out of these people, and document your conversations along the way.
Also, read some management books. I like Peter Drucker but there are cases to be made for some others.
posted by bilabial at 6:24 AM on June 18, 2019
Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant/relativant, time bound.
So in your weekly checkins you can say ‘this week I’m reviewing designs for other social programs similar to what you’ve requested I build, and contacting their organizations with these specific questions. I’m also investigating the city zoning process to change the allowed uses for the building we own that you want to house the program.’ You can ask if the priorities remain the same and directly request feedback about your process and progress.
So you’ve got to force specificity out of these people, and document your conversations along the way.
Also, read some management books. I like Peter Drucker but there are cases to be made for some others.
posted by bilabial at 6:24 AM on June 18, 2019
Yep, you can't predict the mercurial whims of your manager but you can communicate and check in with them a lot more often. It may feel like you're bugging them or over communicating but you really aren't and planning your work around 1-2 week check-ins is a great way to motivate yourself to finish stuff. Chances are you are on the right track and your manager just doesn't realize it.
posted by dawkins_7 at 6:39 AM on June 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by dawkins_7 at 6:39 AM on June 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
Bury them with your metrics! If you have senior management that's expecting "X" deliverable, and you provide no tentpoles around the review of "X", that only perpetuates the "waving hands up here vaguely" timeline that your senior executive is already on.
Always keep track of how your projects are doing with concrete details week-to-week and regurgitate them routinely with people expecting results. Put the onus on senior management to keep up with you, not the other way around.
And don't feel shame about where you are now - just become super-meticulous about everything you do in your role and memorize it.
And do everything upthread as well - this entire conversation has excellent suggestions for ANYONE.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 7:53 AM on June 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
Always keep track of how your projects are doing with concrete details week-to-week and regurgitate them routinely with people expecting results. Put the onus on senior management to keep up with you, not the other way around.
And don't feel shame about where you are now - just become super-meticulous about everything you do in your role and memorize it.
And do everything upthread as well - this entire conversation has excellent suggestions for ANYONE.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 7:53 AM on June 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
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Then after a while of this, apply for a more senior job.
posted by quacks like a duck at 1:20 AM on June 18, 2019 [33 favorites]