Smart Lemming Diary: Don’t Forget about the Hidden Power Players in your Company
January 27, 2006
There are times when you’re working so hard and fast that you forget how powerful a particular key stakeholder is in your company.
When you’re in the weeds, raise your head, look around, and communicate with key stakeholders.
Because I failed to do this, I lost political capital this week with one of my key stakeholders — my CEO’s wife and partner who also works on our business proposals. My Marketing team was starting to fall apart at the seams due to fatigue that reduced the quality of our work. Not meeting my key stakeholders expectations was my first management misstep since joining the company.
Our just-in-time delivery worked against us because we didn’t allocate enough time for the corporate website redesign.
Our content for each web page was rougher than expected, but I still had to roll it out for our CEO and his partner’s review.
Bottom line: the CEO’s partner was annoyed that our content was not up to par. By this morning, it became clear that I was on her radar screen. I had tense email conversations with her from Wednesday through Friday of this week.
On Wednesday, I received an email from our CEO’s partner in all caps, after she reviewed the Client Success tab:
“THESE TWO EXAMPLES USE THE SAME OLD STUFF WE ALWAYS SAY. LET’S GET SPECIFIC QUOTES FROM Client X AND Client Y ABOUT WHAT THEY LOVE ABOUT OUR PRODUCT. BETTER YET, LET’S FIND OUT IF WE CAN TALK TO ONE OF THEIR CUSTOMER’S ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCES USING OUR PRODUCT. I THINK THAT WILL BE MUCH MORE MEANINGFUL. WE NEED TO GO TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL IN SELLING THIS PRODUCT ON OUR WEBSITE.”
In my mind, all caps in an email = yelling.
I had to figure out how to deal with this because she’s also a contributor to some of our website content. I’m also was working on another sales process project with here, where she’s not providing her deliverables in the process. I chose to reply with:
“I absolutely agree, and we’re working on the Client X and Client Y to get specific quotes. We have to go live on January 31st for the corporate Website, so we’ll use this content until we can swap out. But do you think we should not post this content until we have specific product quotes? We could not go live with this tab until we have the quotes.”
20 minutes later, she replies,
“I think it’s fine to go live with this but I’m very glad that you already had new content on your priority list.”
On Thursday, I finished up on my sales process document that our CEO wanted. I identified myself as the work around to plug the hole that the CEO’s partner is causing in our process. I called her to review the process again, letting her know that due to her home office challenges I would be happy to do her step in the office for her.
The CEO’s partner sounded fine when she responded in a positive manner by thanking me for helping out. I emailed:
“I don’t mean to jump topics on you, but I want to make sure that you’re comfortable with us using the old client stories until we get new ones.” I asked. She was fine and tone was good.
Then later, she sent one more change by letting me know:
“You said you wanted these by COB Thursday. Does 7:05 PM count? If I can do anything else, please be SURE to let me know. Over and out.”
On Friday, we continued the discussion when I replied to the CEO and his partner so I could address concerns:
I want to thank both of you for review, editing, and writing the Website content. Here’s our plan for Website rollout:
- Complete uploading the CEO’s partner changes today
- Add CEO’s changes today and Monday
- Marketing team adding the people images today
- Development moves site to staging today (adds Web forms and possibly ROI calculator which is TBD)
- Marketing team reviews after any content changes
- Marketing team focuses on the site again on Monday with a final review at 3:30 pm
- Our goal is to go live Tuesday which I don’t see as a problem
I apologize that we gave this to you at the last minute. I know from my perspective, just-in-time delivery on this project traded off content quality content for speed in preparing the content for your review.
Our goal is to maintain the right balance when we have to make this type of trade-off. Fortunately, I think my team’s improving its ability to make estimates on how much we can accomplish during our 90-day plans. I’m trying something different with this coming 90-day plan by reviewing the proposed list with the team, so they can contribute to the target dates and number of deliverables, then finalize with CEO.”
Much later, CEO’s partner replies back with,
“I think you and your team have done a great job with the website. I certainly don’t mind reviewing rough copy. Better that than running into delays. Please let me know if I can help in any other way.”
Reading the Tea Leaves
On Friday, I met with our sales person who confirmed that, “Yes, based on everything you described, you’re on her radar screen.” In fact, the CEO’s partner came into the office this morning, which is very rare. My sales contact said, “That’s how she checks in on people, casing them out.” She added, “The CEO’s partner did say, ‘I’ve been just slammed by reviewing Marketing’s content for the Website…’ That’s her way of saying she’s not pleased.”
I’ve always known that my CEO’s partner had enormous political power as an owner of the company. I respect her and her position.
I told my Sales contact, “Personally, I think the CEO’s partner is more powerful than our former VP/COO ever was when I compare the two. At least with our former VP/COO, you could see things coming and she’d want you to see it coming. With our CEO’s partner, she’s stealth and you can’t hear or see her approaching until she appears. You don’t know what’s really going to happen.”
Fortunately, the rest of the day improved since our CEO’s partner emailed:
“I know now that it is true that God wants us to be happy - because he sent us our Marketing Manager- AND Cosmopolitans martinis.”
Casually, I asked in email if she was still in the office or at home because I was hoping we could do coffee:
“Alas, I am at home. Let’s do coffee one day next week - maybe when our Marketing Manager’s here. I’d like to get to know him better.”
Lessons Learned
- Key stakeholder relations: I’ve been so busy in the weeds that I forgot our CEO’s partner is a power player in the company. I should have made sure that she knew my team’s priorities over the past 90 days.
- Buffer time: I should have carved out more time so we could have had an extra week to write the content rather than throwing it out there like that. It left our CEO’s partner to think, “This is crap.” I’m sure she didn’t think that, but she certainly didn’t appreciate feeling compelled to rewrite an entire page of content.
- Don’t over commit the team: I took on too many 90-day priorities this month by under estimating the level work needed to complete them on schedule. We ended up randomizing development resources, since my Marketing Manager didn’t plan. I should have caught this sooner. I’m capturing time estimates for the next set of 90-day priorities and can identify my team’s bandwidth and who’s over resourced so I can move tasks/deliverables around.
And I’m still on the radar screen and that’s not a good thing.
The Smart Lemming Diary is a series that chronicles a journey of laid-off worker, who becomes a Vice President of Sales Operations & Marketing for a small entrepreneurial healthcare technology company. For previous entries in this series, click here. For the first diary entry, click here. For the highlighted Smart Lemming Diary entries, click here.