Some people ask me how to get ahead on the corporate ladder, and I say something that generally ends up being that you must be friends with people more important than you. To put it more professionally, you need an executive that trusts you enough to allow you to take the reigns and go to town.
Executive Sponsorship is a term is heard often on Scott Galloway’s podcast, and mentioned almost every other episode at least once but that’s about all. I’d like to go a deep dive because I realized that because a Chief Science Officer at my old job at Isagenix gave me a chance to prove myself and I rolled with it. That investment in me allowed me to do things I’ve never thought possible such as start a company, understand how corporate governance work, and give me the confidence that tells people what I do is faster, better, and higher quality than anything else.
These Executive Sponsors will act as mentors but they will also allow you to do things normal people can’t. However, you just can’t get an Executive to sponsor you, you have to really work for it and it might take years to actually get someone to notice you. Sometimes it takes a little bit of luck and utilizing all you got when the opportunity is shown, but having an executive sponsor can accelerate your career to places you’ve never thought of before.
Without an Executive Sponsor early in my career, I would have never had had the experience and confidence to be where I am today.
Serendipity and Action
We were transitioning CSOs and there was a project left in the air. I recently had some street cred for digging up a 5-year-old project, refurbishing it, and launching it and it sold very well. Nobody knew I did it except the R+D team. I had the title “bar-man” at the time. The new CSO approached me and asked me about this factory in Canada.
So he and I went to Montreal Canada to figure this out.
When you have a couple of high-class dinners with your CSO, you get to talk a lot and make a good impression that you are a good person is a great start
The biggest thing to note is that you must have a reputation as being a change maker before people start to notice you. Once you get the opportunity to talk to someone who notices you, you have to take the time to hold a conversation enough where they think you are a generally a good person. As you break down the barriers, eventually, you can ask for more responsibility, or ask to implement something or ask to even get more money if you’re gutsy enough.
Trust and Leverage
Trust is gained from doing great work consistently and with transparency. This is the simplest formula. Good results matter and being transparent when something goes wrong matters more. Trust takes a while to build and if you really want to accelerate acquiring trust, you will have to take risk.
The more people who trust you within the company, the better you have at leveraging what you want
Leverage is how much you can turn the tides within your favor and it’s derived from a simple physics experiment. The better you position yourself, the less effort you have to exert when achieving your desired result.
The unwritten rule in the relationship between trust and leverage is that different people and different roles have different values associated with them. If a CEO trusts you, you have much more leverage to make decisions and execute than say, a coworker. People take this the wrong way as it implies all you need to do is smooze with the top dogs to get ahead. Though it’s a valid method, it’s not a morally good method. Good leaders gain the trust of their team and use that as a bride to leverage what the collective group wants. This brings a prolific feedback loop that pays off in the future.
Doing favors like doing busy work matters, eating lunch with someone sitting alone matters, going to the event that they organized after work matters, and listening to their podcast matters. These things may not seem like they have any impact, but they do. Above all else, people are human, and people remember the little things you do for them.
If you have a good amount of trust at work, you can utilize this as leverage. Leverage allows you to ask what you want. This includes purchasing decisions, but more importantly, projects that you might find important and that you can spearhead. A big part of the reasons why I have a good success rate in projects was because I had the most control over the project.
If there was a priority of gaining trust throughout the organization, I’ve always broken it down as doing exceptional work as the most important value. Doing favors and going to happy hours are small, but they add up but don’t depend on them when it comes to gaining trust to the people you work with. Overall, you must be able to execute important things and be known as the person who can get things done.
How to Extract Lessons
It’s hard to get a 1:1 meeting from a top executive and the time you get must be valuable. Most people are scared of these meetings but for me, these meetings are opportunties where the main goal is to be insightful, thought-provoking, and memorable.
Depending on how important you are, you might actually have a list of project questions where you have to get clarification but if you’re not that important, then now it’s time to be memorable.
Asking good questions and not being afraid to ask dumb ones is generally the most valuable skill I learned throughout four years of podcasting. Another valuable topic to gain trust that leads to better lessons is to exude a type of technical competency and excitement when communicating one on one.
Something as simple as talking about how they grew in their career not only allows you to develop a framework in your life, but it also gives them a feeling like their story matters.
Give Thanks
We all have flaws. I think it’s very important to recognize this. My Executive Sponsor had a lot of flaws and he recognized it. After discussing a stressful work situation, he would tell me “This is what I’d do, but Adam, you’re different, you have a good heart”.
But not only that, but it also allows you to realize all of us are human, all of us have problems and all of us just want to do good work to help push forward. There are a lot of complexities in any corporate ecosystem. Most people want to seem perfect at work but when you see that everyone is human who just wants to do a good job with the least amount of stress, maybe the best thing you can do is to be the person who’s able to do it.
My Executive Sponsor just texted me about how he loves the content I posted on LinkedIn. I gave thanks. We had a catchup call recently, and it was really nice. We then talked about a completely unrelated project which was also fun.
