2.2 The invisible influencer

This is post/article-1 under the topic “Stakeholder Management” under the series “Growth to CPO”

Gautam is elated as he has been nominated for promotion to Director of Products. He is very confident that his promotion would go through because he has achieved his goals for the year

On the day of promotion finalization, his boss (VP of Products) walks out of the discussion room and meets Gautam. To Gautam’s dismay, his boss tells him that he has to wait for another cycle to get promoted and lists the things he needs to do. 

Gautam is frustrated.

What really happened? 

During the promotion discussion, one of the early employees of the company, Nikhil, objected to the promotion saying “Gautam is not ready to become a Director”. He gave a couple of reasons supporting his view. One – Gautam is not focusing on some segments of the market and two – he could become better at presentation (from just one instance that Nikhil noticed). The founder who chaired the panel didn’t want to discount Nikhil’s objections and decided to push this case to the next cycle. 

To be fair to Gautam, he had good feedback from stakeholders whom he worked with directly. He didn’t even have a direct working relationship with Nikhil.

But then, what are the mistakes here – 

a. Gautam thought that achieving results is just good enough for promotion. This is true until a certain level in the hierarchy (say Group PM) where the decision is largely influenced by one’s manager. However as one moves towards senior management – peers and people above in different functions influence the decision. 

 b) Gautam didn’t know who all would influence his case.

c) Gautam’s manager was not well-prepared to handle the potential objections

What steps did Gautam take after this? 

Gautam understood from his boss that Nikhil is the one thing between him and the elusive promotion. He sets up monthly 1:1s to understand Nikhil and his points of view. Gautam uses those 1:1s to show the work he does and asks for feedback. Sometimes, he walks to Nikhil’s seat and shows prototypes that he knows Nikhil would be interested in. 

As a result, Nikhil gets more visibility into Gautam’s work and is now able to empathize with the trade-offs that Gautam makes in his job. In situations where Nikhil has a product ask/idea that didn’t make sense or didn’t align with Gautam’s goals, he tries to convince Nikhil directly. When that didn’t work, he looped in his boss ensuring the three are aligned. 

The result…

Gautam is nominated again for promotion in the next cycle. This time Gautam missed his goals by a small margin but that didn’t seem to matter. In the meeting, Nikhil is all praise for Gautam’s work and the case passed quite smoothly. 

Gautam is Director of Products now. 

Takeaways – 

a) Results can get you the promotion nomination but stakeholder feedback is the one that gets you the final Yes 

b) One needs to know the invisible influencers in your domain. This is not just for getting a promotion but also influencing important decisions for the greater good of the product/customers/company. Having a picture of whose voices matter, who trusts/listens to whom in the company is a very important way to influence and take everyone along. 

c) Managers need to be well prepared before nominating someone for promotion. The best way is to get individual feedback from different stakeholders before the nomination process itself. 

There are a few unanswered questions here like – what are Nikhil’s intentions?, how did Nikhil have so much influence on the founder? Is Gautam aligning or pleasing Nikhil? Why do the system value peer and cross-functional feedback more often at higher levels? 

All of these would be answered in the next few stories which finally leads to a framework to manage stakeholders.