Power is Not Always Formal

“There was a relief in not being listened to, sometimes. Power meant responsibility. Advice unacted upon almost always might have been right, and in the working out of whatever plan was followed, there was anyway always blood; better it was on their hands. The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all, volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.”
—  Iain Banks, Culture series, Use of Weapons, Chapter XII.

I don't try to formally expand our power within clients’ organizations. As external consultants, we don't have a lot of formal authority, and that's also a pretty good position to be in. Sphere of influence is more important, and even more so is getting people to do things without needing to leverage their boss or their boss’s boss manager. 

Whatever our clients decide to do, mistakes will be made, and things will go wrong at some point. If there’s weak motivation to follow through, they won’t try hard to make it work, to recover from setbacks, or change course. But it’s ultimately their decision.

Still, it’s hard for high-agency people to feel ignored, to follow a course of action they think is wrong, and to not feel like you have an impact. So how do you solve that?

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Impact Doesn’t Equal Power or Tenure

At Product People and in other consultancies, it happens once in a while that employees exit for a permanent role. Most frequently stated reasons are: having more power as a full-time employee ( FTE) and having a bigger impact by spending more time there (e.g., 3 years instead of 6 months). I think they’re fairly wrong.

You don't need formal authority to get things done. You need to be able to find the key people, then convince them. And get the timing right. You need to read the room and figure it out: is this a good time for this specific idea that I had on my agenda? Who are the best people to back me up? What are everyone’s interests in this? You need to do all this horse trading and shifting things around.

Of course, you could end up with people saying: yeah, I don't wanna do it, or I wanna block you. That can happen everywhere, and in any role. Everyone has their own boss to some degree. Even the CEO has the shareholders, investors and/or board. There's always going to be someone who can block you. Power is not always formal. There could be an individual contributor that whatever they say about security is going to go, because everybody trusts them and nobody wants to end up messing up this critical area.

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Test the Unclear Boundary Instead of Waiting

Currently I'm not doing client-based work, but I am still supervising some of our missions. And I’ve realized that many times externals end up in this position of damned if you do, damned if you don't. That means you can do either too little from the client's perspective or, rather, too much, and then you get told to back off. I prefer being the damned if you do. Because this way you can test boundaries. Also, you show initiative. The downside, obviously, is that the client can ask you why you did something, but then the answer is simple: because you pay me to do things. 

As a Founder, sometimes I have a higher risk appetite than the sales team or the staffing team has, and I get that. Not everybody is comfortable challenging someone in a high position of power to make it happen. Because it comes with risk: they may end up firing us, or they may end up ignoring us, both of which will make the engagement unsuccessful. I would think it’s a fun challenge. But not everybody is interested in being antagonistic in certain situations. 

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Force Clarity When Nobody Says Who Decides

One time I was at a company that was being restructured. We were brought in and immediately got introduced to the main people we’d be reporting to. One of them was the CPO, so presumably a very busy person. Another person was a director or VP, but they had leave planned in a few months. Then we got some other person who should be our counterpart or supervise us, but it was never very clear. Three people, and no clarity for us.

So we ended up sending emails to all of them and saying: hey, this is what's happening. This is what we plan to do. And at some point, some of them were like: please send a message just to me. Or please take me out of these comms, I'm currently not involved here anymore.

So while it sounds very negative, at least we got clarity. And then we knew who to talk to, and we ended up also having a track record of what we've done. Because later on, someone moved back and became our collaborator from that side of the company again. And then they came in and said: oh, you don’t have the domain knowledge. And it was: no, this is all we’ve done, and we already had people who were domain experts telling us what to do here. In my opinion, people also overvalue domain knowledge

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Show Bias for Action

At a different client, I would sometimes just need to have something super basic sketched out. There was constant stepping on designers’ toes, and one part of the team was very protective of their work, while the other was like: here’s the design system, I don’t care.

So I would send a request, wait an appropriate amount of time, and then just move on and do what I wanted to. Because I still didn’t want to get blocked, and my updates would have been: oh, I’m just blocked by Design. There were A/B tests anyway. I love the Amazon principle of “bias for action”, because at least if it’s the revolving-door type of decision (easy to switch back), then you learn more per unit of time than you would otherwise.

Because people always kind of want to have both things. They wanna be important, but at the same time, don't wanna be bothered to give a timely response. So it's a bit hard to move things along if you have to wait for everyone.

Clients do like getting people in who move things. This is something we're constantly praised for. 

And this is also what we look for when we hire a senior product leader. The ability to get people with strong personalities and conflicting interests to agree on what needs to be done. This is also sometimes the reason why product leadership moves beyond product. Because this is also a good ability of a CEO, a COO, or someone in sales or business development, which are all sometimes better rewarded in power and money than the CPO role. So if you have this ability to convince people to do what you think is right and align them in that direction, then you can do whatever you want.

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