Hi, this is Fiona, Welcome to my bi-weekly Wednesday newsletter with observations that may change how you think, decide and lead. To get is directly please hit the subscribe button. Thanks and enjoy this 4 -5 min read.
Last week I launched my second book Decisions That Carry. It was a week that was both exhilarating and mind numbing in one. Sharing the news, signing books and giving talks created real energy, but the behind the scenes and indeed the run up was not the same. From the outside a launch looks like one big moment, but getting there is a thousand small ones, not all of them my forte.
Over the preceding months there was lots of pain. Proofreading for the spelling or grammar mistake that somehow survived four rounds and four separate pairs of eyes. Hunting double spaces. Metadata across retailer sites that each want the description in a slightly different shape. Images resized for every platform. The audiobook synced to the written word. Event details, menus, invitations. Thank-you notes. The website. I was acting as all departments in one.
Can I do the detail? Absolutely.
Do I enjoy it? Absolutely not.
There were weeks when I was frustrated. I kept going, because I would rather take the pain than put something out that isn’t good enough. It is, after all, my reputation as an executive not just as a writer.
So who am I?
A number of years ago I reached the final stage for a significant role. I could do what the job required. I knew what it needed, I had done it before, I liked the company, bought into the philosophy. Then having progressed all the way to the end, the process stopped. One line of feedback: Someone didn’t think I was a detailed person.
Looking back, they may have had a point about that interview. Perhaps my examples didn’t go deep enough to show I understood their detail. That would be fair feedback on a conversation.
But it wasn’t feedback on a conversation. It was a description of my character.
I am a self-confessed big picture person, and I love it. But nobody runs a business, a P&L or a team from the helicopter alone. You need to land. You get into the detail because the job requires it to do it well. It isn’t optional. Writing works the same way. You shape a story arc then write the words to bring it to life.
A big picture leader who can’t do detail isn’t a big picture leader. They’re an observer.
The interview was situation specific. Yet the label I was given, wasn’t. Ironically my cover designer and layout designer felt I was a detailed person, such was my commitment to quality. I knew it needed doing.
Labels are being reshaped, but they are still labels
We may have gotten a little better at de-emphasising job titles, at least there has been lots of talk where people are seeing life beyond the title. I have tried to network without mentioning your job title. Try it, it is eye opening. Now we talk about skills over job descriptions and we encourage people to live beyond the role.
But we hand people a new set of boxes.
Big picture or detail.
Creative or structured.
Strategic or operational.
We describe these traits as opposite ends of a single line, and so the more you have of one, the less you must have of the other. Right? Wrong.
I trained as an engineer and have spent thirty years almost proving I am allowed to also be in marketing – a route someone expressly said was off-limits to me in my early years – I am creative, and I am structured. I can build the data argument and tell the story it supports and sells it.
On the other hand in Belbin terms I am a Shaper and a Coordinator, high energy, initiative taking, not afraid of the blank page. The Completer Finisher in me, who naturally thrives tying up loose ends is close to absent.
None of that is a contradiction. It only looks like one when you draw it on the same line.
This launch showed me why. Every one of those small checks served something bigger. A typo on page forty doesn’t just look careless, rather it tells a reader the thinking might be careless too. A description in the wrong meta data means the right person never finds the book. The detail isn’t the opposite of the big picture, but how the big picture reaches people.
The shaping of the big picture tells me which details matter. The details make the shaping real for others.
Capability is not energy
When that interviewer saw shallow examples in one conversation and wrote down “not detailed,” a moment became a trait. However whatever my interviewers were sensing underneath was something else again. Detail doesn’t set me on fire. It is not my natural default, certainly not for long. That is a separate statement from not being a detailed person.
Capability tells you what someone can do. Energy tells you where they come alive.
A better question I like to ask about people is not how I would describe them. It is what sets them on fire, and what drains their batteries. Ask that, and the picture changes. You stop seeing someone who lacks detail. You see someone who lights up in the big picture, and who lands in the detail whenever the work needs it, but who does not gravitate there by choice. That demonstrates commitment and range, not a gap.
Two weeks ago I wrote about the exhausted organisation.
Part of that exhaustion is structural: too many decisions, travelling badly. Part of it is how we see people. We place them by the label we gave them, often from a single moment, and stop looking at what naturally energises them.
Leadership work isn’t sorting people into boxes and keeping them there. It is catching the moment before a trait becomes a label. A label measures someone by what they can do and closes down the question of what they can be. What sets them on fire keeps it open.
Launch week had me on fire in many ways.
I made creative images, created artwork and ended the week on the red dot giving a TEDx talk. The same week also had me numb, mid-week, checking the venue capabilities for launch events and chasing down mis-aligned meta data between retailers.
On fire and running on empty, in the same week, sometimes in the same hour. Both true. Neither cancelling the other.
When we rule that option out, when we insist people must be one thing at the extremes, we don’t just mislabel them. We narrow what they are allowed to become, and what our organisations can get from them.
Write the headline for visibility and opportunity
This week I also started preparing introductions for the talks I’m giving on the book and additionally I needed to brief the MC for the TEDx event. I stopped at the first line and smiled. The same quandary again.
Who is about to walk on stage? The commercial executive with thirty years of P&Ls behind her. The author. The speaker. I haven’t turned into any of those this week, nor have I stopped being any of them just because I wrote another book. I have always been all of them. But every host needs one line, and every audience decides in seconds whether I’m relevant to them.
I wrote earlier too, that people only have the bandwidth to hold one thing about you. Attention is scarce, so choose your one thing. I still believe that, and this piece seems to argue the opposite.
It doesn’t, quite. One thing is how people find you, not the only thing they ever see. The headline earns attention. The label stops people looking beyond it.
We all have many sides. I saw that concretely this past week. So what does it take to let people have many sides, and have all of them recognised? Not fewer labels but perhaps labels that work as a door rather than a wall, inviting conversation. Leaders decide which of these prevails, every time they describe someone. Each description either opens the question of who that person is, or closes it.
Knowing how this works for me, I am going to look at energy and adaptability, not fixed boxes.
The world will always want a headline. As a leader I will look for opportunities to light people up, not close their fire down for the sake of box ticking.
Have a great week.
Fiona
Look again. See what was always there.
P.S. If you are interested to learn about the book. Decisions That Carry: How Leaders Build Trust Through Judgement, Data and Story is out now. Love to know what you think.
https://amzn.eu/d/0b8M1aL6