Judgement Is Glue, A Connector
Why the skill, not the job title, matters more.
My son asked me a question recently that I didn’t have a quick answer to.
“You’re not a marketer. You’re not a CFO. So what do you actually do, Mum?”
Fair point.
He wasn’t being mean, just trying to file me somewhere, the way all of us do with each other. And I realised, standing in the kitchen, that thirty years in business had given me a skill but not a permanent profession. I can’t point to a function, only to a kind of leadership and decisions I got better at making, over and over.
So what do I do?
I think I have got clearer on this with time. Pictures helped. I chose four characters; WD40, Bob the Builder, Ginger (Chicken Run) and the court jester. If these described your career, what would your job title be? Someone who gets things moving, builds for the future, motivates people and tells the uncomfortable truths to those at the top. Not easy.
As I’ve refined my personal brand over the last 12 months, working under my own name it actually made me question my professional label.
Where is the connection?
Last week my social media feeds were full of Cannes Lions.
Thousands of marketers reconnecting with their profession. And I found myself wondering…
Where do General Managers connect?
We don’t fit one discipline. We move between customers, finance, technology, operations and people. We switch roles constantly.
Builder. Challenger. Motivator. Problem solver.
I read David Epstein’s Range last year too and it resonated so much with me. Breadth is great for learning and adapting, and it equips for uncertainty. I shouldn’t fear the lack of functional label.
Breadth isn’t the absence of expertise, it’s a different kind of expertise. Contextual.
The more I reflect on my own career, the more I think the capability that holds it all together isn’t strategy, sales, marketing or finance. It’s judgement. Judgement is what allows us to know which hat to wear, which question to ask and which perspective the business needs next in that context. It’s not something that appears on an org chart, but it is far more important in my view.
The thing that matters most in leadership we stopped training
Every company I’ve worked in has a clear progress path for functional skills. You get better at marketing by doing marketing. You get better at finance by doing finance.
What that path doesn’t teach is what to do when the marketing answer and the finance answer disagree, the KPIs conflict and the power play kicks in. Somebody has to decide anyway. That’s not a functional skill. It sits between the functions, in the space the org chart doesn’t cover. It is hard but not to be ignored. The more precisely we train people in their function, the less practice they get standing in that gap, being that glue that connects.
We haven’t just failed to teach judgment. We’ve built systems that actively train it out of people and incentivise insular behaviour.
When the knowledge comes up short we need judgement.
Every functional problem has an answer, eventually, if you dig deep enough - if you optimise to bits. The spreadsheet balances or it doesn’t. The campaign performs or it doesn’t. Judgment is needed where those answers fail to capture the issue. Where the data has narrowed the field but not chosen for you, where two functions have each done their job correctly and still arrived at opposite conclusions.
I think this is why judgment is so hard to see in others, and harder still to see in yourself. It doesn’t look like expertise. It looks like perspective and yes, the ability to pause. A question from left field that means well and seeks to expand the thinking. Or a willingness to sit with an answer we can’t fully justify yet, and carry it regardless. Patience to be uncomfortable.
If judgment helps navigate the gap between functions, then the way to build it is not another course or specialism. It’s deliberately putting yourself, or the people you’re developing, into situations where no single function has the whole answer. Cross-functional projects without a clear owner. Decisions where the data points in two directions. To own the discomfort of not being able to say “that’s not my area” certainly when it really doesn’t feel like your area.
Career paths are built, by default, to remove exactly that discomfort. Judgment is built by staying in it.
Profession of discomfort
I’ve spent a career being hard to pigeonhole, and I’ve stopped apologising for it.
I lead. I speak. I write about what I’ve seen. It’s a 360 degree career, each one fuels the others. And being a mum and wife I add in there too. Multiple perspectives to bring and share for tangential learning. For a long time I felt the pressure to pick a lane, because the world runs on lanes, more so now we optimise everywhere. The systems want one word for you, not four.
I understand why this is. (and this turns up is my next article) It has advantages but shouldn’t define nor confine you.
The skill I actually have, the one my son couldn’t find a title for, is the same one this piece is about. It doesn’t come from any one function I’ve have had the pleasure of filling. It comes from having been in enough of them, long enough, to notice what happens in the messy space between. I have judgement as a profession and something I will develop continually.
Look Again this week: Where in your work could you use a little more glue?
Have a great week