Critical Impact Work: Embrace It or Ignore It?

It’s not core work, but it’s critical to your success

I see a few consistent themes from some of the legends about core areas of business building:

1. Recruiting

2. Sales

3. Leadership

Technology is often assumed.

Tech is a given in most industries, and differentiation, while extremely important, is often a byproduct of these first three areas above. For the best tech, talent, demand, and thriving associates are essential. Engaged people drive engaged and profitable business, and create great tech for great products.

Priorities

It’s interesting that with these three areas, especially the first two, they are often not valued by global business based on how they are prioritized. When the layoffs start happening and cost reduction is in full swing, the focus on recruiting, sales, and leadership typically doesn’t happen until the realization arrives:

More sales are needed —> Increase sales —> Need for sales people increases —> Demand for people in the market increases —> Recruiting/Talent Acquisition (TA) and Leadership needed

The cycle continues.

When things get tight, margins dip, market uncertainty increases, TA is one of the first areas to see cuts, and for sales, when cuts are needed, sales comp can get crushed. So what can we do, here are a few thoughts to consider:

• Integrated Talent 

• Incentive and Performance Based Compensation

• Leadership Structured Smartly

• Long-term Decision Making

Recruiting and Sales continue to be stated as critical priorities for building an organization from some of the foremost legends, all the way down to the local business leader talking about the importance of their people. And we continue to hear that growing an organization and running an organization, it’s about the people, yet the general business landscape typically would not favor the talent and revenue fueling groups as their energy and profit makers. Talent, revenue, and leadership are as close to fundamental as it gets, and they drive great products and services.

Pure Leadership

With leadership, it’s more of a lack of understanding of the value with a pure leader that can come into play. Not a SME, not an engineer, doctor, attorney, operations, or marketing expert, but a pure leader who can lead nearly any organization. These other disciplines can be great leaders, but it doesn’t take an SME to be a great leader. Let’s put Elon, Altman, and Satya Nadella aside for a second, as those leaders are rare, and there are so many exceptionally great technical leaders in their own right throughout history. Naturally, the more technical and visionary the business, especially early on, the more technical the Founder or CEO, or other leaders must be.

Technical or subject matter expert leaders must still be leaders if they’re leading future great organizations. But if they’re just the smart guy in the room, it’s not going to last, so what does that mean? It means leadership is a skill and it must be learned through experience, intentional connection, understanding people and business, prioritizing people development, and the other core people areas aligned for holistic organizational growth and maturity.

Product, service, or tech guide your business, no argument here, but I bet you have great talent and leadership driving those areas to build the best of the best in your space. Maybe leadership value should be measured based on the total performance of all critical factors aggregated over a determined reasonable period of time. Value from margins, revenue, money saved, cost reduction, reduced expenses, investment allocated to development, opportunity cost of alternate decisions, etc. Stakeholder value, organizational value creation, customer delivery, and associate growth opportunity are all factors.

It’s important to step back and review the critical areas, measures of success or progress, and act accordingly. Decisions made only based on stakeholder reaction is a danger zone. Google has really taken a beating in business circles recently from investors to news media, and as AI, Social Media, and Tech matures that will continue until the narrative sees Google as the development leader in AI.

OpCo Looking Forward

Originally, Opco has been all about looking at business through experiences I have had, or my perspective, knowledge or expertise based on that experience, along with what I’m learning through professional research and daily work. It’s been based on recent learning or thoughts, whereas the next several will be more real-time and covering what’s going on recently or even that week. I like transitioning into more of work in review, learnings, and random thoughts, versus only making it about what I’m learning or thinking, or my perspective at that time. OpCo will continue this open exploration on all things organizations, people, culture, operations, talent, client service delivery, and across business and investing as it makes sense. Maybe even an occasional unrelated column, but it will be broad as I hone in on what I enjoy, and how I can help OpCo readers. Maybe it will be more targeted eventually, or maybe it’ll be the miscellaneous leadership and organizational centerpiece. We’ll see.

A mix will be good and be beneficial for the quality of OpCo and more story-based, and experience, over thought and curation. A blend of everything will keep it fresh and interesting, and always new. Action-fed writing encourages more action, which generates more original thought and connectivity. OpCo is here to make organizations better through intentional people driven leadership.

Potential Topic Areas of Future OpCo Editions

• Service operations & delivery

• Relationships - partnerships

• Account development

• Follow the money

• Focused intentional work, versus scattered

• Work vs hiring

• Building a solutions business

• Goals vs expectations

• Intentional focused activity

• Hiring

• Self growth and personal development

• Organizational design

• Keys to high leverage leadership

• Supplier echo system and communities

• Moneyball for talent

• Culture Index

• Talent optimization

• Talent capital

• Integrated talent

• Talent box score

• Building a professional services organization

• Fundamentals

• Planning

• Prospecting

• Long-term vs short-term

Yes, this is a long list, but this how I will continue to add value and share perspective, experience, and knowledge, and this list will grow and shrink based on what seems appropriate to cover and what is relevant and interesting at that time. At the very least, I want to point out the brutally honest points that are, or will become, significant trends or outcomes about work or business that I am not seeing shared elsewhere in a simple and easy to understand format.

Hopefully, this added a little value to your business or your career. Thank you for reading. Please repost or share with someone who may benefit from this edition.

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