Question Page

How do you think about building influence to map your charter to the broader goals?

Tiffany Tooley
Tiffany Tooley
Workday Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly Salesforce, IBM, Silverpop, BlackboardMarch 8

This one is so important! That's because it helps define your team's strategic impact on the organization. At a very high level, I think your team's goals should directly map into the company's organizational goals so that your team can convey how they're helping to grow the business. Once you've defined the team's prospective impact on your annual goals, then you can determine how your respective sub-teams across your PMM team (or individuals if you're leading a smaller team) can support them. At an IC (individual contributor) level, you may see workstreams that are more tactical in nature. That's to be expected! But each person on your team should understand how they're contributing to the greater goals of the team and organization. My recommendation to help get buy-in on all of this is to have your team help co-create these goals. As a leader, you may be defining the team's key objectives, but should consider how you can empower each member on the team to define how they achieve those. 

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Becky Trevino
Becky Trevino
Flexera Chief Product Officer | Formerly Rackspace, DellJune 1

For me, the first thing I do when interviewing for a position or starting a new role is to understand what problems my hiring manager is trying to solve by adding me to the team. 

If I'm new in role, I build my 30/60/90+ day plan off of these problems and build a roadmap/charter on how I plan to solve these. 

What I've found is that there is often a tie-in between the problems my hiring manager is looking to solve and broader company problems. 

At the end of the day, my manager is investing in me and my team to help him/her solve a business problem. And when I make traction on solving these problems I BOTH help my manager to meet his/her goals AND I help the organization progress on key business outcomes.

The added benefit to this problem-centered approach is that when your team is seen as both helping your direct manager (or his/her boss) and creating desired business outcomes you are viewed as a team worthy of continued and expanded investment. 

Beyond the 30/60/90 day period, I continue to work through either the OKR process or I create my own 6 month goals. I then ensure leadership is aligned to what I've prioritized and follow the steps above to ensure my teams deliver value.

306 Views
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