Hearts, Minds and Bananas . . .
I was drawn to a piece from Iain Campbell McKenna that started with the assertion about CPOs (Chief Procurement Officers, not Chief People Officers, although the lesson applies equally).
Iain states that “Some CPOs bring a banana to a gunfight”.
I had to read on . . . .
Iain’s point is that a lot of us are losing battles we are creating ourselves.
Assuming that our “Subject Matter Expertise” is our key asset.
This resonated with me as Steve Fox and I had just been facilitating a workshop entitled “Accelerating Digital and AI-enabled Transformation” at the 30th Shared Services & Outsourcing Week (SSOW) conference in Orlando.
The themes from the workshop discussions really connected to Iain’s post. Despite the wonders of technological progress and AI itself, success in driving business transformation with AI has less to do with deep understanding of the technology than with human issues. Now, THAT may seem counter-intuitive 😉
We discussed;
- Enterprise transformation opportunities to deliver real P&L and Working Capital impact are massive in all our businesses.
- Much of the opportunity lies, untapped, in the gaps and “blind spots” between the silos – hence the criticality of “end-to-end” process focus, irrespective of our span of control or “ownership”.
- We don’t need to “own” full end-to-end processes to identify, facilitate, collaborate and create value across the enterprise.
- The challenges, however, remain stubbornly familiar. In the age of AI, human factors (EQ, trust, control vs influence, WIIFM et al) remain the dominant challenge. And the key question, “WHY?”
Winning “Hearts & Minds”
Sometimes the mindset we bring to engagement with stakeholders and the C-Suite is fundamentally misaligned with the environment in which they operate.
Iain quoted a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article on a 2022 study analysing nearly 7,000 C-suite job descriptions, which found that what businesses are actually seeking at the top is not functional expertise but social skills, relational intelligence, and the ability to influence peers.
EQ, trust and strong social skills.
At the top of businesses, functional expertise matters far less than business acumen and relational leadership.
Members of the executive team often have more in common with their peers across the table than with the people they actually manage.
“AI cannot replicate the ability to read a room, build trust with a CFO, or shift a COO’s perception of the function.” That is entirely human work.
Get the mindset right, and you build the kind of trust and credibility that is rock solid.
“Get it wrong, and you will spend your entire tenure in a duel, convinced you are armed, holding a banana.”
You can read Iain’s post “Some CPOs bring a banana to a gunfight” here . . .
You can read the HBR article “The C-Suite Skills That Matter Most” referencing the Russell Reynolds survey here . . . by Raffaella Sadun, Joseph Fuller, Stephen Hansen and PJ Neal
Thanks for reading . . .
Hearts, Minds & Bananas