Leveraging Leadership

Bridging the Gap Between Nebulous Concepts and Tangible Business Outcomes

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 136

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Emily explains how to turn vague ideas into clear proposals with tangible outcomes, using examples like investing $40,000 in executive coaching for key team members and a $20,000 offsite to boost sales team morale. She offers advice on reducing scope if needed and aligning requests with overall company goals or risk mitigation. Chiefs of Staff are encouraged to be prepared with specifics to streamline approval.

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Who Am I?
If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 


Time Stamps:
00:25 Turning Vague Ideas into Tangible Outcomes
01:06 Examples of Specific Asks and Outcomes
03:50 Tying Outcomes to Company Objectives and Risk Mitigation
05:06 Handling Pushback and Final Tips

Welcome back to Leveraging Leadership, where we unpack the art of business leadership. I'm your host, Emily Sander, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. This show is all about finding your points of greatest influence and leveraging them to better serve those around you.

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In this episode, I want to talk about how to take a nebulous concept or kind of a vague idea and tie it to a specific ask and a tangible outcome. So as chiefs of staff, we're often talking about things like company culture and employee engagement and training, and all of those things are good and we should be bringing them up in conversation and advocating for them, but very often in conversations, you'll get to a point. Especially if you're asking for budget, where someone will go, what exactly are you asking for? And if I approve that, what am I going to get? And so being prepared to answer those follow up questions is a good way to streamline these conversations. So, let's go with, uh, an example here. The nebulous concept is investing in people. So you might be sitting there as chief of staff saying like, we really need to invest in our people more. Great idea. Yes. Yes. Very positive. And then follow that up with specifics. So maybe you've taken a look at the internal staff and you've identified four specific people who are key team members who you want to provide executive leadership coaching to. And so you've done the internal kind of review, like here's the four people. And then you've done the external research on here's some coaches or some coaching programs I think would fit our organization. And then you And these people really well. So I recommend to you, CEO, to you, principal, that we invest 40, 000 for Mark, Cynthia, Rohit, and Damien to get executive leadership coaching. They are key team members. We see them as being future VPs and future C suite leaders at this company, and we want to, one, retain top talent, and two, accelerate their growth in these areas. And with this investment, we expect a 15 percent increase in our three 60 leadership feedback surveys and a 20 percent increase in the output of these two teams. Our delivery teams and engineering teams are key and we have to have top leadership in those areas, something like that. So investing in people, specific ask. tangible outcome. Example two would be a sales organization and maybe one part of a sales organization that needs some attention. Let's say the Southwest region of sales has had three leaders in the last six months. There's churn like crazy morale is low. And as chief of staff, you're looking across the entire organization and like, Oh my goodness, This team needs some attention And you've also done some research and thought about some options and you think that an offsite would really help this team. So the recommendation to your CEO, to your principal would be a 20, 000 investment for a two day offsite for all of the reps in the Southwest region. And the first day we're going to bring in a keynote speaker, get them motivated, get them jazzed up, rah, rah, rah, ready to go. And the second day is going to be a hands on workshop. And a lot of our new hires. Have kind of fallen through the cracks in terms of training. So they've, some of them haven't gotten like the overview of our product suite or how we position things or the talk track or the talk off for competitors. So we want to make sure everyone has a unified sales approach with that second day hands on workshop. And with this investment, we expect a 10 percent increase in sales from the Southwest region. Okay. And with sales, it's pretty easy, right? Like it's, numbers and like you give me this and I will output this for you. So that could be a pretty straight line. A couple other notes in these, in these categories. Um, if you can tie the outcome to an overall company objective, that's even better. So if you can say something like, and this directly ties to our annual goal of 10 million in revenue, You're literally connecting the dots for someone like boom, boom, boom, boom, please sign here. The other way to think about that is in terms of risk mitigation. So I have a chief of staff whose principal is a lawyer and she is all about mitigating risk across the company. So when the chief of staff and I talk about things, we talk about them in terms of what risk this mitigate and having the conversation teed up that way. So for instance, if an example, one, someone is, is bulking at the investment for the executive coaching, it could be, look, it might sound like a lot of upfront investment, but if you think about it long term, we are preventing a churn on that team. So if you think about those four key people leaving, well, that could easily result in. 600, 000 of recruiting and hiring and onboarding and training and replacing the people on their teams that have left because there's so much churn at the top, all of those types of things. We're mitigating that risk with this relatively small investment upfront. So those types of things you can say, Oh, another thing here is If you, if you do get more pushback, you can reduce the scope of the ask. So it might be instead of those four people getting executive coaching, it might be two people, or you still might keep the four people, but have them get less coaching or fewer coaching sessions, something like that. In terms of the example too, with the sales organization, it might be. Um, maybe one team within the southwest region goes to the offsite, or maybe just the managers of the southwest region, or it could be, look, we're not going to do an offsite, we're going to do an onsite, but half day onsite with everyone, and they still get the hands on workshop in the big conference room type of thing. So those are some things to think about. And as chief of staff, I would often get these requests. So I would be on the receiving end of these requests. And first of all, I would, I would just praise people for, Bringing these things to my attention. Like, thank you so much for thinking about how to invest in your people, or like, thank you for being proactive and coming to me with a solution. And then, here's the types of things that I'm thinking about. Here's the types of things I need to approve this. And for this specific thing that you're bringing up to me now, let's talk through these things. And then in the future, you know, to have these things teed up and I will just. Boom, boom, boom. if that looks good, if that makes sense, then I will definitely approve that type of thing. So if you're on the receiving end, then you can also talk to people about, when these requests come in, I'm always going to ask you this, this, and this, so you can just be ready to go. All right. So I hope this is something helpful you can use to take nebulous concepts and ideas and tie them to a specific ask and a tangible outcome. go forth, be a good chief of staff, be a great leader, and I will see you next time on leveraging leadership.

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