When your job is defined as being an “influencer”, you may get people to do things differently but you will never be credited – or rewarded – for it. And you will not be able to assess your own progress either.
Try this. Go to LinkedIN (or to any other job searching website of your preference). Enter your criteria and see what opportunities are found and recommended to you.
I bet you will get: fuzzy job descriptions (especially if the job is promoted through a professional recruiter), vague role and responsibility definition, unclear metrics. Salary range will be indicated as meaninglessly as “6 digits OTE” or “competitive package”.
But when you look at the job requirements, you will find a lot of details: languages, master degrees, certifications, years of experience, ability to write with your feet and clairvoyance (all right, I made some of those up…).
The latest fad I noticed is the trend of describing the candidate’s role as “acting as an influencer” to a more or less defined number of people, functions and areas.
Let me tell you right away: in my experience, to have a job defined as “being an influencer” plainly sucks. It’s the least rewarding kind of corporate job ever (and I should know…).
For a start, requiring somebody to be an influencer is a thin disguise for really saying: “look, we could not give you the hierarchical responsibility, the money and the empowerment to really change things around here, so you’re stuck with the influencer thing.”
In addition, such a role usually does not entail a clear and univocal definition of the operational perimeter, of what to do and how to measure the outcome.
In practice. If you influence a certain behavior, and the person changes because of you and goes on to achieve something important, you will not be rewarded. As honest as the other person can be, she will not grant you kudos for changing her approach. Sure, you might get a thank you note and a warm feeling inside, but that’s all you’re gonna get for your effort. This is called corporate ruthlessness.
Conversely, if the other person does not change her behavior notwithstanding all your tries (i.e doesn’t buy into your recommendations or does it only partially) then you have wasted everybody’s time.
And on top of that, if you are passionate about what you do, you will also have had a pretty frustrating experience.
Oh and by the way, how should you assess an influencer? Do you look at how hard he’s trying to influence? Or do you factor-in the changed behavior of people and teams that he influenced? A mix of both?
And what metrics do you use? Do you measure how many times he disagreed with a certain way of doing things and count that as “influencing activities”?
Reality is, at the end of the day there can be no hard metrics for influencers. The very nature of the job and the way that it’s usually set up in a large company are making it impossible to define those.
The annoying consequence of a lack of metrics is that you have no way to improve at what you do, and you’ve got no quantitative basis to claim your rewards either.
Because of such an unfortunate state of things, the performance evaluation of an influencer can only be carried out based on qualitative feedbacks from managers, peers and colleagues. No hard data. Not good enough I think.
So please be careful next time you look at a job opportunity or to a new position. Avoid anything that sounds as fishy and as unrewarding as “being an influencer”.
Unless of course you are the big boss, in which case influencing others is really all you should do. That’s called leadership, by the way.
IMAGE Credits: anankkml, FreeDigitalPhotos.net
