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00:00:04.160Hello, this is Stephanie Harris-Yee, and here for another episode of Field Notes.
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00:00:24.239And today I have Kevin O'Donnell, who's the strategic advisor from Global 10X, who's going to be talking to us about this idea of localization teams, which they have this massive scope of thing that they're doing, but their influence is a little bit limited depending on departments, etc.
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00:00:36.960So he's going to be giving us a better idea of this landscape and then also some ideas of what he's seen work in order to get around that limited influence roadblock that a lot of localization leaders have.
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00:00:40.320So, Kevin, to you, how would you lay this out?
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00:00:43.200Yeah, hey Stephanie, great to chat with you today.
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00:00:45.439Um, it's such a common issue.
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00:01:04.000So when I talk to localization leaders again and again, I hear them with the amount of responsibility on their shoulders, they talk about the fact that their work touches every single part of the customer journey from acquisition to conversion to onboarding, retention, and expansion.
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00:01:09.120So they're effectively accountable for this global customer experience.
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00:01:14.640But their biggest challenge is that each one of these stages has a different executive owner.
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00:01:31.120So ultimately, it's the head of marketing, head of sales, the head of customer success, head of product, who are chiefly accountable for the budget, for the roadmap, for the resource allocation on each of these parts of the customer journey.
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00:01:33.920And that's attention that I see all the time.
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00:01:47.120So the localization leader is expected to deliver high-quality, excellent experience without actually having influence over the roadmap, the priorities, the resources.
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00:01:59.439And it's something that sounds obvious, but it's so pervasive that a lot of localization leaders get stuck or don't know what to do about this or how to actually map this influence for themselves.
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00:02:07.680So I would think, as a localization person within a company, you probably have people within these different departments that you go to a lot of the time.
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00:02:13.840They're like your friends, you talk to, and I would imagine that would be the easiest place to start.
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00:02:14.960Is that correct?
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00:02:16.000Or how do you see that?
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00:02:19.039How should someone go about with these relationships?
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00:02:30.080Yeah, I think for all of us, if we work cross-functionally, there's a tendency to work with people that you like to work with and you have a good rapport with and you have a good partnership with.
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00:02:31.759It's human nature.
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00:02:49.199However, when you're in a cross-matrix organization and you're relying on people in every single department or function to work with you, and they're relying on you, then there can be a bit of a trap if you default to the teams you work best with.
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00:03:07.919Because the teams that maybe there's more friction or are harder to work with, sometimes they get less attention, or you don't necessarily go above and beyond for those, and that's a difficulty that can be really ongoing because where you have a good relationship, nothing's broken there.
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00:03:24.719But if there's a relationship that is subpar or is highly transactional, well, what that really means is you don't have any presence, and I always encourage people to think about where are the conversations that matter to you but you're not a part of.
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00:03:31.199So think about when a sales leader is talking to a product leader about expanding to a new region.
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00:03:40.000As a localization leader, you really want to be part of that conversation either in the room or indirectly by somebody coming to you talking about that.
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00:03:53.840So it's thinking about where the conversations that matter happen across the organization, and that's a clue to the types of influence and the types of partnerships you really need to work on and improve.
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00:04:00.400So I'd imagine this idea of trying to map all of this can get very complex.
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00:04:07.039And I know we just have a very short episode here as well, but how would you go about diagnosing this?
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00:04:11.280And is there a way we can see kind of your whole method of how you would recommend this?
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00:04:24.639There's a fairly simple approach I've used with Teams before, and I prefer simple approaches because you can do it in an afternoon, and it gives you enough information to get started, and then you can always dive deeper and focus on it later.
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00:04:33.680And if you can't do something in an hour and a half on a whiteboard, then you're probably not going to find a day or a week to go deeper into it.
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00:04:38.079So the type of approach I've done is an influence map exercise.
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00:04:43.759Effectively, it's where you literally draw out your partnerships across the organization.
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00:04:50.720So you might draw all the typical functions and then you identify which of these are my strongest partnerships today.
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00:05:02.160So a localization leader might say I'm very strong with the marketing team, I'm pretty strong with the support team, but not so much with engineering, not so much with sales perhaps, and a couple of others.
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00:05:14.959And by mapping them out, colour coding them, putting some different labels on them to figure out where are we strong, where are we not so strong, and where are we maybe underinvested, but we have higher potential.
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00:05:28.000And these are the really interesting ones where there might be room to do more, to have a bigger impact in your organization, but you've been shying away from that, or it hasn't dawned on you because maybe they didn't come and ask you for help.
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00:05:37.120So it's certainly possible to do this simple mapping that gives you a picture of your organization and where you sit in it, where your partners sit in it.
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00:05:44.319I think it's a really nice exercise to do with your team, and then even to bring to your partners to say, This is how we see you.
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00:05:48.720We've got a dependency on you, but we only exchange emails once a month.
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00:05:51.360We really need to work closer together here.
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00:05:53.040What can we do about that?
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00:06:05.040And the first step is awareness, it's figuring out what the map looks like, and then the second step is deciding what do we want to change, how do we invest differently in the way we spend our time.
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00:06:13.759I know that you and Antoine Ray are having a webinar series to go over and talk about this idea of doing that mapping in person.
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00:06:18.000Is that a good place for people to start on getting introduced to this?
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00:06:20.079Yes, we would love people to come to that.
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00:06:47.040So Antoine and I we chat a lot about these types of topics, and we felt there was a need to bring these highly practical topics to a new forum where we could talk through what is actually happening in organizations today, how localization is evolving, and how a localization leader needs to step up and be more strategic and be bolder than ever before with all of the changes that are happening.
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00:07:05.519So we're starting a new series, The Bold Localization Leader, starts on September 9th, and our first conversation is going to be based on this stakeholder mapping exercise that we're talking about today and why it matters, how you can map your influence and what you can do about that to be more impactful in your organization.
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00:07:06.160Awesome.
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00:07:08.720I'll have the link to register that in this episode.
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00:07:15.519So if you're watching, feel free to take a look at that in the description. https://info.argosmultilingual.com/the-bold-localization-leader Okay, is there anything else on this topic?
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00:07:21.600It is the short snippet preview that you want to introduce today that anyone should be looking out for.
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00:07:38.720No, my my last word would be when people talk about strategic work, talk about influence mapping and stakeholder excellence, these are long-standing topics and they can feel maybe like heavy work, or they can feel like I've never had time for that.
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00:07:44.879And I would just like to reassure people, you can absolutely make small changes that can have a big effect.
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00:07:55.360So it's absolutely worth investing one or two hours on starting to map your influence because I've seen huge results when I've worked with teams on this.
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00:08:00.079Whether people tried this before, it's absolutely worth investing their time in again.
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00:08:02.160Okay, thank you so much, Kevin.
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00:08:03.759Thanks, Stephanie.
