#57 Could your skip-level say what you own?
Through my clients, I'm hearing whispers. A team here, a few folks there, quietly gone. Nothing big enough to make the news, just a creeping fog that makes it hard to know what's coming.
You can't control where cuts land. But there's one thing that puts you on the front foot whichever way this goes: the people above you knowing exactly what you own.
And you own a lot. A launch in four countries. A programme across nine teams with authority over none of them. The escalation nobody else wanted to touch. Most of the people I work with carry a list like that, and it's seriously impressive.
What's usually missing is the one sentence that ties it together. Work at that scale gets described in pieces, because pieces are what show up in the weekly update. The thread connecting them lives in your head.
One of my clients spent years making sure third-party sellers were plugged into the marketing calendar, the ad placements, every part of Amazon that gets a product in front of customers. Ask what the job was and you'd get a full list of activities - Prime Day participation, hero placements paid for, and so on. The sentence underneath it: they owned whether every seller got the full weight of Amazon behind their products. Same job, same person. The second version is the one a skip-level can repeat in a room you're not in.
That sentence is how you get described well when you're not there to do it yourself.
It matters more at Amazon and Microsoft than most places, because your manager tends to change more often than your work does. Each new leader starts from whatever they've seen of you lately. Hand them the sentence, and you decide how that starts.
One thing to try this week: finish the sentence "I'm accountable for ___."
A business problem, not a project. Then put it at the top of your next update, or say it out loud in your next skip-level. It makes you easier to keep and easier to promote. And if you ever decide it's time to go, you've already written the first line of your story.
That sentence is question one of my Senior-to-Director Positioning Diagnostic. The other eleven show you where the rest of your story sits. It's free and takes about 15 minutes: check it out here.