A Seat at the Table: The Specialist's Dilemma - Learning Guild

Variousprofessional specialists – for example, trainers; e-Learningdesigners, developers and producers; HR staff (specialists andgeneralists); Organization Development (OD) consultants, and ITstaff, to name a few – can from time to time be heard lamenting thefact that they don’t have “a seat at the table.” Thateuphemism refers to their wanting an increased say, or level ofparticipation, in important business decisions.

James E. Lukaszewski, a leadingpublic relations practitioner, says he spends a fair amount of timetalking with and counseling CEOs and he finds their perspectives onpeople getting to the table quite interesting. CEOs ask, “How do Imanage all these people who constantly yak at me, who know virtuallynothing about the business or what I care about, but want to tell mehow to run the business? They all clamor for a seat at the table,which is already overcrowded with folks who don’t know how to helpme. Spare me these amateurs. Who are these people anyway?”

How to get a seat at the table

If you’reone of those folks clamoring for a seat at the table, listen up;here’s how to get one.

First,ask yourself questions like these:

What would I do if I had a seat?
What value would my presence add?
What are my unique contributions?
How would I have to behave differently?

If youdon’t have good answers to those questions then you probably don’tbelong at the table – at least, not just yet.

Next, takestock of your grasp of your organization’s purpose, mission,operations, history, structure, strengths, personnel, politics,finances, the opportunities and threats it faces, its competitors andtheir relative advantages or disadvantages, its customers andmarkets, its key suppliers and critical inputs, its stated andmanifest strategies, its reputation, any governmental and regulatoryconsiderations, the executive cadre (including their history andrelationships inside and outside your organization), and anythingelse you can think of that I haven’t included in this list. If youdon’t have a good grasp of all or most of those matters, then youprobably don’t belong at the table – at least, not just yet.

Then takestock of the table itself,and what goes on there. Who sits there now?What are they like? How did they get there? What do they do there?How do things work there? What games do they play and how are theyplayed? If you don’t know, then you probably don’t belong there –at least, not just yet.

But – do you really want a seat at the table?

Butmaybe you don’t really want a seat at the table. Consider thislittle story.

Onceupon a time there was a trainer named I.M. Smart. He was very, verygood. Trainees loved it when they drew Smart as a trainer, andSmart’s knowledge of business, organizations, systems, processes,marketing, IT, and finance impressed managers and execs. Smart wasalso known for seeing past the presenting training issues andidentifying underlying performance issues. Furthermore, Smart wasable to get others to see these same issues. Better yet, he couldthen find ways of addressing these issues, or of getting others to doso. In short, Smart was pretty good at improving the performance ofpeople, processes, systems, and organizational units.

Overtime, Smart drifted (or was drawn) away from training. Managers andexecs were desirous of making use of Smart’s abilities in areas thatdidn’t comfortably wear the label of “training,” but theywere not comfortable making use of a person in that role who wore thelabel “trainer.” More and more of Smart’s work had to do withperformance improvement and general management consulting and lessand less of it had to do with training. Smart noticed that someformer peers, once trainers themselves, had also moved away fromtraining. They, too, were in demand on matters that managers andexecs deemed too important or too challenging for “trainers” totackle. Smart, however, always remained interested in training andmaintained a relationship with the training community. After all,such were the origins of Smart’s own career, and he was mindful ofwhat some might term his “humble” origins.

Smart’sefforts to get trainers to understand the limitations of the label“trainer” fell short. He couldn’t get trainers to see that evenif they were competent in areas beyond training, and even if theysucceeded in demonstrating this competency, managers’ and executives’perceptions of “training” and “trainers” were notlikely to change. Instead, assuming competency in these other areascould be demonstrated, managers and executives were more likely tomove such a “trainer” out of a training role and into onewhere the managers and executives could feel comfortable putting thatexpertise to work – without having to scratch their heads andwonder how it was that a “trainer” was able to work suchmagic. As Smart was once asked, “Why do you go around pretending tobe a trainer?”

The specialist’s dilemma

And so Smartpondered the pointy horns of “the specialist’s dilemma:”

On the one horn, if you’re a “specialist” and you want a seat at the table, you’d better be able to go beyond matters that relate to your specialty only.
On the other horn, if you’re able to go beyond your specialty, chances are you won’t be in that specialty for long.

So askyourself if you really want to sit there. If you do, you’d better doyour homework and prepare yourself. If you do that, and do it well,you’ll wind up at the table. If you don’t, you won’t, and it will bebusiness as usual – at least for now.