Up Your Game to Influence Senior Leaders with Ethan Evans & Sue Bethanis
Executive presence and balancing gravitas with grace
Welcome to this week’s free article of Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans. If you’d like to become a paid member, see the benefits here, and feel free to use this expense template to ask your manager.
Omar Halabieh (Amazon Tech Director) and Jason Yoong (my Operating Partner) on Friday, September 27 will have a fireside chat on “Leading a High-Performing Org & Cross-Functional Acumen” covering tactical tips to measure performance, implementation, altitude shift, and scale. Omar will also share how he quickly grew his career while becoming a LinkedIn Top Voice.
If you lead big teams (or want to), this talk is for you.
Live attendance is exclusive to newsletter paid subscribers.
At Amazon, I had to quickly win over an upset senior leader when my job was on the line.
After a launch failure at Amazon (read the story here), I found myself in a room with the CEO of the Retail business, Jeff Wilke, where he was evaluating whether or not to replace me in the role.
Some will say wow, you were about to be punished for a mistake.
Well, when you accept an executive role, you accept that the stakes are high and that sometimes the damage you can do while you are "learning" is too expensive and dangerous for the company to accept.
If you are unwilling to live on the edge where one mistake can be too many, probably big leadership roles are not for you.
With Wilke, the key was to be both direct and transparent.
To show that I owned the failure and my role in it (that I was not blaming anyone else) and that I had a clear plan to avoid repeating the failure.
For Jeff, what also turned out to matter was that my mistake had been caused by bad judgment rather than ignorance.
I pushed an under-tested product live to hit a marketing date.
Bad judgment.
I knew the risk I was taking, gambled, and lost.
Interestingly, Jeff found this more acceptable than if I had been blind to the risk I was taking. That is, if I had not realized that the product was under-tested. He told me to my face that if I had not known the risk, he would now be discussing my departure.
I assume he believed that he could instruct me on how to manage risk in the future, but he could not take the time or the risk if I lacked the basic skills.
Anyway, I kept my job and was ultimately promoted to a larger role.
Watch my Maven Lighting Lesson with Sue Bethanis on how to influence senior leaders by developing your executive presence, what it means to balance gravitas + grace, and hear our answers to the top-voted live audience questions.
Cracking the C-suite 'How to Get and Master Key Executive Roles'
If you’re already in executive roles (e.g. Director, Sr. Director, VP) and want to optimize performance or move up further, join my course, Cracking the C-suite 'How to Get and Master Key Executive Roles' which I co-teach with Sue Bethanis (Executive Coach & CEO/Founder of Mariposa Leadership) who has coached 400+ tech executives and was my best coach when I was an Amazon VP.
Top executive (CXO) roles are more than managing larger teams or bigger budgets; it’s about being able to do what the company needs for success. The mindset shift is crucial. We go in-depth into the 4 skills to develop for top performance in CXO roles: Strategic Influence, Scale Culture, Develop Talent, and Executive Presence.
This class was designed to combine Sue’s years of coaching expertise with my live experience as an executive to give you actionable models backed up by real-world insight.
The next live cohort is October 5-6 and will be capped at 50 executives.
If the live dates do not work for you, we offer a video-on-demand version which you can check out here.
Connect With Ethan & Jason
Ethan’s live online courses and on-demand courses.
Level Up is your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans.