How well should I know the business?

Where did January go?

As much as I wanted the month to go slow and savour every moment, the pace threw me off balance; but before we talk about my challenge for February, stopping by really quick to answer a question I’ve been asked a fair bit recently.

When it comes to our profession, the one career advice I have heard more often than any other is ‘know the business’. I heard it when I first started my career, I hear it today and I am guilty of repeating it through the many conversations I’ve had with peers. In fact, I spent so much of my early career feeling guilty about not knowing the business well enough that it led me to obsessing over details that in hindsight, I could have functioned without.

Before you launch into defending the advice, hear me out. I am a big believer in knowing the business but it is time to acknowledge that the advice is incomplete. The part we often ignore answering is – just how well do we need to know the business? Should I be listening to customer calls (yes) and proposing product/service solutions (not really core job description)? Should I know the finances associated (maybe)?

Just how much is enough?

A few years ago, I transitioned from supporting a business where I was an end user/customer to supporting a business where I wasn’t. This meant sitting in a room with a nebulous idea of what the teams were creating, being unable to use their creation and ultimately, it drove me nuts!! I enrolled myself into a course on cloud computing for dummies and neglected a little of my core job in my pursuit of understanding what the teams did. It wasn’t until my manager sat me down that I realized that I hadn’t been hired into the role for my business acumen.

The fact of the matter is that we aren’t the best person for the job because we are the business expert but because we are the people expert at the table. I was (likely) never going to understand the business better than the leaders at the table. They weren’t coming to me because I knew what they were creating inside out but for my expertise with all things related to workforce strategy, people and the like.

The true value of the advice lies in knowing enough and knowing what enough is. It also lies in understanding that business acumen builds with time and isn’t something we must rush into. For marketeers and human resource professionals, the advantage comes from the same set of expertise – knowing people well.

This really hit home when I recently heard Bozoma Saint John’s, one of the greatest marketers of all times, interview with Steven Bartlett in the diary of a CEO. When asked how to be a great marketer, Bozoma says – ‘stay curious about people, ask a lot of questions because you can’t rely on what you know and your experiences alone. If you aren’t curious about people, you are really going to suck at the job.’

As important as it is to know what the teams you work with create and its impact on customers, it is equally important to remember that your true competitive advantage lies in being curious about why people turn up to work every day, what drives them to perform and how do we sell – be it a product, service or a vision.  So the next time you hear someone pass on the advice of knowing the business, I challenge you to ask them – ‘how well’.