The secret to executive enagagement in records

The secret is simple.

Executives have the organisation going in a specific direction, and they're really interested in making it go faster in the same direction.

To engage with executives, you just need to have a reputation for being someone who can make the organisation go faster - in the same direction.

Generally, this means that you need to have actually done it for significant parts of the organisation so that middle managers are singing your praises and bringing you in to solve problems that they have.

When they do this, they're saying "we believe that you can solve problems for us, and we trust you enough to let you change the business unit whose performance we are responsible for, managed on and will ultimately get fired over if we screw it up."

If this isn't happening, your chance of getting executive engagement is slim to none.

The problem for records, is that the way it's practiced in lots of organisations actually creates a lot of problems for people.

There's no magic words you can say to an executive that are going to mean anything, if you don't have a reputation for delivering value and solving problems.

If you can't get people to engage, it's the organisations way of saying "we don't value what you do."

That's a really bitter pill to swallow, and leaves you with really only two choices -

1. Continue doing what you've been doing.

2. Change what you've been doing.

The path to making records executive worthy is a simple one.

Find a thing that you can do that someone values, and use the reputational value of that to do it for someone else.

Then repeat, over and over, until your reputation has spread and people will allow you to tackle bigger problems.

Eventually, you'll have a problem big enough that you'll need an executive to support it.

If you've done the reputation work well enough, and built a big enough virtuous cycle - you won't have to try any tricks to get the executive to engage with you, they'll open the door.

Because they know that they can trust you to make the organisation go faster in a direction that they want.