Field Notes: Mapping Your Influence Across the Organization

Localization leaders sit in an unusual position: their work touches the entire customer journey, from acquisition and conversion to onboarding, retention, and expansion, which makes them effectively accountable for the global customer experience. Yet accountability and authority rarely line up. Each stage of that journey has a different executive owner: the head of marketing, the head of sales, the head of customer success, the head of product. Those owners control the budget, the roadmap, and the resource allocation, while the localization leader is expected to deliver a high-quality experience across all of it without real influence over any single part.

Kevin O’Donnell, founder of Global10x, calls this the central tension of the role, and it is pervasive enough that many leaders get stuck without a way to even name it, let alone fix it. The instinct is to lean on the relationships that already work, the colleagues you like and the teams you have rapport with. But in a cross-functional, matrixed organization that instinct is a trap: the partnerships that feel harder or more transactional are often exactly the ones where you have no presence, and no presence means you are absent from the conversations that decide your outcomes. The more useful question, O’Donnell argues, is where the conversations that matter to you are happening without you. When a sales leader and a product leader discuss entering a new region, are you in that room, either directly or through someone who brings it to you?

His remedy is deliberately lightweight: an influence-mapping exercise you can run in an afternoon. Draw out your partnerships across every function, then color-code them, marking where you are strong, where you are weak, and, most interestingly, where you are underinvested but the potential is high. Those underinvested-but-high-potential relationships are usually where the room to grow your impact hides. The point is not a perfect diagram; it is awareness first, then a deliberate decision about what to change and how to spend your time differently. If it cannot be done in ninety minutes on a whiteboard, he notes, you will never find a week for it, and small, deliberate shifts in where you invest your attention tend to produce outsized results.

Key Insights

• Accountability without authority is built into the role. A localization leader’s work spans the entire customer journey, but each stage, acquisition, conversion, onboarding, retention, and expansion, answers to a different executive who owns its budget and roadmap. Being responsible for a global experience you do not control is the structural tension at the heart of the job.
• Do not let rapport decide where your influence goes. It is human to invest in the partnerships that already feel good, but the relationships that are transactional or full of friction are usually where you have the least presence, and presence is what gets you into the decisions that shape your work.
• Follow the conversations that matter, not the org chart. The signal for where to build influence is wherever consequential decisions get made without you in the room, a sales and product discussion about a new region, for example. Map your work to those conversations rather than only to your existing contacts.
• An afternoon of influence mapping beats a strategy you never start. Draw your partnerships, color-code them by strength, and flag the ones that are underinvested but high-potential. Awareness comes first, then a deliberate choice about what to change. A simple ninety-minute exercise you actually finish creates more impact than an ambitious one you keep postponing.

More “Field Notes” Episodes

Explore more topics in our Field Notes series, where we break down complex localization concepts, ideas, and experiments for industry professionals. Check out our other discussions here.

Field Notes – Episode 16: Mapping Your Influence Across the Organization

Below is an automated transcript of this episode

Stephanie Harris-Yee: Hello, this is Stephanie Harris-Yee, and here for another episode of Field Notes. And today I have Kevin O’Donnell, who’s the founder of Global10x, who’s going to be talking to us about this idea of localization teams, which have this massive scope of things that they’re doing, but their influence is a little bit limited depending on departments, et cetera.

So he’s going to be giving us a better idea of this landscape, and then also some ideas of what he’s seen work in order to get around that limited influence roadblock that a lot of localization leaders have. So Kevin, how would you lay this out?

Kevin O’Donnell: Yeah. Hey, Stephanie, great to chat with you today. It’s such a common issue. So when I talk to localization leaders, again and again I hear them, with the amount of responsibility on their shoulders, talk about the fact that their work touches every single part of the customer journey, from acquisition to conversion to onboarding, retention, and expansion. So they’re effectively accountable for this global customer experience. But their biggest challenge is that each one of these stages has a different executive owner. So ultimately it’s the head of marketing, head of sales, head of customer success, head of product, who are chiefly accountable for the budget, for the roadmap, for the resource allocation on each of these parts of the customer journey.

And that’s a tension that I see all the time. So the localization leader is expected to deliver high quality, an excellent experience, without actually having influence over the roadmap, the priorities, the resources. It’s something that sounds obvious, but it’s so pervasive that a lot of localization leaders get stuck or don’t know what to do about this, or how to actually map this influence for themselves.

Stephanie Harris-Yee: So I would think that as a localization person within a company, you probably have people within these different departments that you go to a lot of the time. They’re like your friends, you talk to them. And I would imagine that would be the easiest place to start. Is that correct? Or how do you see that? How should someone go about with these relationships?

Kevin O’Donnell: Yeah, I think for all of us, if we work cross-functionally, there’s a tendency to work with people that you like to work with, and you have a good rapport with, and you have a good partnership with. Human nature. However, when you’re in a cross-matrix organization and you’re relying on people in every single department or function to work with you, and they’re relying on you, then there can be a bit of a trap if you default to the teams you work best with. Because the teams where maybe there’s more friction, or that are harder to work with, sometimes they get less attention, or you don’t necessarily go above and beyond for those. That’s a difficulty that can be really ongoing. Because where you have a good relationship, nothing’s broken there, but if there’s a relationship that is subpar or is highly transactional, what that really means is you don’t have any presence.

And I always encourage people to think about where are the conversations that matter to you but you’re not a part of? So think about when a sales leader is talking to a product leader about expanding to a new region. As a localization leader, you really want to be part of that conversation, either in the room or indirectly by somebody coming to you talking about that. So it’s thinking about where the conversations that matter happen across the organization. That’s a clue to the types of influence and the types of partnerships you really need to work on and improve.

Stephanie Harris-Yee: So I’d imagine this idea of trying to map all of this can get very complex, and I know we just have a very short episode here as well. But how would you go about diagnosing this, and is there a way we can see kind of your whole method of how you would recommend this?

Kevin O’Donnell: There’s a fairly simple approach I’ve used with teams before, and I prefer simple approaches because you can do it in an afternoon, and it gives you enough information to get started, and then you can always dive deeper and focus on it later. If you can’t do something in an hour and a half on a whiteboard, then you’re probably not gonna find a day or a week to go deeper into it.

So the type of approach I’ve done is an influence map exercise. Effectively, it’s where you literally draw out your partnerships across the organization. So you might draw all the typical functions, and then you identify which of these are my strongest partnerships today. So a localization leader might say, I’m very strong with the marketing team, I’m pretty strong with the support team, but not so much with engineering, not so much with sales perhaps, and a couple of others. By mapping them out, color-coding them, putting some different labels on them to figure out where are we strong, where are we not so strong, and where are we maybe underinvested but we have higher potential. And these are the really interesting ones, where there might be room to do more, to have a bigger impact in your organization, but you’ve been shying away from that, or it hasn’t dawned on you because maybe they didn’t come and ask you for help.

So it’s certainly possible to do this simple mapping that gives you a picture of your organization and where you sit in it, where your partners sit in it. It’s a really nice exercise to do with your team, and then even to bring to your partners to say, “This is how we see you, we’ve got a dependency on you, but we only exchange emails once a month. We really need to work closer together here. What can we do about that?” The first step is awareness. It’s figuring out what the map looks like, and then the second step is deciding what do we wanna change? How do we invest differently in the way that we spend our time?

Stephanie Harris-Yee: Okay. Is there a place, I know that you and Antoine Rey are having a webinar series to go over and talk about this idea of doing that mapping in person. Is that a good place for people to start on getting introduced to this?

Kevin O’Donnell: Yes, we would love people to come to that. So Antoine and I, we chat a lot about these types of topics, and we felt there was a need to bring these highly practical topics to a new forum where we could talk through what is actually happening in organizations today, how localization is evolving, and how a localization leader needs to step up and be more strategic and be bolder than ever before with all of the changes that are happening.

So we’re starting a new series, The Bold Localization Leader, starting on September 9th, and our first conversation is gonna be based on this stakeholder mapping exercise that we’re talking about today and why it matters, how you can map your influence, and what you can do about that to be more impactful in your organization.

Stephanie Harris-Yee: Awesome. I’ll have the link to register for that in this episode, so if you’re watching, feel free to take a look at that in the description. Okay, is there anything else on this topic, this short snippet preview, that you wanna introduce today that anyone should be looking out for?

Kevin O’Donnell: No, my last word would be, when people talk about strategic work, talk about influence mapping and stakeholder excellence, these are long-standing topics, and they can feel maybe like heavy work, or they can feel like, “I never have time for that.” And I would just like to reassure people, you can absolutely make small changes that can have a big effect. So it’s absolutely worth investing one or two hours on starting to map your influence, because I’ve seen huge results when I’ve worked with teams on this. Whether or not people have tried this before, it’s absolutely worth investing their time in again.

Stephanie Harris-Yee: Okay. Thank you so much, Kevin.

Kevin O’Donnell: Thanks, Stephanie.

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