Tag Archives: careers

Do the Right Thing

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Do the Right Thing

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

100% agreement means there’s less than 100% truth. If, as a senior leader, you know there are differing opinions left unsaid, what would you do? Would you chastise the untruthful who are afraid to speak their minds? Would you simply ignore what you know to be true and play Angry Birds on your phone? Would you make it safe for the fearful to share their truth? Or would you take it on the chin and speak their truth? As a senior leader, I’d do the last one.

Best practice is sometimes a worst practice. If, as a senior leader, you know a more senior leader is putting immense pressure put on the team to follow a best practice, yet the context requires a new practice, what would you do? Would you go along with the ruse and support the worst practice? Would you keep your mouth shut and play tick-tack-toe until the meeting is over? Would you suggest a new practice, help the team implement it, and take the heat from the Status Quo Police? As a senior leader, I’d do the last one.

Truth builds trust. If, as a senior leader, you know the justification for a new project has been doctored, what would you do? Would you go along with the charade because it’s easy? Would call out the duplicity and preserve the trust you’ve earned from the team over the last decade? As a senior leader, I’d do the last one.

The loudest voice isn’t the rightest voice. If, as a senior leader, you know a more senior leader is using their positional power to strong-arm the team into a decision that is not supported by the data, what would you do? Would you go along with it, even though you know it’s wrong? Would you ask a probing question that makes it clear there is some serious steamrolling going on? And if that doesn’t work, would you be more direct and call out the steamrolling for what it is? As a senior leader, I’d do the last two.

What’s best for the company is not always best for your career. When you speak truth to power in the name of doing what’s best for the company, your career may suffer. When you see duplicity and call it by name, the company will be better for it, but your career may not. When you protect people from the steam roller, the team will thank you, but it may cost you a promotion. When you tell the truth, the right work happens and you earn the trust and respect of most everyone. As a senior leader, if your career suffers, so be it.

When you do the right thing, people remember. When, in a trying time, you have someone’s back, they remember. When a team is unduly pressured and you put yourself between them and the pressure, they remember. When you step in front of the steamroller, people remember. And when you silence the loudest voice so the right decision is made, people remember. As a senior leader, I want to be remembered.

How Do You Want to Be Remembered?

  1. Do you want to be remembered as someone who played Angry Birds or advocated for those too afraid to speak their truth?
  2. Do you want to be remembered as someone who doodled on their notepad or spoke truth to power?
  3. Do you want to be remembered as someone who kept their mouth shut or called out the inconvenient truth?
  4. Do you want to be remembered as someone who did all they could to advance their career or someone who earned the trust and respect of those they worked with?

In the four cases above, I choose the latter.

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How Not to Get in Your Own Way

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How Not to Get in Your Own Way

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you could get another good job at the drop of a hat, how would you work differently? Would you speak your mind or bite your tongue?

If you didn’t care about getting a promotion, would you succumb to groupthink or dissent?

If your ego didn’t get in the way, would you stop following the worn-out recipe and make a new one?

If you don’t judge yourself by the number of people who work for you, would your work be better? Would you choose to work on different projects? How do you feel about that?

If you knew your time at the company was finite, how would your contribution change? Who would you stop working with? Who would you start working with? Wouldn’t that feel good?

If you didn’t care about your yearly rating, wouldn’t your rating improve?

If you cared more about helping others, wouldn’t your talents (and the returns) be multiplied?

If your time horizon was doubled, wouldn’t work on projects that are important at the expense of those that are urgent?

If your ego didn’t block you from working on projects that might fail, wouldn’t you work on projects that could obsolete your best work?

If you cared about the long-term success of the company, wouldn’t you work more with young people to get them ready for the next decade?

If you cared solely about doing the right projects in the right way, wouldn’t you help your best team members move to the most important projects, even if that meant they worked for someone else?

If you cared about helping people develop, would you formalize their development areas and help them grow, or take the easy route and let them flounder?

If you didn’t care about getting the credit, how would you and your work be different? Would the company be better for it? How about your happiness?

If you declined every other meeting and just read the meeting minutes, would that be a problem? And even if there are no meeting minutes to read, don’t you think that you’d get along just fine? And don’t you think you’d get more done?

What would you have to change to work more often with young people?

What would you have to change so your best people could be moved to the most important projects?

What would you have to change so you’d dissent when that’s what’s needed?

What would you have to change to develop others, even if it cost you a promotion?

What would you have to change so you could ditch the urgent projects and start the meaningful ones?

What would you have to change so you could spend more time developing young talent?

What would you have to change so you could attend fewer meetings and make more progress?

What would you have to change so you could work on the most outlandish projects?

What’s in the way of looking inside and figuring out how to live differently?

If you were able to change, who would you start work with? Who would you stop working with? Which projects would you start and which would you stop? Which meetings would you skip? Who are the three young people you’d help grow?

If you were able to change, would you be better for it? And how about the people that work with you? And how about your family? And wouldn’t your company be better for it?

So I ask you – What’s in the way? And what are you going to do about it?

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Rise of the Prompt Engineer

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Rise of the Prompt Engineer

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

The world of tech is ever-evolving, and the rise of the prompt engineer is just the latest development. Prompt engineers are software developers who specialize in building natural language processing (NLP) systems, like voice assistants and chatbots, to enable users to interact with computer systems using spoken or written language. This burgeoning field is quickly becoming essential for businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises, to remain competitive.

Five Skills to Look for When Hiring a Prompt Engineer

But with the rapid growth of the prompt engineer field, it can be difficult to hire the right candidate. To ensure you’re getting the best engineer for your project, there are a few key skills you should look for:

1. Technical Knowledge: A competent prompt engineer should have a deep understanding of the underlying technologies used to create NLP systems, such as machine learning, natural language processing, and speech recognition. They should also have experience developing complex algorithms and working with big data.

2. Problem-Solving: Prompt engineering is a highly creative field, so the ideal candidate should have the ability to think outside the box and come up with innovative solutions to problems.

3. Communication: A prompt engineer should be able to effectively communicate their ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences in both written and verbal formats.

4. Flexibility: With the ever-changing landscape of the tech world, prompt engineers should be comfortable working in an environment of constant change and innovation.

5. Time Management: Prompt engineers are often involved in multiple projects at once, so they should be able to manage their own time efficiently.

These are just a few of the skills to look for when hiring a prompt engineer. The right candidate will be able to combine these skills to create effective and user-friendly natural language processing systems that will help your business stay ahead of the competition.

But what if you want or need to build your own artificial intelligence queries without the assistance of a professional prompt engineer?

Four Secrets of Writing a Good AI Prompt

As AI technology continues to advance, it is important to understand how to write a good prompt for AI to ensure that it produces accurate and meaningful results. Here are some of the secrets to writing a good prompt for AI.

1. Start with a clear goal: Before you begin writing a prompt for AI, it is important to have a clear goal in mind. What are you trying to accomplish with the AI? What kind of outcome do you hope to achieve? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you write a prompt that is focused and effective.

2. Keep it simple: AI prompts should be as straightforward and simple as possible. Avoid using jargon or complicated language that could confuse the AI. Also, try to keep the prompt as short as possible so that it is easier for the AI to understand.

3. Be specific: To get the most accurate results from your AI, you should provide a specific prompt that clearly outlines what you are asking. You should also provide any relevant information, such as the data or information that the AI needs to work with.

4. Test your prompt: Before you use your AI prompt in a real-world situation, it is important to test it to make sure that it produces the results that you are expecting. This will help you identify any issues with the prompt or the AI itself and make the necessary adjustments.

By following these tips, you can ensure that your AI prompt is effective and produces the results that you are looking for. Writing a good prompt for AI is a skill that takes practice, but by following these secrets you can improve your results.

So, whether you look to write your own AI prompts or feel the need to hire a professional prompt engineer, now you are equipped to be successful either way!

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Rise of the Evangelist

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Chief Evangelist Braden Kelley

by Braden Kelley

What is an evangelist?

When many people hear this term, their minds used to picture Billy Graham or Pat Robertson, but this is changing. Why?

Our perceptions of evangelists are transforming as the pace of change accelerates to construct a new reality faster than most human brains can process the changes.

This creates a chasm in understanding and change readiness that evangelists can help bridge in a number of different ways.

Let us look at what an evangelist really is…

Oxford Dictionaries say an evangelist is a “zealous advocate of something.”

Nine Innovation Roles EvangelistIn business, the evangelist is a role that any of us can take on (with varying levels of success). Evangelism is very important to innovation success, which is why the evangelist is one of The Nine Innovation Roles™. This is how I define this particular role:

“The Evangelists know how to educate people on what the idea is and help them understand it. Evangelists are great people to help build support for an idea internally, and also to help educate customers on its value.”

Notice at this point we are talking about an evangelist as a role that can be played by one or more people, and not as a job that one or more people hold. Evangelism normally will be a role and not a job, but there are inflection points where this must change.

Outside of an innovation context, evangelism often falls on the shoulders of CEOs, business owners and product managers within organizations. When the need for evangelism is small, this can work. But for most organizations, this is no longer the case.

When should you hire an evangelist?

The time to cross over from evangelism as a role to evangelism as a job is when:

  1. The pace of internal change is accelerating faster than employees can grasp without help
  2. The pace of external change is accelerating faster than customers can understand without help
  3. Your company is facing disruption by new entrants or existing competitors
  4. You’re considering a digital transformation
  5. You’ve already embarked upon a digital transformation
  6. You’re using Agile in product development
  7. Your brand essence is being shifted by you or your customers
  8. You need a more human and personal presence in your marketing efforts to better connect with customers

When one or more of these conditions are true, you’ll find that it isn’t possible for CEOs, business owners and product owners to meet the needs for evangelism in the short spurts of time these people can dedicate to the necessary activities.

As highlighted by Agile Product Development’s presence in the list, organizations leveraging Agile to develop software-based products will find that their product managers are always engaged with the backlog with little time to focus on evangelism. They’re always focused on shipping something.

Some organizations will resist adding evangelists to their team, feeling that such a role is superfluous, but having one or more people focused on evangelism delivers value to the organization by executing a range of incredibly important activities, including:

  • Growing awareness

  • Building a community around the company and/or plugging the company into pre-existing external communities (potentially taking the brand to places it has never been before)

  • Generating interest

  • Working with customers and the marketing team to identify the stories that need to be told and the themes that need to be introduced and/or reinforced

  • Creating desire

  • Building and maintaining conversations with the community that cares about your products/services/brands

  • Engaging in an open and honest dialogue to help gather the voice of the customer

  • Facilitating action

  • Practicing a human-centered design mindset to continuously elicit needs and surface wants and desired outcomes

Depending on the size of the organization you may decide to have a single evangelist, or some larger organizations have more than one type of evangelist, including:

  1. Chief Evangelist
  2. Brand Evangelists
  3. Product Evangelists
  4. Service Evangelists
  5. Innovation Evangelists

This specialization occurs when the evangelism an organization needs become too big for one evangelist to handle. At that point a Chief Evangelist creates the evangelism strategy and manages the execution across the team of brand, product, service and other evangelism focus areas.

So what makes a good evangelist?

Evangelists arrive from a range of different job specialties, but key knowledge, skills and abilities include:

  • Empathetic
  • Passionate About the Company’s Mission, Products/Services, and Customers
  • Comfortable Public Speaker
  • Efficient and Effective Writer
  • Human-Centered Design Mindset
  • Experienced with Social Media, Audio and Video
  • Skilled Content Creator
  • Continuous Learner
  • Self-Directed and Comfortable with Ambiguity

… and ideally your chosen evangelists will already have some presence in the communities important to you, or the knowledge of how to establish a presence in these communities.

Customer buying journeys are notoriously unpredictable, meandering, long and non-linear. Evangelism is a critical part of helping to build relationships with potential buyers and increasing the chances that your brand will be top of mind when a non-buyer finally becomes a potential customer of your products or services.

It’s a long-term non-transactional investment, one that will pay dividends if you see the wisdom in making the expenditure.

Has your organization already invested in evangelists? What learnings would you like to share in the comments?

Are you ready for the evangelists to rise in your organization?

Or do you need help with evangelism? (contact me if you do)

Share the love!

p.s. I wrote a follow-up article for InnovationManagement.se that you might also enjoy — Increase Your Innovation Reputation and Velocity with an Innovation Evangelist


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Innovating the Path for Human Growth

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Career Lattice, Not Ladder

LAST UPDATED: December 10, 2025 at 12:12PM

Innovating the Path for Human Growth - Career Lattice, Not Ladder

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

For over a century, the metaphor guiding professional development has been the career ladder: a single, vertical track where success is measured solely by climbing to the next managerial rung. This linear approach is fundamentally broken for the modern, innovation-driven economy. It forces technical experts into supervisory roles they neither want nor excel at, creates deep talent silos, and ultimately limits an organization’s adaptive capacity. The traditional ladder generates leadership bottlenecks and expertise gaps.

The solution is the Career Lattice. This model replaces simple vertical promotion with a complex, interconnected network of roles that rewards movement across functions, deepening of non-managerial expertise, and mastery of cross-disciplinary skills. This horizontal and diagonal movement is the necessary foundation for building a resilient, innovative, and human-centered workforce. The lattice acknowledges that a lateral move from marketing to product development, or a diagonal shift into a subject matter expert track, is often more valuable to the individual’s growth and the company’s innovation ecosystem than a simple management title. Organizations must unlearn the idea that management is the only path to influence and compensation and embrace the horizontal value of the expert. This is the structural requirement for true Human-Centered Innovation.

Visual representation: A diagram comparing the Career Ladder (a single vertical line with few rungs) to the Career Lattice (a broad, interconnected grid showing horizontal, vertical, and diagonal movement between different functions like Engineering, Marketing, and Strategy).

The Three Core Benefits of the Lattice

Shifting to a lattice model yields three transformative benefits that directly fuel innovation:

1. Deepened T-Shaped Expertise

The lattice explicitly supports the growth of T-Shaped Professionals — individuals who possess deep expertise in one area (the vertical bar of the ‘T’) but also broad, cross-functional knowledge (the horizontal bar). A designer who has spent a year in customer service, or a developer who has shadowed the finance team, gains the empathy and perspective necessary to create truly human-centered solutions. The lattice makes these moves desirable and compensable, creating a workforce rich in interdisciplinary context.

2. Unblocking the Expert Track

The biggest failure of the ladder is forcing valuable experts — brilliant engineers, data scientists, or regulatory specialists — into managing people just to gain a pay raise or seniority. The lattice introduces parallel, high-status, high-compensation Expert Tracks (e.g., Distinguished Engineer, Principal Architect, Master Strategist) that are non-managerial. This allows top talent to focus on complex problem-solving and mentorship without sacrificing their career ambition, keeping critical institutional knowledge and technical leadership focused on innovation, not administration.

3. Fostering Organizational Agility

A workforce with experience across multiple functions is inherently more agile. When teams need to pivot or collaborate on a complex, novel problem (the core of innovation), individuals who have worked in different departments understand the language, incentives, and constraints of their partners. This shared context dramatically reduces friction, misunderstandings, and siloed thinking, accelerating the organization’s responsiveness to market shifts. The lattice acts as an organizational glue.

Designing the Lattice: Essential Structural Elements

Simply drawing a box grid is not enough. A functional Career Lattice requires intentional structural changes:

  • Value Equivalence: Compensation and seniority must be mapped to skill mastery and organizational impact, not reporting lines. A Principal Architect (non-manager) must be demonstrably capable of earning the same as a Director (manager).
  • Internal Mobility as a KPI: The success of managers and HR should be tied to the percentage of employees making meaningful lateral or diagonal moves. Internal mobility must be prioritized over external hiring for specific roles.
  • Rotational Assignments: Formalize temporary, project-based assignments outside a person’s core function. These tours of duty expose employees to new challenges and build lattice connections without permanent job changes.

Case Study 1: Transforming a Technology Team into a Business Partner

Challenge: IT Department Viewed as a Cost Center, Lacking Business Empathy

A large financial services company (“FinNova”) had a technically excellent IT department, but it was siloed. IT projects often failed because the team lacked empathy for the daily struggles and strategic needs of the sales and operations teams. The only promotion path in IT was to become an IT manager, increasing the isolation.

Lattice Intervention: Diagonal and Horizontal Movement

FinNova implemented a Career Lattice focused on building business context. They established a “Business Architect” track — a diagonal move from IT specialist. These non-managerial roles required 18 months of embedded work in a business unit (Sales, Compliance, Operations) followed by a return to IT to lead strategic integration projects.

  • The Business Architect track was compensated equally to the IT Manager track.
  • IT staff were required to complete at least one rotational assignment (e.g., three months in a branch office) before being eligible for the top technical roles.

The Innovation Impact:

The lattice successfully broke the silo. IT projects began incorporating operational realities from the start. The quality of IT strategic advice improved dramatically, and the IT department transitioned from a cost center to a genuine business partner, directly enabling the firm’s transition to a digital-first service model. The lattice created cross-functional translators.

Case Study 2: Retaining Top Talent Through Expertise Recognition

Challenge: Loss of Senior Scientific Researchers to Competitors

A bio-technology startup (“BioLeap”) found that its top PhD-level researchers were leaving for management positions at larger firms after reaching the ceiling of the non-managerial “Senior Scientist” role. The company was hemorrhaging institutional knowledge and technical leadership.

Lattice Intervention: The Expert Track Parallel

BioLeap formally introduced a parallel Expert Track to run alongside the Management Track. They created “Research Fellow” and “Principal Investigator” titles, offering compensation and perks equivalent to Director and VP-level roles, respectively.

  • Research Fellows were given protected time for pure research and mentorship responsibilities but zero direct reports.
  • The promotion criteria for the Expert Track were focused on patent creation, publication of high-impact research, and mentoring junior scientists — not people management.

The Innovation Impact:

By explicitly valuing and rewarding technical mastery over administration, BioLeap immediately stabilized its senior research team retention. The company not only retained its most valuable minds but also leveraged them as internal consultants and mentors, significantly accelerating the development of novel therapies. The lattice allowed their best scientists to continue being scientists, directly contributing to the core mission of disruptive innovation.

Career Lattice Not Ladder Infographic

Conclusion: The Lattice is Human-Centered Strategy

The Career Lattice is more than just an HR policy; it is a fundamental shift in strategy that aligns organizational structure with Human-Centered Innovation. It rewards the natural human desire for continuous learning, diverse experiences, and deep mastery, rather than forcing everyone into the narrow, often ill-fitting, constraints of management. Leaders must champion this shift, not just to retain talent, but to build an enterprise that is inherently more versatile, empathetic, and capable of generating sustained, cross-functional innovation. Stop climbing ladders; start weaving a lattice.

“The depth of your expertise matters as much as the height of your title.” — Braden Kelley

Frequently Asked Questions About the Career Lattice

1. How is a Career Lattice different from a dual-track career system?

A dual-track system (Management vs. Technical) is a component of a lattice. A true Career Lattice is much broader: it allows for horizontal movement between different departments (e.g., Marketing to Finance) and diagonal movement from a technical track into a cross-functional role (e.g., Technical Expert to Project Strategist), rewarding diverse experience, not just vertical or single-track progression.

2. Does the Lattice eliminate the need for traditional managers?

No. The Lattice clarifies and elevates the role of the manager. Instead of being the only path to success, management becomes a distinct specialization focused on people leadership, resource allocation, and strategy execution. It ensures that those who become managers are genuinely skilled in leadership, while experts are free to focus on deep technical or strategic contributions.

3. What is the single biggest barrier to implementing a Career Lattice?

The biggest barrier is cultural—specifically, the ingrained perception that higher management titles automatically equate to higher value and compensation. Successfully implementing a lattice requires leaders to publicly, explicitly, and financially validate the equivalence of the top Expert Track roles with Director or VP-level Management Track roles. Without this cultural shift, employees will still default to chasing the traditional title.

Your first step toward building a Career Lattice: Identify your top five non-managerial experts who are nearing a career ceiling. Create a specific, high-status “Principal” or “Distinguished” title for them and publicly announce their promotion, ensuring the compensation is equal to the next level of management. This sends the clearest signal that expertise is valued horizontally.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

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