Leaders Letter 182 - The 5 Recommended Roles For 2024
How To Recruit Roles For The Future & For "The Year Of Performance"
Dear leaders, each year I make recommendations for the roles you will want to hire for the next 12 to 24 months. These are to help leaders think differently or zoom out and consider the broader landscape to improve performance.
2023 has been known as the ‘year of efficiency’ from large businesses and the VC and PE worlds, and I predict 2024 is going to be seen as the ‘year of performance’.
Therefore a performance theme is running through this year's predictions.
I have broken the ‘what’ of the role and the ‘why’ of the role with some commentary to give you a little more context for success.
The Recommended Roles For Success In 2024
The AI Compliance Officer (Internal)
What? A dedicated compliance officer concentrates on AI's good and bad uses within and around your company.
Why? To help steer your business from what is safe and productive and be proactive in reducing risks and bad use cases of AI and LLMs.
What to be aware of is the rush that many companies had to create their own AI feature, there is likely already damage been done and the busy CPO or CTO may night have protected the business as much as an AI compliance would. Like with many tools like Dropbox, Slack team members are already installing and bringing in the tools to their work and their teams, meaning they are using and sharing data with different AI tools without much protection.
The Project Manager (Internal)
What? The modern twist on the unfashionable role, the classic project lead who takes important projects and drives towards set deadlines
Why? Almost every business is slowing in the delivery of important work (especially larger projects) and it is hindering how a company performs. This role will be responsible for alignment, moving from stagnated or roadblock to nearer completion. Project Managers have the autonomy from leadership to push and push harder where many Product & Delivery Managers don’t.
Having been a Project Manager and a Product lead you have very different roles and Product is often a fully political role, whereas a Project Manager can use brute secondary executive force to make changes. A great Project Manager will ensure great retrospectives are made and ensure the right performance impact is made alongside any cultural bridges they may have burnt.
The Distribution Specialist (Internal)
What? A dedicated person who specialises in positively obsessing about getting your company, your people and your products in front of right eyeballs.
Why? Many companies have Social Media, they have CRM (email marketing), PR and Performance Marketers but this isn’t gaining the cut-through that is required to gain more exposure to the most important updates from your business. This is an incredibly small pool to hire from however it is critical in the nosiest content market (feeds have been flooded with quantity of content not a quality of content and relationships with key distribution centres and people will be critical for all non-huge companies)
Most businesses struggle to hire a Marketing or Growth specialist who concentrates on Retention or modern-day Distribution, these roles are going to be critical for many companies to gain any traction and make sure their latest update or product feature or pricing change cuts through.
The Performance Coach (Internal/External)
What? The coach can be internal or external (could be seen as a similar person to the character Wendy Rhodes in Billions). The coach will help to improve “hard” and “soft skills” and bring in other coaches (and mentors where applicable)
Why? Traditional exec coaches have created the same training materials for over a decade and the next gen of leaders needs more coaching, and more skills (particularly more EQ and workIQ alongside PQ political intelligence), while these exec trainers have strong materials they haven’t adapted and often does not consider the person receiving the coaching and won’t tailor to them and their profile.
One important note, in the world of work we operate in today, there is a role for the “software coach”, a dedicated person helping all staff members to get the most out of the 40-50 different pieces of software we use daily to weekly (see a new person using Notion, or trying to work out Microsoft’s (version of Notion) Loop or a person switch from Slack to MS Teams) and you will see no-one is set up to be successful using the tool or software.
The Corporate Creator (Internal)
What? A dedicated employee who acts as the revised company representative, who creates compelling, informative and educational content about and around the company.
Why? The CEO has had to take on this mantel in recent years, many companies have pushed content to be shared and amplified across social media channels, specifically LinkedIn, re-shares, reposts and re-quotes have been down-weighted in their algorithms. The role of the spokesperson has also lost its shine with these roles being seen through and not being invited onto podcasts, news interviews and non-corporate press moments.
The corporate creator has unofficially existed for a few years, the creators have often been brand policed versus being embraced and coached into what the brand would like to see alongside their organic content creation or curation. Be wary of your company not embracing these types of creators or collaborating with your employees in this way.
There will be a demand for more content to be created, what you will need to ask as a business (and with the distribution specialist) is how can we increase the quality, increase reach and impact of your content versus creating huge quantities of content and spraying and praying.
This week’s focus action is to consider how you would hire or incorporate these roles into your business without overloading the existing team(s).
Thanks and have a great week ahead,
Danny Denhard
PS Are You Annual Planning? If yes and planning for 2024 and you need templates to help you, here are 2x free annual templates to help you: