Get Fractional
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I would like to redefine the framing of fractional leadership from what most see as an affordability strategy employed by startups to help them grow, to the idea that fractional leadership can, and should, be about helping others build better businesses while elevating one’s own professional growth.
Hiring Fractional CMOs and other leadership positions to help build a startup is common practice when budgets are tight and getting to market is the priority. Before and after the financial crisis of 2008 through to the present, fractional leadership roles gained more ground as economic uncertainty fueled how businesses navigated building, growing or merely maintaining course. The pandemic and the rise of the gig economy has shifted working methods further toward a normalization of contract labor, part time roles across all tiers, and side hustles.
When it comes to getting the most out of someone’s expertise, the equation is always how much quality and value you can attain over time. The maximum value is really dependent on the effort of the individual with the expertise you need and how much attention and dedication they have toward their role. For businesses, fractional roles are only useful if the people in those roles are really good at what they do and work hard for you during the time they focus on your business.
Who is in a fractional role and ensuring they have the expertise, background, and commitment to bring the most value is key. Many people ask themselves why would any leader that is killer at what they do spend any available time this way? This is a great question.
Part of the answer is that almost everything ever written that is critical of the structure of modern business and knowledge work agrees that people are only genuinely productive a few hours of the day and that our jobs can not satisfy all of the things you might want to do professionally. This is not hyperbole. This is a fact.
In my experience, if you are deeply interested in creative entrepreneurship and driven to build and maintain a broader professional skillset, you naturally seek out new challenges. What I find compelling about taking on a fractional leadership mindset is that it is a way of putting yourself in a place of voluntary challenge to stimulate personal growth, similar to how a muscle under load becomes strengthened.
Hobbies and side hustles are valuable and rewarding, but by their nature they are perceived and executed in a discretionary manner. They are never the center of what you are doing. That book we have been meaning to write, that pile of outdoor gear in the corner, and our half completed projects in the shed are a testament to this optionality.
Similarly, our leadership activities such as meetups, webinars, lectures, and groups, just skim the surface of what is happening in business and are not the forum for deep labor or learning. They are a dinner party that lets you glean Wikipedia level insight, not a job site for hard work.
What if you turned any of your well intentioned hobbies into a job, gave yourself a paycheck, and had a boss that could fire you? My guess is you would focus on it more and would take it a bit more seriously. Taking on a factional leadership mindset is similar to this forcing function that makes a “maybe” activity a “must” exercise.
For those that are already busy, one of the main criticisms of factional leadership roles is that people feel that they don’t have the time. But I believe that this is untrue and is purely a state of mind. Optionality, in whatever you take on in life, is a decision you make personally. I’m sure we have seen folks rally with intense speed and focus to secure a project they really wanted and have seen an equal level of effort made to dissuade people from committing to a less interesting one. We are often picky and selfish and avoid hard things preferring known patterns and outcomes.
We can all agree that a great deal of our individual time can be spent in ways that eat away at our value. Faux busyness. Self validation on social media. Doom scrolling. If our work life is only partially fulfilling professionally and our free time is dedicated to trying to fill that void by investing in some kind of self satisfying distraction, then what is the long term outcome of this attack and retreat cycle?
Surely we all need a break and some level of work life balance. Meditation. A nice walk. These are things that can bring us a degree of realignment amid the chaos of life. As you grow older and see folks grow into leadership roles with some degree of discretionary income, we see the stereotypical stories; spending more time on the golf course or buying an expensive purchase to announce that you have made it. The vernacular of leadership excess is tiresome and in this political and socioeconomic day and age it’s a bad look.
We are in a moment of radical and tectonic change. The world is shifting and polarizing. For those with valuable skills and insights developed over years of professional practice, we owe it to ourselves and to each other to leverage our expertise to help move our world toward a better tomorrow.
I was brought in recently to be part of a team of leaders in the marketing and impact space. Each person has had a successful career and has made many relationships over the years and are folks that have professionally made it so to speak. But each one wants to give something more and build something they can be proud of.
In our group we talk a great deal about who we know and what we could do. There is a natural impulse to jump in and get going. To do a project and figure it out as we go along. My role is to help architect a way of working that is transparent and equitable. I take this fractional responsibility seriously because I know how we orchestrate the group will define who does what and how each is both given responsibility and compensated. There is no optionality if you want to succeed and operate at a level of professionalism that the work and the team deserves. You have to be totally pro.
I would argue that riding out our current moment on a wave of escape, consumption, distraction, or a lack of ambition are not what we need right now. We need to build a new future and we need to help one another to do this. This requires professional generosity. For me, Getting Fractional is really just a personal commitment to professionally honing any discipline that you are skilled in and having a willingness to spend part of your time more rigorously building, growing, and helping others professionally. Professional curiosity, fascination, and altruism, in my view, can be a more satisfying endeavor than any side hustle or hobby. Helping build businesses that bring value to our society is its own kind of positive disruption in the distraction-prone world we live in.
For me, it’s not about the posture of leadership but rather the substance of it. Let’s level up and help others architect the future for how modern work works. Get Fractional!
From Across my desk. Factional edition.
In casual conversation my wife refers to ChatGPT as a person named “Chatty.” Similar to Kathy. I will do the same here. I was talking to Chatty and asked them to find some of the best articles that align with the ideas above. Here are a few that resonated with me.
The Atlantic. Workism Is Making Americans Miserable
World Economic Forum. This counterintuitive idea could make you better at your job
Keron Ferry. A Half Day of Focus
SOCAP. The Average Worker Is Only Productive for About 3 Hours a Day
HBR. How to make fractional leadership work
Noam Chomsky - Controlling Your Own Work
Longer read. Less Design Leadership, More Design Authorship
Shameless self promotion
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