Creating Thought Leader Evangelism | Sean Davis

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Using Thought Leadership to Evangelize Your Message and Mission

An interview with Sean Davis about using thought leadership to evangelize, build trust, and create measurable feedback.

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Today’s guest is Sean Davis, Information Security Advisor, DevSecOps at TransUnion, and former Chief Transformation Evangelist at Equifax.

Sean sits down with us to explain the role of an evangelist, the challenges he faces, methods of engaging with clients, and how to build trust.  We discuss how connecting with employees, helping them understand their value to the mission, and vision of the company can increase happiness and uncap potential client satisfaction. Sean provides details on connecting evangelism in the field to leadership and management of a company. Then, defines how the overall vision comes to life once these things are connected.  We finish off with Sean sharing some great tips for anyone entering the role of evangelist for their organization.

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

•  How to evangelize your thought leadership to build trust.
•  How thought leaders can improve employee satisfaction by helping them understand their importance to the overall mission.
• What hardships thought leaders will face when trying to spread the message of the company.

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Are you an evangelist for your organization? Do you need help figuring out how to better communicate and connect with your employees or management?  If you want to transform your organizational thought leadership, reach out to Thought Leadership Leverage.

Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.

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Transcript

Bill Sherman Hello and welcome. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re talking about one of my passions, organizational thought leadership. That is the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organization. My guest today is Sean Davis. Shawn is an expert in business transformation. Most recently, he served as the chief transformation evangelist at Equifax. Today, we’re going to talk about using ideas to transform within your organization as well as client facing. Welcome to the show, Shawn.

Sean Davis Thanks for having me, Bill. It’s great to be here.

Bill Sherman So let me start with a simple question, because some of the guests or some of the audience might not know what’s a chief transformation evangelist? And what do they do?

Sean Davis So I don’t know if there’s an official statement of work or whatever that’s out there. It could be a lot of different things. Some companies call them dev Rel, some companies just call them whatever their titles are, and it’s an auxiliary task within the role. Within Equifax, my job was really to connect with our internal employees, our external customers and consumers and our industry market and talk a little bit about just the great things that Equifax is doing and what they have learned from the experience of post breach and how we’re innovating and how we’re driving through the transformation. So it’s really fascinating to take on a role that had a much broader scope than traditionally because with temporal, you’re really just talking to your customers most of the time in the market, but getting involved with the employees and kind of creating feedback loops around where their concerns are, where their challenges are, and then helping drive innovation programs within the company was a real step up. And it was really interesting to see how that kind of formed as we went along our journey.

Bill Sherman So if I understand correctly, you were standing at an intersection between technology employee and customers. Is that correct?

Sean Davis Yes.

Bill Sherman Yeah. So talk to me about how you reach those target audiences. What were you doing to listen as well as to communicate?

Sean Davis So it was really interesting. I tried to allow a lot of the initiatives that I was running within the organization to drive that communication pattern with our customers. So when you talk about your internal employees, we really looked at how could we empower them? And one of the things that I did was I kind of just went around with, you know, snack trays or whatever because everyone loves to eat. Everyone likes a little snack. Said, Hey, my name is Shawn Davis, the chief transformation evangelist for Equifax. My focus is really on understanding what you do here and the great things that you’re learning so that I can share with others. And that kind of built into the bigger goal of creating this global services catalog, right? Because we were trying to define in this new world what are all the capabilities of the organization and how do we create a catalog that can be consumed by our leadership in order to develop better products for our customers? So by going to each team and kind of wondering where they’re coming from, some of the challenges that they had and helping them define here are the capabilities that we offer and how we do that. It gave me an opportunity to talk to them about how you can better align to the mission and the vision and get them, you know, kind of in that mode of understanding how not only they contribute to their day to day task, but how that value that they’re creating actually props up and helps perpetuate the mission and the vision of the organization to our customers. From a customer perspective, it was really just talking to the customer and giving them confidence and what we were doing in the transformation and answering questions they had because they’re going through their own transformations, right? And they’re understanding like, what are you doing and where have you found success and where have you been challenged? And then really learning from them as much as they’re learning from us and then taking a lot of that, wrapping it up and then telling the story to the external market.

Bill Sherman So I like the phrase that you used in terms of, you know, conversations with snack trays and walking around. Now, when you were going and talking on the client side, were you carrying your snack trays with you or how were you engaging with clients? What sort of modalities were you using there?

Sean Davis So a couple that I like using was, one, I like a conversational tone when you’re talking to your customers. So when we did remote conversations, I like to bring in other people. We have a preliminary conversation that says, you know, Hey, what do you want to know and to what level do you want to understand it so I can grab the right people and involve them in the conversation. So video chat was really, really useful for that because people miss a lot in conversation. If you’re not seeing their face, you’re not seeing the nuances of their body language because there’s a lot hidden behind a blank screen. The second was just getting them out of the office and actually going out, having lunch, having dinner, just talking to them in other informal environments. Maybe it was meeting them at a conference so that we had the time and we were already kind of in that mindset of this is what we’re wanting to learn this week, and this is why it applies to our business and why it’s so important. So that gives you a little more context for the conversation.

Bill Sherman So let’s move a little bit more broadly here in terms of what sort of challenges does a evangelist encounter in sort of this, you know, what are the obstacles you have to overcome?

Sean Davis Man, that’s a huge question. I could talk all day just on that. So from a small perspective, if you’re a niche evangelist, right, so you have a very specific area like death row where you’re really just looking at the customer about the consumption of their application. Some of the challenges you’re going to come across are having a common and mutual understanding of what you want to get out of the conversation, right? What benefit or value are you bringing to the conversation and what is the customer seeking as that footprint expands when you get out to be, you know, kind of working your way up the organization to broader and broader areas? It’s really important to be able to understand how all of the pieces of the organization work together and how you can define measurements for success with that. That’s probably the biggest hit all of evangelism is a lot of people think it’s just about going out, talking to people and telling stories, but it’s really about creating feedback loops within the organization and helping create connective tissue that allows people to understand where these challenges are and where the organizational friction is from internal perspectives, the customer perspectives, even brand recognition in the market.

Bill Sherman So it sounds like you spent a fair amount of your time not only moving vertically through the organization, but laterally as well, and then being a conduit for information going up as well as coming down. So aligning vision with action, would that be a fair summary?

Sean Davis Absolutely. Absolutely.

Bill Sherman So let’s talk a little bit about the intangibles, because you’ve mentioned that these conversations are more than technology, right? You mentioned vision. You’ve mentioned culture. For example. Let’s talk about that connective tissue. You use those words. And I want to dig deeper on that.

Sean Davis Okay. So I think one of the most important things to remember is if you look at what a lot of leadership wants in organizations, I think out of the 35 societies I’ve talked to over the last month, a lot of them want people, technologists that are people, people, you know, somebody who can actually relate and connect with others. And that’s huge, right? Because when you have the technology conversations, we’re all in our, you know, domain of expertise and we can talk tech all day long. But if we’re not connecting in an authentic level with our audience, with the other people that we’re talking with and we’re not building trust as we do that, it’s going to be very difficult to make some really impactful outcomes. Right, Because we’re not here just to output a bunch of lists, right? You sort of put the checks in the box, but we’re trying to drive those outcomes through honest conversation and understanding while building trust with our audiences.

Bill Sherman So. In that trust. And you can’t do that just as a drive by where you parachute in, right? Say a little bit more on how you build trust. So either with the front line or the top levels, give me a story or two.

Sean Davis It’s interesting. A lot of it is really understanding the audience that you have and making time like self-care is so important as an evangelist because you get caught on these will some times where the first year I got into this, I was like, Man, I want to be a speaker. I want to get out there and share all this information that I’ve known and I submitted to I think it was like 75 different places to talk from coat pants to meet up to the conferences. And I ended up getting approved for like 31. Yeah. And I was not prepared for that because it was like, get on a plane. And then as soon as you’re done with your talk, you don’t even get time to enjoy the conference. You just getting on a plane, go do another keynote somewhere else. And it’s like, that’s your life. And you can sometimes get trapped in this circle of, you know, Hey, people are really excited and the feedback’s awesome and they’re really excited by what you’ve said. But if you don’t take the time afterwards to really connect with the audience and talk about their specific challenges that they’re having and saying, hey, you know, how did this apply to you? What did you find that was really valuable in the conversation or in the keynote, or what did you find that you don’t necessarily agree with? Because that’s part of evangelism as well. And it’s really tough sometimes when you talk about trust is coming in and talking to leadership and saying, hey, I’m going to go represent your product, but I’m going to talk about the good and the bad, I’m going to tell you about the things we do. Amazing. But I’m also going to have to tell them about the things that we really lack or that challenge. Dan But with those conversations, we’re going to get some really valuable information about how we can drive more value to our customers, right? Because they’re going to say, well, you know, we would have gone with you, but you don’t have these features. And we’re like, Wow, that’s something I’m hearing all the time. It’s a conversation we need to have in leadership.

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Bill Sherman So. And how does that fit in? Because I think that’s an interesting point, right? Leadership has a vision of where they want the organization to go. But you’ve been out in the field, you’ve been talking to the front lines, you’ve got a pulse. Talk about that intersection between the evangelist and then the strategy and the vision of the organization. Right? Because you’re sitting in a very unique place on that.

Sean Davis Yes, It is a interesting road to navigate. You have to balance your, you know, your personal beliefs and everything, because to be a really great evangelist, you have to believe in the message that you’re sharing with others. You know, I look at it from let’s think of a public company. The mission and vision that they set for the organization is pretty absolute. The big factor with that is the how and the what, right. What are we going to do to be able to deliver on that and how are we going to do it? So when I think about leadership, leadership is really defining that what, you know, what are we going to do in order to deliver on this promise to our mission and vision? And then our individual contributors, The organizations are really defining that house. So there’s a ton of space in there for us to be able to talk and to innovate and to grow and to learn. One of the challenges comes, though, is that different industries are going to require different things for me, right. And using Equifax as an example, or even other fintech firms that I’ve worked for, they’re highly regulated. And no matter how much you want to be honest and transparent about the things that you do, you have to be very careful with the audiences that you have and the things that you say, not because you want to hide the truth or whatever. But we live in such a litigious society that even well-meaning comments, even well-meaning efforts, if they’re not framed properly, for the audience to understand that this is either an aspiration or a reality in the organization, it can get you into a lot of trouble, especially coming from things like post breaches or having security concerns, or the company’s been in the eye of the public because you’re trying to spend that time to authentically build trust with your customers and say, yes, not only have we learned from this experience, but we want to take what we’ve learned, grow from it, and then contribute back out to the industry, our customers and our partners to show them how they can avoid the same mistakes that we’ve made in the past.

Bill Sherman And so finding that line between how do we share what we learned and provide our thought leadership and experience and expertise without opening ourselves up to liability, that has to be a huge sort of challenge right now where you’re talking about privacy, security and really information that members of the general public care deeply about. Right.

Sean Davis About the security. And there’s a lot of coordination with leadership on that, too. Right? Because every level of the organization has something valuable to contribute to our customers, our market and even other employees. Right. Like our leadership is really kind of giving you those broad strokes and telling you about the amazing things that we’re going to do. And Evangelist is really setting in between that very technical depth of conversation and that very high level and operating as a translator. You know, a customer doesn’t talk the same way a developer does and a developer doesn’t talk the same way leadership does and leadership doesn’t talk the same way that an enthusiast might about a specific topic. So knowing how to shift that conversation and translate the details into the audience that you’re talking to is pretty critical.

Bill Sherman Now we’ve gone a little bit more deeply into the evangelist side. I want to dig a little bit into transformation. Right. And so let’s talk about transformation and the relationship between technology and the transformation of the organization and how you achieve that, as well as then bringing the customers along and finding what they need that you have to transform. Right. So give me your perspective, because if you were just out there banging the drum and saying, hey, I got this product and service, that’d be one thing. But I think in your case you were talking transformation. So tell us more about that.

Sean Davis So I think an evangelist role, a transformation is really about creating those feedback loops in the organization and doing it in a way that’s measurable. Right. Yes. That’s criteria that you’re laying out. So, for example, internally for employees, we want to raise employee satisfaction because there’s been a lot of studies that are done that prove that your customer satisfaction is capped by your employee satisfaction. So if we can exactly if we can raise our employee satisfaction, then our customer satisfaction is going to be uncapped and then we can focus on that or it may be actually raised at the same time based on the experience our customers are having because they see how we treat our employees. And that in turn shows how we’re going to treat our customers. A main way that we do that is through driving programs that help create the innovation and give voice to our employees. So an example of that may be an educational ecosystem where people are hungry to learn and there’s a lot of change that’s occurring and they don’t feel equipped to be able to perform at the level of expectation of the business and the timelines they have. It may be just about giving the employees enough time to explore this new world they’re going into to say, Hey, we’ve had ideas. We’re on the ground closest to the problems. Here’s what we see that might make a huge impact. And then creating that feedback loop through other leaders to be able to say, do you see value in this? And it touches a larger audience than the individual contributors may be able to. Another big, important area is focusing on how we deliver that value from the leadership’s message and communication into actual actionable value at the team level. Right. Because the leadership says, Hey, we’re going to transform to create great hotels that guests love or help people live their financial best. But do the engineers understand what they’re doing that’s actually driving their contributions, are driving, delivering that value to the organization, to our customers and to our customers’ customers?

Bill Sherman So you mentioned hotels, the customers that that they love, right? From your perspective as an evangelist, can you give an example or a story there? Because let’s move out of fintech and go into I know you’ve got experience in the hotel industry as well. Can you give me a story or an example there?

Sean Davis Absolutely. So I was a tech advisor for a hotel company a while back, and one of the conversations that we were having was, you know, there’s a lot of change that’s happening, but people don’t really understand how to deliver that value. And you really got to start with that mission and vision. And for this hotel company, it was to create great hotels that guests love. It’s very hard as a technical person to kind of drive, you know, how does that how does my contribution help with that? So I went out actually talk to some engineers, and there was this dashboard team. And their whole job was to create dashboards that tell us what system our time is and how things work. So I went to talk to them and I said, Hey, can you articulate what the value is that you’re delivering and how you’re helping create great hotels that guests love? And they’re like, Well, you know, I manage dashboards, and if the dashboard say that the system’s going down and we don’t respond to it quickly enough, then hotels can’t book reservations, right? So I’m responsible for making sure that. Systems are up and I’m like, That’s a good first step. But writing code doesn’t define the value that we’re giving to our customers. So I went back and I talked to the director and I said, Hey, you know, how do we connect the dots for this guy and help him understand why the dashboards are important, why what he does and the code that he writes is so vital. So long story short, about a month later, you know, the director had been talking to this individual contributor and kind of explaining what their importance is in the role. So I came back about a month later and I talked to this guy and he was way more upbeat. He was way excited about the stuff he was doing. And I asked the question again. I said, So can you articulate what value that you have in your role and how that’s helping deliver on creating great hotels that guests love? And he says, yes, you know, these dashboards that I create actually manage the reservation systems at the hotels, which means that when you come into the hotel and the person goes to the desk to be able to say, Hey, I need to get my key for my room or I need to book a hotel room here, my systems monitor these that accounts for X billion dollars of revenue. And I can’t remember what the specific number was, but he’s like, when those systems are down, those people, will we wait so long before they go somewhere else? And you’re not creating a great hotel that guest loves when they’re waiting to be able to check into a hotel or they’ve already booked their hotel and they’re just waiting to get their key right. They want that process to be a seamless as possible. So by monitoring and managing those systems, I’m held accountable for a bulk of our revenue to ensure that those systems are always running and current. And I said, yes, you know, finally you understand, you know, how that one small contribution of writing some code ends up driving, putting heads in bed, so to speak.

Bill Sherman Perfect. Perfect. And what I like there is you’re describing the role of the evangelist as someone who connects vision with action to create results for customers. Right. That customers care about. Right. So let me ask you, if you were to give advice to someone who’s starting down the evangelist road and trying to figure out give me a tip or two that you would share with them that would make their life easier and make them more effective for their organization?

Sean Davis Absolutely. So two of the primary components of evangelism that will really define success for you is take what you’re passionate about. If you’re not passionate about just talking about things, it’s going to show your customers and your audiences are going to see right through that. The second is focus on that niche because it is so easy in evangelism because it’s not very defined. Some organizations, it’s a marketing function. Other organizations, you may just be an architect who is evangelizing for the things that they’re doing. Start with what you can control. Start with what you do. Understand where you have influence and then build on that and focus on public speaking. Writing documents like papers, blogs, articles. Communicating your ideas through various mediums is really critical, right? Like your presentation skills are huge because sometimes even some of the things that you do and you spend a lot of time on, they’re never seen by the same audience that they’re intended for, right? It’s sometimes it’s to inform an audience, to inform the audience that it’s intended for. So there’s a lot of research that goes into it. There’s a lot of understanding and there’s a lot of consolidation of information that you’re gathering. So always focus on managing whatever you’re trying to drive. Do it with what type of value am I trying to provide with this activity? If you’re just out there talking about stuff like you said, banging the drums, rah, rah, rah, that’s all great. We can all do that, right? But if we don’t have a direct line of how that’s providing value to the organization, you’re going to have a bad time. You’re going to feel like you’re neglected. You’re going to feel like you’re not appreciated because you’re not actually delivering value in the context of what the business is looking for from that evangelism.

Bill Sherman And to build on that. Just as a final point, I think one of the things that you mentioned earlier as well is you started to reach out and understand other functions across the organization. And so you didn’t just look from a narrow lane. You tried to understand things holistically and how they fit into the bigger picture. Shawn, this has been a great conversation today. Thank you very much for joining us here on the podcast.

Sean Davis Thank you so much, Bill.

Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.

 

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