Building an executive narrative

Why the story matters more than the CV

A hiring decision at this level gets made in conversations you are not in. Someone advocates for you to people who have never met you, using whatever they can remember. If what they remember is a list of roles, your case is being made badly, and you will never know that is what happened.

The job of a narrative is to be repeatable by somebody else, imperfectly, and still land.

The shape that works

• The through-line. One kind of problem you have solved repeatedly in different contexts. Not a job title — a class of situation.
• The evidence. Two or three specifics with real outcomes attached, chosen because they demonstrate the through-line rather than because they were your biggest titles.
• The next step. What you want to do now and why it follows. This is the part most people leave out, and its absence reads as availability rather than intent.
• The honest edge. What you are not. Naming a limitation before it is discovered makes everything else more believable.

Building it from what actually happened

Most careers are not planned, and pretending otherwise produces the polished, weightless narrative everybody recognises. The stronger move is to find the real pattern in the accidents — you have probably been handed messes to fix, or been the person who built the function before it existed. That is a through-line, and it has the advantage of being true.

A narrative is not a story you invent about yourself. It is the pattern that is already there, said out loud in a way somebody else can repeat.

Testing it

Say it to somebody who knows your work and ask them to repeat it back a week later. What survives is your narrative. What they cannot reproduce is decoration, however much you like it.

The line you should not cross

Inflation is checkable and gets checked. At chief level, references are taken informally through people who worked with you, not through the contacts you supply — so a number you stretched will be corrected by someone who was there. The cost of that correction is far higher than the benefit of the bigger number.