Mapping Influence For Localization Leaders

Localization can quietly own the global customer experience while still feeling powerless when priorities shift. We’re expected to deliver a high-quality multilingual experience across acquisition, conversion, onboarding, retention, and expansion, yet the real levers often sit with different leaders across marketing, sales, product, and customer success. 

Kevin O’Donnell, strategic advisor at Global 10X, gets concrete about what “influence” actually looks like inside a cross-functional, matrixed organization. Kevin explains why relying on the teams we naturally get along with can become a hidden constraint, and he offers a sharper lens. If product and sales are discussing a new region, or marketing is planning a launch, localization needs a pathway into those decisions before plans harden.

Kevin shares a simple, practical stakeholder mapping and influence map exercise you can do in an afternoon on a whiteboard. We talk through how to map real partnerships across functions, label what’s strong, what’s weak, and what’s “high potential but underinvested,” then use that visibility to change behavior and collaboration rhythms. We also preview the webinar series Kevin is hosting with Antoine Ray, The Bold Localization Leader, starting September 9, with a first session focused on stakeholder mapping and influence. [You can register here: https://info.argosmultilingual.com/the-bold-localization-leader] 

If you want better localization strategy, stronger stakeholder alignment, and more impact without waiting for a reorg, hit play. Subscribe, share this with a localization leader, and leave a review so more teams can build influence where it counts.

Transcript

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Why Localization Feels Stuck

Stephanie Harris-Yee 0:00

Hello, this is Stephanie Harris-Yee, and here for another episode of Field Notes. And today I have Kevin O'Donnell, who's the strategic advisor from Global 10X, who's going to be talking to us about this idea of localization teams, which they have this massive scope of thing that they're doing, but their influence is a little bit limited depending on departments, etc. So he's going to be giving us a better idea of this landscape and then also some ideas of what he's seen work in order to get around that limited influence roadblock that a lot of localization leaders have. So, Kevin, to you, how would you lay this

Big Responsibility With Little Control

Stephanie Harris-Yee 0:40

out?

Kevin O'Donnell 0:40

Yeah, hey Stephanie, great to chat with you today. Um, it's such a common issue. So when I talk to localization leaders again and again, I hear them with the amount of responsibility on their shoulders, they talk about the fact that their work touches every single part of the customer journey from acquisition to conversion to onboarding, retention, and expansion. So they're effectively accountable for this global customer experience. But their biggest challenge is that each one of these stages has a different executive owner. So ultimately, it's the head of marketing, head of sales, the head of customer success, head of product, who are chiefly accountable for the budget, for the roadmap, for the resource allocation on each of these parts of the customer journey. And that's attention that I see all the time. So the localization leader is expected to deliver high-quality, excellent experience without actually having influence over the roadmap, the priorities, the resources. And it's something that sounds obvious, but it's so pervasive that a lot of localization leaders get stuck or don't know what to do about this or how to actually map this influence for themselves.

Stephanie Harris-Yee 1:59

So I would think, as a localization person within a company, you probably have people within these different departments that you go to a lot of the time. They're like your friends, you talk to, and I would imagine that would be the easiest place to start. Is that correct? Or how do you see that? How should someone go about with these relationships?

The Relationship Trap In Cross-Teams

Kevin O'Donnell 2:19

Yeah, I think for all of us, if we work cross-functionally, there's a tendency to work with people that you like to work with and you have a good rapport with and you have a good partnership with. It's human nature. However, when you're in a cross-matrix organization and you're relying on people in every single department or function to work with you, and they're relying on you, then there can be a bit of a trap if you default to the teams you work best with. Because the teams that maybe there's more friction or are harder to work with, sometimes they get less attention, or you don't necessarily go above and beyond for those, and that's a difficulty that can be really ongoing because where you have a good relationship, nothing's broken there. But if there's a relationship that is subpar or is highly transactional, well, what that really means is you don't have any presence, and I always encourage people to think about where are the conversations that matter to you but you're not a part of. So think about when a sales leader is talking to a product leader about expanding to a new region. As a localization leader, you really want to be part of that conversation either in the room or indirectly by somebody coming to you talking about that. So it's thinking about where the conversations that matter happen across the organization, and that's a clue to the types of influence and the types of partnerships you really need to work on and improve.

Stephanie Harris-Yee 3:54

So I'd imagine this idea of trying to map all of this can get very complex. And I know we just have a very short episode here as well, but how would you go about diagnosing this? And is there a way we can see kind of your whole method of how you would recommend this?

Kevin O'Donnell 4:11

There's a fairly simple approach I've used with Teams before, and I prefer simple approaches because you can do it in an afternoon, and it gives you enough information to get started, and then you can always dive deeper and focus on it later. And if you can't do something in an hour and a half on a whiteboard, then you're probably not going to find a day or a week to go deeper

Influence Mapping On A Whiteboard

Kevin O'Donnell 4:33

into it. So the type of approach I've done is an influence map exercise. Effectively, it's where you literally draw out your partnerships across the organization. So you might draw all the typical functions and then you identify which of these are my strongest partnerships today. So a localization leader might say I'm very strong with the marketing team, I'm pretty strong with the support team, but not so much with engineering, not so much with sales perhaps, and a couple of others. And by mapping them out, colour coding them, putting some different labels on them to figure out where are we strong, where are we not so strong, and where are we maybe underinvested, but we have higher potential. And these are the really interesting ones where there might be room to do more, to have a bigger impact in your organization, but you've been shying away from that, or it hasn't dawned on you because maybe they didn't come and ask you for help. So it's certainly possible to do this simple mapping that gives you a picture of your organization and where you sit in it, where your partners sit in it. I think it's a really nice exercise to do with your team, and then even to bring to your partners to say, This is how we see you. We've got a dependency on you, but we only exchange emails once a month. We really need to work closer together here. What can we do about that? And the first step is awareness, it's figuring out what the map looks like, and then the second step is deciding what do we want to change, how do we invest differently in the way we spend our time.

Using The Map To Change Behavior

Stephanie Harris-Yee 6:05

I know that you and Antoine Ray are having a webinar series to go over and talk about this idea of doing that mapping in person. Is that a good place for people to start on getting introduced to this?

Kevin O'Donnell 6:18

Yes, we would love people to come to that. So Antoine and I we chat a lot about these types of topics, and we felt there was a need to bring these highly practical topics to a new forum where we could talk through what is actually happening in organizations today, how localization is evolving, and how a localization leader needs to step up and be more strategic and be bolder than ever before with all of the changes that are happening. So we're starting a new series, The Bold Localization Leader, starts on September 9th, and our first conversation is going to be based on this stakeholder mapping exercise that we're talking about today and why it matters, how you can map your influence and what you can do about that to be more impactful in your organization.

Stephanie Harris-Yee 7:05

Awesome. I'll have the link to register that in this episode. So if you're watching, feel free to take a look at that in the description. https://info.argosmultilingual.com/the-bold-localization-leader

Webinar Invite And Small Next Steps

Stephanie Harris-Yee 7:12

Okay, is there anything else on this topic? It is the short snippet preview that you want to introduce today that anyone should be looking out for.

Kevin O'Donnell 7:22

No, my my last word would be when people talk about strategic work, talk about influence mapping and stakeholder excellence, these are long-standing topics and they can feel maybe like heavy work, or they can feel like I've never had time for that. And I would just like to reassure people, you can absolutely make small changes that can have a big effect. So it's absolutely worth investing one or two hours on starting to map your influence because I've seen huge results when I've worked with teams on this. Whether people tried this before, it's absolutely worth investing their time in again.

Stephanie Harris-Yee 8:00

Okay, thank you so much, Kevin.

Kevin O'Donnell 8:02

Thanks, Stephanie.