The samizdat of fractional executives

Next week, eleven fractional leaders are bringing together one hundred fractional executives to ask and answer the questions that matter in a one week pop-up private network on Filament. If you’re new to fractional work or someone looking to connect and sharpen their practice, you should apply to join here.

Going Deeper

Fractional executive work is the fastest growing new employment category for which no structure exists. There is no industry organizational body, no defined standards or practices, no commonly agreed pricing structure. By its intrinsic nature, there is also no internal training or development. Unlike standard contracting, where there’s usually an internal lead defining the problems and the work to be done, fractional executives often find themselves parachuting into roles where even the outlines of the problem to be solved are indistinct, the internal guidance a plaintive ‘help?’. Every fractional exec is an island, bereft of the main, just trying to get the job donne.

When you are being hired on the strength of your expertise, it can be hard to publicly ask questions that suggest there are things you just don’t know. As a result, like the dissidents of old Europe passing secret pamphlets from trusted hand to trusted hand, the key information fractional executives need is often passed through a whisper network. This is high-trust but fragile. And slow.

A group of fractional leaders asked us whether they could run an experiment where they would try to maintain the trust but create a more robust way to scale the knowledge, standards and practices fractional execs need. They proposed a one-week invite-only private community where no question was off limits, nothing “too beginner”. The goal was not just to connect and inform in the moment but create the nucleus of a robust knowledge base that fractional execs could lean on long into the future.

The leaders span the range of fractional expertise. There are seasoned operators like Natalie Hoop, Carly Guthrie, Ben Levinson and Harry Siggins; GTM and Revenue specialists like Katie Barnes, Sibi Murugesan and Kaitlin Strand; and Product development execs from across the stack including fractional VPs of Engineering, UX Research leads and Trust and Safety specialists.

Space is limited, but if you want to inform and enrich your own practice as a fractional exec, apply here and see what it feels like when you’re no longer working this out on your own.