Slacking, career goals/development, and mgmt pressure in corporate analytics
The problem is, things where I think I have the largest impact are mostly "fluffy" - I advise, guide, and educate colleagues all throughout the org (especially leaders), but I don't have direct reports or a budget to manage. I'm de-facto an executive advisor with a great (compared to my environment of course) understanding in math/statistics/data science and the fincrime application field. I can easily relate to SVPs/directors and make them understand cost/risk tradeoffs. The good ol' "analytics translator", with now enough experience and projects under the belt to see where things are going. Been here, done that, if we do this that will happen and such.
I'm fairly certain though that a few middle managers in my org flagged me as a slacker, because I don't really produce tangible outputs: if it's not code or a word/ppt, or at least "drive meetings" it doesn't exist. What I do actually is define desirable outcomes and steer/mentor others into how to achieve them. And don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly the type that eagerly rolls up its sleeves and powers through general incompetence pulling off 70+h work weeks to be the "one-man-army" that rock-stars whatever you throw at them. I'm mentally a lot past that phase in my career, I'm just not interested in doing that type of work anymore, and haven't been really done it in the last 4-5 years apart from sporadic self-contained prototypes or one-of ad-hoc analyses. I want to focus on high-level thinking, innovation, and leadership. A great number of my peer ICs see me as a role model and find my talks/way to relate to senior management inspiring. So I'm probably not just coming up with all of this myself, or I'm just naturally good at selling snake oil: after all, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
I'm now getting hard-pressed to formulate concrete goals/deliveries as apparently being "just accountable" accountable for successful outcomes while delegating responsibility is not enough. Ideally, I'd measure my impact through org-wide metrics, but it's hard to attribute specific results to my efforts as someone with a well-defined reporting line would. These concrete tasks management all talks about are just not fulfilling, and make me feel like I'm wasting my potential and expertise. I'm getting strong pushback on this "achieve impact through others" that I feel the bread and butter when you transition to more experienced levels, it's seen as not enough if not outright "stealing impact", and has to be supplemented by "things you actually do". I like my current (of course self-defined) advisor role, but I just don't know how to measure impact and state concrete goals/deliveries a way that doesn't make me lose my mind.
Maybe I'm just suffering from an identity crisis where I'm not really an IC but also not a PM, maybe it's impostor syndrome, maybe it's just impostor/slacker full stop. I'm interested to hear from others who have been in a similar career trajectory and/or got experienced similar challenges.