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From a Call Centre to the Rooms That Decide
Hi, I’m Shaikh Noman. Nineteen years in commercial roles, the last nine in enterprise sales. Nineteen years later, I work in enterprise sales for one of the world’s largest technology companies, across the UK and EU, rooms where a single decision moves million, and where what’s said about you after you step out determines whether you’re ever invited back in.
What is NOM
NOM stands for No Ordinary Mentor, No Ordinary Method, a statement of register, not a slogan. It’s a 1:1 practice for mid-career professionals who are competent but overlooked, and the caseload is deliberately small, because the work is a senior read, not a curriculum.
The work isn’t motivational and it isn’t a script. You’ll hear the read as it is, including the parts that are uncomfortable, comfortable and useful are usually different sentences. Everything we build together, from a CV to a promotion case, is built to the standard I’d put in front of an enterprise buyer. And nothing is taught here that hasn’t been used in a live commercial situation first. I still do this work for a living. My methods get tested every week, in rooms that don’t grade on effort.
Where This Comes From
I didn’t start in the rooms where careers are decided. I started in a call centre.
Nobody handed me a map between those two points. No sponsor. No structured mentorship. No one explaining how the invisible rooms worked. I learned it the slow way, deal by deal, mistake by mistake, watching which colleagues moved and working out why it was rarely the ones doing the best work. Every framework in this practice was tested on live deals and live stakeholders before it was ever used in a session.
That’s the asymmetry NOM exists to correct. The lessons took me the better part of two decades to assemble. You shouldn’t need two decades to receive them.
The Background that built NOM
The Kitchen Table
Last year, my daughter ran for head girl. She was the strongest candidate on the shortlist, and the one carrying the most nerves about it. Public speaking unsettled her. Making a case for herself in front of the whole school unsettled her more.
The week before, we sat at the kitchen table and worked through it the way I work through enterprise deals. Who actually decides this. What they’re already half-thinking. What the second sentence about her needs to be when teachers talk in the staff room. Where the gaps were in how she was being read, and what to do about them.
She went through the speech, the questions, the process. She won.
I noticed the same pattern twice more, with two professionals I’d been mentoring informally. One was between roles and not landing the next one. The other was trying to move into a different kind of career altogether. Both were competent. Both were stuck in the gap between the work they were producing and the way they were being read by the people deciding. Both got there, once we worked on what those people were actually reading.
The Pattern
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Careers are not decided in the rooms the candidate is in. They’re decided in the rooms they’re not in. In the half-sentence a senior leader uses about you in a calibration meeting. In the line a hiring manager stops at on your CV, and the second sentence the panel uses after you’ve left. In whose name surfaces when someone asks, who could run this?
Most competent people work hard inside the visible room and have no read on the invisible one. They mistake being reliable for being legible. The two are not the same thing, and only one of them gets you promoted, hired, or moved into the next chapter.