Spencer Stuart senior director and marketing recruitment guru Greg Welsh gets CMOs into leadership gear with these top tips
7. Transform your entire company into marketing evangelists
As the organisation’s top marketer, you really do have permission—consider it a mandate—to rally the whole organisation behind the latest marketing initiative. Respected CMOs like Bill McDonald at Capital One find venues to share the company’s new commercials for the next quarter, firing up the whole company behind the campaign. If you believe, like we do, that your own employee base is becoming the bridge to customers, there’s no better group to educate as disciples for your brand.
8. Try one new thing to encourage creativity in your team
Excellent ideas can get lost in the shuffle, especially in complex global organisations, so marketing leaders need to find ways to surface the best ideas and develop actionable plans to bring them to fruition. One suggestion for promoting creativity: Take some time to look at old ideas—both the successful ones to consider what might have been done differently and the ones that were never implemented. Some ideas require a gestation period and are improved when they are reexamined.
9. Don’t fly solo when it comes to digital
Whether it’s mobile media, social networking or email marketing, digital’s influence reaches across business sectors. The accelerated pace of innovation and change in the digital world can be daunting, and marketers should not be shy when it comes to asking for help. Accomplished CMOs become player/coaches and serve an important educational role internally.
Your company will look to you to be the expert. To be prepared, leverage an external brain trust, including many of your peers who are facing the same dilemma.
10. Don’t do. Lead.
I know it is tempting for creative marketers to get involved in the smallest details of the marketing plan, but remember that part of leading a thriving, engaged marketing team means letting them do their jobs. As a senior leader, you’re there to provide visionary leadership and build morale. In 2013, try to spend at least 50 per cent of your time ‘leading’. You just might find that your team’s output will put you in a better place.
Greg Welch is the senior director and partner for Spencer Stuart’s global consumer goods and services division, and an expert in the recruitment of senior-level marketers.
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In the third and final episode of our 3-part CMO50 video series exploring modern marketing and why it’s become a matter of trust, we’re delighted to be joined by Telstra’s former CMO and now digital services and sales executive, Jeremy Nicholas, and Adobe VP Marketing Asia-Pacific and Japan, Duncan Egan.
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