Thought Leadership

After my last blog about some student questions from my class at UCLA Anderson, I am happy to be back to complete the Ten Habits of Highly Effective Chief Marketing Officers.  This post will offer some ideas and suggestions on the all-important but controversial “training” topic. And the CMO’s unique role here.

Habit #7:  Train All the Time

We really have quite a dilemma in business today.  Most employee surveys I see through my clients, and most conversations I have with “middle” managers, clearly show people feel training is a lost art.  Many formal training programs have been cut during the recession,  and it is tough to reinstate them once they are cut.  Meanwhile, with the pace of change in business today, especially in marketing, training is more important than ever.  So what can be done?

My first idea for you is an obvious one, and one that does not cost a penny.  Yet it is not practiced regularly.  It is a simple thought:  train all the time, and expect that from all leaders. Every conversation, every meeting, every visit, is an opportunity to train.  Most of us train by example, and bright, observant people pick that up.  But what I am talking about is to overtly and explicitly use everyday encounters as training moments.

As a young leader, I loved it when people did that with me.  My first brand manager at P&G used to group our brand team together after every advertising agency meeting and ask “What did we learn today?”   “What could we do better?”  ”Are we excited about the outcome?”

I have tried through my career, especially as a CMO, to keep this habit alive.  It adds a few minutes to each meeting or visit, no more.  I also found an extra benefit to the training — which people deeply appreciate as it is an investment in them — and that extra benefit is that outcomes improve immediately.  Right after a meeting ends, when everything is fresh, when I am replaying the meeting outcomes and learning, I find that I revisit something with the team or individual and we make it better.  Immediately.  And if it is a sales call, capturing this learning quickly leads to prompt followup with the customer, and usually better results.

So training all the time does not cost anything but a few extra minutes after a meeting, and it improves results.  Good deal — get on with it!

The second idea I have for you is to formally train your people also all the time.  Obviously your people cannot and should not be in training sessions all the time, that is not what I mean. I mean you need as CMO to be accountable for the capabilities you build in your company, in tough times and in good times.  Great training builds the capabilities an organization needs for competitive advantage.  You must first be clear on these, and then build your training program around it and constantly measure and innovate to be sure you are building the capabilities you need to build.

Pret A Manger, the wildly successful natural and preservative-free fast-food company, is relentless on training against their core capabilities of inspirational team leadership, clear and sincere communication, and passion for, and knowledge of, healthy, organic, easy food. Target trains by ensuring every employee (they call all employees leaders, nice!) knows “why” they are doing what they are doing and how this is linked to their brand ideal and guest satisfaction.  At P&G, we dedicated expert resources to training what people needed to learn for today’s business, while we created the training we felt prepared us for the future.  I had reviews once a quarter to ensure we were seeing results, and building the right capabilities for the future.

Last point:  training, both the kind you can do every day and the more formal training, is perhaps the strongest signal to your people that they are what drives your business.  One of my first visible actions as P&G’s new CMO in 2001 was to dramatically reframe our training, and to get personally involved in its execution.  P&G people got, and loved, the message: building our capability and inspiration will lead us to win with consumers and customers.

This is part six of a ten-part series that will share my Ten Habits of Highly Effective Chief Marketing Officers, based on my experience and what I have learned from others.  See my January 22 entry for Habit #5 — Champion innovation – especially disruptive innovation.

Habit #6:  Setting Your Standards High

The toughest feedback I ever got in a meeting, or from a boss, was that I was “capable of so much better.”   I learned early in my career that one of the most powerful levers we have as leaders, especially as CMOs, is where we set our standards.   And how we communicate these standards to all involved.   Setting your standards means answering questions like:  When is the work of my team good enough to move forward?   What level of performance is acceptable?   When do we say “yes” or “no” to important decisions?

The higher you go in an organization the more important it is that you are clear about your standards.   So when you are a CMO, where you set these standards is critical for your business and organization’s success.  And, believe me, the daily pressure of business will challenge you to compromise your standards, on what results get rewarded, what people get promoted, what innovation makes it to market.  Don’t do it.  Don’t compromise your standards. The great leaders don’t.  Leaders like Mary Dillon at McDonald’s,  Becky Saeger at Charles Schwab,  Michael Francis at Target,  Jim Farley at Ford,  Trevor Edwards at Nike.

I remember three leaders early in my career at P&G who taught me this.   Bob Goldstein, the CMO of P&G when I joined the company in the early 1980s,  always drilled me on my advertising program:  Was it memorable and persuasive enough?  Did I have an alternate campaign in test market?  Was I investing enough?  Neil Kreisberg, a Senior Account Executive at Grey Advertising in the 1980s,  set his standards for his group’s advertising even higher than I did as a junior brand manager on Jif peanut butter.   And Jurgen Hintz, a senior P&G German manager working in the U.S.,  never stopped pushing for discontinuous thinking.  No annual business plan or budget was accepted without a “how high is up” test.

I find in my consulting and in my research that CMOs do not leverage this simple but highly effective habit. And it is a habit that gets practiced every day, in every decision, which means you can make a big difference here immediately.  My advice is to pick a few areas that are very important to your business success,  like what new initiatives you approve,  what people you promote,  what goals you set,  what competitors or companies you benchmark.   Get clear in your own mind what YOUR standards are, and then begin communicating through your words and actions.   You will be amazed at how your organization will respond.

This is part five of a ten-part series that will share my Ten Habits of Highly Effective Chief Marketing Officers, based on my experience and what I have learned from others.  See my January 13 entry for Habit #4 — Get your team right.  And do it early in your tenure.

Habit #5:  Champion innovation, especially disruptive innovation.

This is an especially important habit in these turbulent times, where we are not confident we are out of a recessionary mindset among the people we serve through our brands.

Business history is chock full of successful brands that launched or relaunched during recessions; Google and Apple are two examples.   There is nothing more important a CMO can do in a recession — or anytime really — than to lead the innovation program for a brand or a company.  Usually in partnership with the CTO.    True innovation is impervious to recessions, witness the recent success of Amazon’s Kindle, Motorola and Verizon’s Droid, and the breakthrough results for Avatar.

Leading innovation is too often not a high enough priority for CMOs.   They are distracted by the many short term issues that can consume the best of us. Here is what I have found that has worked for the best CMOs:

– Ensure your forward-looking innovation portfolio is building your value as a brand.  Value is always important, but these days it is especially important. And this is very measurable before your innovation goes to market, so make it important in your pre-launch criteria.   And expedite those innovations that do build value.  When people, consumers, rate your brand a better value than the competition, I guarantee you will grow and achieve market leadership.

– Ensure your innovation portfolio is sufficient to meet your future growth goals.  Sounds obvious, but I am amazed at how many CMOs and CTOs cannot answer that question.   There are a variety of ways to measure this pre-market introduction, and if you do not have those capabilities in place you need to do that.

– Build balance into your innovation portfolio.   Most innovation programs are dominated by incremental product or service innovations,  with 80-90% of the initiatives directed at maintaining the brand’s position in the market.   This would include things like longer protection from a deodorant, more on-time departures for an airline, or an improved taste or crust for a pizza brand (I must say Domino’s is creating a lot of buzz now for an incremental innovation.) You need a balance of incremental innovations like these with a small portfolio of discontinuous innovations.  Discontinuous innovations are things that change the dynamics in a category, create new markets, solve problems in new ways. Clayton Christensen has wonderful insights in this area. Discontinuous innovations are riskier, but great CMOs create and manage a diverse portfolio of innovation … with the obvious benefit of stronger growth and the less obvious benefit of cultivating a culture of creativity and bold thinking.

So, if you are a CMO and you are not championing innovation, start today.  I cannot imagine a higher ROI for your time.

This is part four of a ten-part series that will share my Ten Habits of Highly Effective Chief Marketing Officers, based on my experience and what I have learned from others.  See my January 5 entry for Habit #3 — Live the Four Cs:  Design your organization for what you need to win — core work, capabilities, career path, and culture.

Habit #4:  Get your team right.  And do it early in your tenure.

Hundreds of experts have written about the importance to business success of getting the right people in the right jobs.  Highly effective CMOs do this;  the secret is that it entails deep thought and quick, smart choices based on what a brand or company needs at a given period of time.

A CMO is like any other leader — she is only as good as the people she entrusts.  The key is to assess where you want to be great, best in class, and then to build your team based on that.  And an even more difficult decision is to assess what part of that team you want internal to the company, and what part you want to source externally.

My CMO role was in a large, multi-brand company, P&G.  I determined early in my tenure that I needed two teams — one team comprised of marketing leaders from our many business units, and one smaller team comprised of my corporate staff.  Each team had different priorities and deliverables.

The business unit marketing leader team was focused on advancing our competitive advantage through the business units.  We chose priorities every year, and stuck with them until we baked the capability into our business model.  I needed people on this team who were passionate about marketing, who had allegiance to me and their business unit President, and who would participate in a shared leadership model.  I needed people who would lead, and also reapply work from other businesses.  I formed this team within the first three months of my appointment.

The second team I formed was a smaller, central team, focused on leading innovation, systems and processes that would lead to competitive advantage.  One of the best decisions I made was to move outside the marketing discipline to staff this team with people experienced in skills P&G needed at the time.  I brought in a purchasing manager to help with external agency management, I recruited an HR manager to help with talent management, I leveraged a finance manager to improve strategy and operations in selected areas.  These people and a few others formed the nucleus of my “brain trust” that helped P&G advance to the next level.

With both of these teams, I cannot overstate the importance of setting your standards high for the people you choose.  Especially in the corporate roles.  Too many companies place “second tier” managers in these kind of roles.  That is unacceptable.  These people need to have the highest respect from top management, and key external partners.  Their role is to create sustainable competitive advantage in marketing, and that demands high performers with strong track records.

I find in my research that most CMOs have weak teams.  That is one reason CMO job tenures are still short lived.  And the ones that survive feel burned out.  So for the health of the company and its brands, for your health as CMO, get your team right early!