This is part three 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 December 17 entry for Habit #2 — Be Clear What You Stand For And Be Visible Inside And Out.
Habit #3: Live The Four Cs: Design your organization for what you need to win — core work, capabilities, career path, and culture.
This is the most underrated habit. And one of the most powerful. Great CMOs are brilliant organization designers, architects, leaders. This is hard work, often not understood by CEOs, who are looking for a quick fix to their marketing. I was fortunate at P&G as A.G. Lafley and Bob McDonald understood this and valued it.
This is hard work as it entails some research, some analysis, but most importantly, it involves hard choices. And these choices on core work, career paths, capabilities, and culture are difficult as they may be different from what the historical strengths of the organization have been. And that is when the leadership skills become so important, because the best plans are worthless if not conceived, planned and executed with passion and care.
Let’s talk about each of the Four Cs that make up Habit #3:
Core Work — One of the most provocative questions I ask my clients now is “What are your people working on, what is valued?” It is amazing how many leaders don’t know. When I began as Global Marketing Officer at P&G in 2001, I asked this question of our marketing leaders in the business units, and their staffs, and none of us liked the answer. We found too much time was spent on internal alignment for decisions, project coordination, and rework. This kind of work does not build the world’s greatest marketing organization! So we set out to define the work we WANTED our people to do and excel at, we changed systems and rewards to implement the changes, and then we measured the progress.
Capabilities — I remember a conversation I had with Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit and a P&G Board member, about the importance of an organization clearly choosing what capabilities they wanted to drive for competitive advantage. And then resourcing them, measuring them, and innovating against them. One of my mentors in this area, besides Scott, is Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Mangement in Toronto. He is a “stickler” for this concept, and I learned a lot from him about how to arrive at these choices. One capability I am very proud we built at P&G was our excellence at Shopper Marketing; this was a vague concept years ago and is now one of the drivers of P&G’s competitive advantage.
Career Path — There are many areas within brand building we cannot control, that is why authenticity and good intent is so important. But one area we can totally control is how we move people through careers: what experiences they have, who gets promoted, what skills we value, what work gets valued, what destination jobs we create and how we prepare people for them. This is where the core work and capabilities come together. This is the most visible thing we do as leaders, and if we do not “walk the talk” on this everything falls apart. One company I really admire here is LVMH. They really believe their people need to develop an intuitive understanding of the categories, brands and people who buy their brands, and they manage careers accordingly. One principle that underscores this is that LVMH moves their people between brands infrequently, running counter to many practices at other brand companies.
Culture — Culture is the visible sign of what is valued. Again, this is within the leader’s full control. Tony Hsieh at Zappos has built an amazing, visible culture around Zappos’ brand ideal of Wow! service. This drives who they hire, how they train, how they talk with customers, what they reward, and on and on. And just look at their results. Culture does not just happen, it is created, constantly renewed and refreshed, and it is the oxygen for the other Three Cs.
[...] 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 … [...]