Increasingly, marketing leaders are being called on to juggle complex change programmes with the ever-growing pressures of the day job. Here, Jos Cleare, who led UK marketing and communications for a leading global consultancy, looks at how to balance these competing task masters.
It feels like business transformation has become part of the everyday of corporate executives. Change is the new normal. With all the upheaval, angst and discombobulation that goes with it.
But in too many cases, in the marketing and comms department managing change means stasis for everything else, which has a cost to the business. Many senior leaders bear this out – confirming that one of their biggest challenges in a transformation scenario is to ensure that every day programmes keep going. Losing momentum, or simply stopping activation, can have a fundamental long-term impact on brand and reputation.
As marketing and comms leaders, we would all hope that we would be a key part of the change management team, sitting at the heart of the action. Managing the communications around change is after all critical to any change being accepted, by any of a business’s audiences, and ultimately succeeding. This inevitably means a loss of focus on the everyday. But all of us have a team (of some sort) around us and this is a time when effective delegation is everything.
True, budgets are often limited or even frozen while transformations work their way through and new strategies are developed. But this is simply not good business practice. Supply chain and manufacturing production lines don’t stop. And an organisation’s brand value is now considered to be a critical part of its overall valuation, so why stop marketing?
As a senior leader, juggling the need to be a central agent of the change, with the imperative to keep the home fires burning is indeed a major career-defining challenge.
It comes back down to a few critical points.
Firstly, whatever you do, don’t stop the day-to-day programmes. Convincing your management team to provide budget to keep going is a critical part of your continued success. Re-evaluation of your programming and focusing on what really is moving the dial is key. Whatever you do, don’t ask your team to be involved in both workstreams as splitting focus never ends well. You want those on the transformation to dig in and give it 100%, so repurpose some of your team rather than ask them to double-hat. If you need to, scale a few things back but don’t stop. Perhaps consider hiring in extra resource but keeping the day-to-day going is critical.
Secondly, know what you do best. The best CMOs know what they are good at – and have people around them who are good at the rest. This is as true for marketing programming as it is for transformation planning. Yes, be involved in the change steering committee, but you don’t need to be deep in the nitty gritty of change, and honestly, it probably isn’t your sweet spot. So – delegate. Having temporary captains with added responsibility is good for you, and good for your rising stars.
Thirdly, ensure that whatever the shape of the change, and the resulting evolution in your marketing strategy, you have a kick-ass programme to embed the transformation, and ensure that the organisation can live it and breathe it over a period of time. And it does take time. Yes, transformation programming will gradually taper off but make sure you make the time to breathe life into it to ensure it becomes the status quo. Running transformation communications in parallel to the day-to-day with separate teams is much tidier and helps everyone keep focused.
Fourthly, and this might be the most critical point of all, bring your team with you. Don’t leave your team out in the cold. Trust them on the journey. They can all sign NDAs. This will help you in your planning, but it will also help with the roll out of the transformation, whatever shape it takes. The marketing and comms team can all be agents of change, early ambassadors if you like. Businesses can wait too long to get the marketing and comms team involved and then there is a lot of catch up to be done – which ultimately adds more pain to the leadership.
Alongside the stress and discombobulation transformational change brings, there are also the opportunities of a new beginning. By embracing the new, while simultaneously keeping the revenue engine in motion, marketers and communicators can engineer a reset of their own – at the heart of the business.
Good luck…