Beating longer tenure risk with curiosity
While all the business textbooks tout many pros when it comes to longer tenure staff – invaluable institutional knowledge, stability and consistency, mentorship and leadership, enhanced productivity, cost savings and better employee morale and loyalty to name a few – there is the danger of becoming overconfident or stuck in your ways. All three CMOs of the Year finalists and winners agree it’s an omnipresent risk and one longer tenured marketing chiefs need to watch out for.
“One of the risks of tenure is the fact you can become stale and you can have a mindset of always having done it this way. Which people in the business will go, we've never done things like this, or it’s just all shiny objects,” Merhi says. “Part of my own development, and how I try and push the team, is through curiosity, which is not only on the inside; curiosity is ensuring I'm always looking up, looking out and thinking about what might disrupt us. What are the new innovations coming in? How are customers and consumers transacting, behaving and what are they expecting from brands? And how do I bring the new-age type of thinking into the organisation so that the business and the brand stays current and modern?”
Surujpal agrees staying curious and being bold is critical here. “A lot of times we've set the boundaries, and we've pushed it fast because we're leading from a category point of view. So it's ensuring you beat yourself in a lot of cases. Because you are the benchmark and your team has set those goals and targets,” he says.
“The ability to stay curious is something I really talk about with my team standards and having this notion that you have to learn. Mistakes are ok, and you've got to push. Because if you don't, someone else will do it for you. And you won't know where it's going to come from, that's the thing – it may not come from where you think it's going to come from. We push into spaces where we're not supposed to be and people will think, oh gosh, you can't be there, that's not where you're supposed to be. So that's the one thing for me, being able to stay at the forefront.”
For Barnes, the wider challenge every marketer faces is the constant feedback loop – something that can be even harder to bear the longer you oversee a brand, build pride in your efforts, and work within an organisation.
“Because we make and build in public, the feedback can be relentless. I think we don't talk enough about that. For me, particularly, what I've struggled with is the mental health aspects of the marketing role,” he comments. “Every single thing you put out into the world gets critiqued. A social media post goes out, and I will get a message from someone saying it's not good enough or there's an issue with it.
“Some of it is just noisy, and you've got to learn to deal with it, while some of it is really helpful and important. But there is this wealth of information and noise that comes your way, and it can almost feel like you're doing a bad job all the time. I think we've got to look at how we do that and have conversations… you put yourself out there as the heart and soul of the company plus the vision of your brand work, which we spoke about earlier. That's something I just had to learn how to manage over my duration there.”
But rather than worry about staleness, Barnes points to the risk of marketers pursuing too much change, too constantly.
“That is actually an issue in marketing: There's too much stuff that gets thrown at you to change,” he says. “What we know is the fundamentals of doing the right thing over and over again is actually how you win. Is it easier for customers to book? Do more people know about you? Do they remember you when they go to shop? And are people talking about you? Those are the fundamentals, yet we get thrown so much stuff from every part of your business… Sometimes our job is to be that calm. What if we just do the right thing time and time again, and get in a better position?”
That’s not to say Barnes doesn’t recognise the need to remain a change agent for Intrepid. “I've shaken myself up personally – I have moved to another country to do a completely different job, to test myself, and I've encouraged my people and team to move around and take those steps,” he adds.
“It's about the right change and understanding that. That's our job as senior marketers; we can't just get caught up in all the flashy stuff. How do we keep making the right moves so we're better every day, but when you see that opportunity, how do we run and make that happen?”