My Podcast Recommendations For Marketing & Growth Leaders

Here are my most recommended podcasts for Marketing leaders, as you will see the majority aren’t marketing-specific podcasts, they are importantly more business-related, with that said they will help with honing your skills and improve how you communicate to business leaders and consider how you approach Marketing and pitching across the business.

Decoder

Good for company breakdowns, deep questions and CEO profiles

Rapid Response

Good for business responses and how they’ve reacted 

Work Life

Good for exploring interesting topics and deeper conversation 

Marketing Against The Grain

Good for marketing chatter. I am not always a big fan of all of their recommendations (as for very specific types of early-stage companies) but good for food for thought and opportunities to see if the ideas would fit for your business

Business Untitled

Good for understanding the people behind the business and great for ideas

Definitely check out the genius behind MSCHF and the art of going viral podcast

Masters Of Scale

Good breaking down companies or themes and considering how to apply to your own situation. 

Land Of The Giants

Good for the inside look of companies and breaking down business and business leaders.

The latest series on Disney is brilliant 

Marketing Freaks

Good for getting under the skin of the companies, the how and why behind campaigns and channels. As a past guest I can tell you how much effort they put into sourcing their guests and setting up their vodcast and podcasts.
Here is my cheatsheet from my appearance on Marketing Freaks

Or watch the short version ↓

The Uncensored CMO

Good for understanding the varying worlds of CMOs, their day to day and their journey to the leadership team

Discover Daily

If you are a brand lead and want to understand how you can create a highly-produced daily podcast Perplexity is a great example of how to do it and bring the brand to the front of the project.

Mentoring In The Hybrid & Remote Era

I am a huge advocate of mentoring and coaching. I don’t say this as a coach, I say this as something who learnt a lot from mentors, especially unofficial mentoring, importantly reverse mentoring and silent mentors.

(Remember a coach is someone who has hard goals with deadlines to improve a core set of skills. A mentor is someone who helps to guide you over a longer period often without setting goals but to help you navigate difficult situations and build towards the future. You can have multiple mentors and likely have one coach who will help specialist skills develop and then change, coaches and mentors can overlap)

Having spoken to several businesses over the last year and the majority are worried about their move to hybrid and remote and how it will impact their staff.

Something most overlooked is the coaching element of in-person work and the indirect mentoring many get from spending time face-to-face, in meetings and bumping into each other in the office, going for lunch or grabbing a coffee together.

These are situations that can be re-engineered but have to be engineered as many do not seek out their own internal development and will let these moments not happen because of a screen or poor nudging from leadership.

How to think about improving mentorship moments:

• Organise time slots for mentorship (leadership teams shouldn’t have to do this but if they don’t it won’t be something that naturally occurs throughout the org)

• Set up fika - A Swedish traditional for friends or colleagues to grab a pastry and a coffee together

• Create moments to share learnings and a mentor manual that people can access and learn from

• Create reserve mentorship - match younger team members with more senior members (especially good for those on the leadership team) to understand what the teams feels, see's and the latest changes in their area of expertise

• Create internal mentorship programmes and see if you can invest time into sourcing and matching in external mentors, external mentors are often taken more seriously as they do not have a status or stake in the internal game being played.

All of these will help you improve mentors, amentorship and endorse a mentor programme that likely needs the most senior support in pushing forward.

>> If you are worried about your wider subculture (what I suggest is your department’s culture), I wrote about it in my leadership newsletter leaders letter last year.

Want to go deeper into different types of mentors?

• Internal mentors are usually paired or seeked out, less experienced staff are matched with more experienced members to help navigate the business and have a support network

• External mentors are usually seeked out by the employee or their manager - they can be in a related field or have a lot of similar experiences to help the mentee forward

• Silent mentors are those you learn from, their emails, and the way they handle themselves in meetings, but also are those who have direct impact on you, likely through the content they put out, the podcasts they host or appear on etc.

• Reverse mentorship is critical for great managers and generalists and those who are serious about their career and improving their career internally.

And if you are not taken by what I have said here’s the all in podcast discussing mentorship from 11:18 ↓

Free Power Hour

For the past ten years, I have offered power hours, which is an hour with a person (usually a business leader or senior c-suiter), a company or an institution where I help and support.

I have ran power hours for:

• Creators

• CEOs and founders

• Startups

• Known Marketplaces

• For SMBs

• For leadership teams at a school

• & for large businesses

Sometimes it is a sanity check, other times the time is used as a lunch and learn for their teams, others use it an AMA and then for some, it becomes a coaching session. It is more clinic (clinics are similar to office hours at a VC firm with their portfolio companies) than therapy but I’m always happy to support.

I am opening this up a little further to readers and visitors of my site and wider than I have before, so if you would like a power hour with me, please complete the form below or DM me on LinkedIn.

So get in touch and let me know how you’d like to collaborate and where you might need help, a sanity check or an AMA with your team/department.

My Recent Recommendations To Coaching, Consultancy And Advisory Clients

Here are the most recent pieces of advice I have given my coaching, consultancy and advisory clients over the last six months.

1. Learn The Tools: Learn the comms tools (especially new tools) - Gmail, Slides, PowerPoint, Slack/Teams. The tools will help you do more in a quicker time (here are my 7 ways to get the most out of Google Workspaces)
   

2. Use The Tools Your Customers Use. That means Discord, Snapchat, and TikTok. That could also mean Notes app, Excel, Sheets, Strava or Pendo etc 
   

3. Understand AI - I will not tell you to learn every prompt and every tool, however, understanding how ChatGPT works, playing with Claude (Claude is better output than ChatGPT IMHO) and using the new features inside work tools are going to be a competitive advantage for you and cut through when your team might be just using AI tools 
   

4. Reverse Coaching: Team members will know the new tools, they will know the newest tactics and tricks to help improve the performance of your department or company, set up sessions where the team can officially coach you and reverse coach you, make this their session and help them set out the training. Offer this as a two-way street, they coach you, and you then coach them. 
   

5. Culturalise Frameworks: Other people’s frameworks and templates only work if you customise and culturalise them for your business. If you don’t you’ll have to teach everyone how it works and then they fail.
   

6. OKR Struggles: If you are struggling with OKRs (most people do) look at think BIG, act small by when as an alternative. Here is a free Think BIG act small by when template for you to use. If you’d like to read more about this framework read my think big act small by when post.  
   

7. Refresh: Get into a fresh environment when you’re stuck. Outside in the garden in the sun, if you’re working from home get a commute and walk for 10-15 minutes, block out time for lunch and break down the days to recap the day and write down the good, the bad and the ugly to give you chance to attack the next working day 

My Favourite Matrixes & Frameworks

Here are my favourite matrixes and frameworks together on Google Sheets, free to make a copy and use for improved goal setting, better ownership and cross-functional alignment.

Frameworks & Templates

• John Whitmore Model - Aka GROW Goal Reality Options Will matrix for what you want, where you, what could be and what will you do.

• SMART & PURE - Setting the best goals and helping to select the right goals

• DACI - A project management framework helping to clarify ownership and feedback in a project (RACI is more well know)

• RACI - A project management framework helping to clarify ownership and feedback

• Feedback Model - A way to field feedback from colleagues or managers and categorise

• Eisenhower Matrix - Work template to go through what to prioritise

• SWOT Analysis - Self-assessment of strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats (I run through this template with every coaching client and is a foundation we work on top of)

• Subtle Signals Model - Effort vs reward matrix

• Maslow's Hierarchy - Score your engagement

HVE - High Value Employee(s)

Why High Value Employees (HVE) Need To Be Identified, Supported & Have Individual Plans Of Action

Imagine this ↓

Your best-performing member of the department comes to you and suggests they are unhappy and have been applying for external roles.

Your first thought was likely FFS, your second was to try and talk to them and hopefully listen to their points.

Your next action is likely to convince them to stay…

If this comes as a shock, there are likely three things that it could be or that are happening:

1. You are busy and missing the signs from this employee

2. The subculture or company culture has shifted and the employee doesn’t feel connected
   or

3. The company is not moving in a direction that connects with said employees.

Most department leads do not identify who is your HVE (your high value employee(s)). They have an idea but do not actively treat the identified employee as such. They definitely do not have a plan of action for these individuals.

Yes, you can identify them and treat them well and they will look to progress their career elsewhere but many do not actively check-in, you miss their signals from their performance dropping, being continually frustrated in meetings and hearing what they are saying from their silence, you or they actively miss 1-2-1’s,

In some organisations, they train department leads and executive teams to identify and actively discuss key person risk - when someone is that important it creates a business risk for them to become unhappy and leave the business. If you were to take a step back, would your HVE be a key person to leave the business and create a risk to the business?

Do you have a handful of HVE’s or a high-value employee who you need to connect with and work through how they like to work, how you could support them further or know when to get out of their way?

A coachable moment for the week ahead is to review your team (try not to make it a 9-box exercise), identify your HVE and work out a plan of action for them or the HVE’s.

Remember: It is also great to support them in moving on, often high value employees need to leave and it’s ok as their line manager to support them in reshuffling your org and creating the most effective org design.

If you enjoyed this post why not read more of my blog posts here, if you are interested in more actionable coaching blog content read here

7 Magic Moments For Coaches

1. A thank you email/iMessage/WhatsApp straight after a coaching session
   >> This shows you have landed or cut through the noise of their everyday work

2. When your coachee tweaks one of your frameworks and applies it within their business - the issue with frameworks is it is only proven within your business or when you have had the chance to implement it yourself. When you have your own framework it is ultimately built for you
   >> This proves you have been heard and your coaching has allowed more

3. A thank you message away from the coaching session, after a chance to think about what was discussed
   >> This shows you have landed your message and they feel comfortable and confident to deliver their own version of the framework

4. When a recommendation is instantly implemented and you are sent a screenshot or an email on how well it was received
   >> This shows you unlocked something simple for your coachee to deliver.
   Remember simple wins almost every time

5. Months after you have finished coaching you receive a message and your coachee informs you of something they have done
   >> This shows you have had a positive long-term impact and they want to share the experience with you

6. A personal introduction is made by someone you are coaching and recommends your services
   >> This shows you have made a real impact and they want to refer a colleague or professional friend to be coached by you. This also applies to people you have finished coaching.

7. When you are asked to come back and coach or run a workshop within the same business
   >> This shows you are respected and they trust you to deliver high-quality work with their colleagues

Is It Time To Dust Off RIP To The CMO Deck & Update For 2024?

Why Chief Growth Officers Are In Demand & Why The CMO Role Has Lost Some Of Its Influence

Recently there has been discussion around the CMO role and how the CGO role is what Marketing leaders do. This is inside the CMO community and at board and founder level.

Interestingly, this was not what I found back in 2019 when I keynoted a Marketing conference with RIP To The CMO and it is still very different to what most CMO roles are and what their outputs are.

Having held both the CMO CGO titles, coached both (And Product leaders) and advised company leaders and founders on what to hire for the roles are different, in the best CGOs - they understand Product, they blend the best of both worlds (Marketing & Product) and understand how to get the most out of the Product, improve the Product features (some even write the tickets) and get the most out of development teams and communicate this across the business.

The below deck is a quick breakdown of speaking to 20+ CMOs across 2019 and exploring how the role was and still is being disrupted, how the CMO will continue to be rebranded and what the future struggles might be if the CMO struggles to influence and own the traditional 4c’s and 4p’s.

The question now is 🤔 - Do I need to update for 2024? I think I might just have to

RIP to the CMO Role from Danny Denhard