The 17 Marketing Leaders’ Principles To Guide You Forward
This week I dived into a few reminders and principles for Marketing Unfiltered. These will give you food for thought and an opportunity to change your approach (or say I knew it 😉), these often come up in my coaching and advising roles too.
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The Exec Summary
Here is your executive leadership framework to my core principles for high impact leadership
1. STRATEGIC PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
- Stay close to data and work regardless of seniority level - this is your competitive advantage
- Own your performance numbers - CFOs and COOs need to see you command the data
- Balance team member types effectively:
> Leverage "Department Jokers" for cultural performance
> Engage with "Internal Influencers" to shape company sentiment
> Value "Translators" who bridge communication gaps
> Coach "Defenders/Over-Explainers" to respond constructively to feedback
2. TEAM DYNAMICS & ORGANISATIONAL DESIGN
- Create clear guardrails that define success without micromanaging
- Plan for star performer departures with contingency planning
- Handle layoffs with empathy while providing clear rationale
- Recognise the shift to "opt-in" culture - actively secure team commitment
- Foster tribal belonging especially during challenging periods
3. COMMUNICATION EXCELLENCE
- Drive cross-departmental collaboration - be the connective tissue
- Balance internal and external marketing - leverage tools like Notion/Loom
- Use the Rule of 3 for delivering impactful updates
- Differentiate signal from noise - communicate what truly matters
- Structure leadership updates with killer information, not filler
4. PERSONAL LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS
- Continue leveraging your own superpowers regardless of seniority level
- Deliver measurable business impact through people and performance
- Design better working environments for hybrid teams
- Prioritise strategic pauses to protect your time and energy
- Apply the "good enough → greatest" (not just good, better, best) product spectrum when evaluating work
The Deeper Dive The 17 Timeless Reminders You Are On The Right Path Or The Nudges You Didn't Know You Needed Today
Cross collaboration clarity - most often Marketing & Product are across details and dates, others aren’t. Being the cross collaboration partner of choice, and double down on how you can act as the glue throughout the business
Some people want and sometimes need micro-management - it is how you communicate and connect. Creating the guardrails for success is critical for your team, as well as knowing what good and bad behaviour and what success looks like. By creating successful environments with boundaries, you are removing the feeling of micro-management and guiding team members towards success.
It is ok to be close to the work and the data - there is a myth that you don’t have to be as close to the work and the data the higher up you go in your career. This is often misleading. Being close to the work and the data is a competitive advantage, working out when to step up or step out is often the difference between managers and leaders. The best CEOs are plugged in and know the flow of the business via the most important data points
Being close to the performance data is critical - it’s a frequent problem many Marketing Leads struggle with is knowing the data and understanding what it means/being able to explain it. CFOs and COOs need to see you are close to it and own the numbers - their relationships with the CEO/founder are critical as they will influence their views on you
Your superpower should always be your superpower - don’t stop working on it and enjoying it. Even as the most senior, you will want to do great work and lean into your superpowers and unleash them. This also works for your kryptonite.
Star performers leave and that’s fine - Have a plan B and design your org to feel less impact when star performers leave. It is the team who needs reassurance and needs to know there is a short to mid-term plan in place, reducing how much extra work they will have to take on.
Layoffs are hard, but often necessary - it is ok to feel it, show empathy and offer support to those leaving and those who are left in your department. Layoffs are often not what we planned or is it something that we can get behind. Helping your department to know why and how the decision was made makes a big difference. The kinder (not nicer) you are, the more it will stick in the minds of your team members.
Know the impact of different team member types
Department joker - the department joker who makes jokes, cracks comments and generally lifts the mood, might outweigh their business performance with cultural performance. This is important to know and often lean into
Internal influencers - those with more internal influence and clout than others, their words and actions can influence many without them realising. These are important members of the company, and those you will want to collaborate with and ensure they are doing well. If they have a negative impact (often turning toxic), and continue to have - it is also important you reduce or remove this.
Translator - the team member who often understands their colleagues and can translate from one to another, often being the translator between disciplines, and can communicate effectively - when these leave it has a big effect on the performance of the team. The translator is often the generalist and a mature member of the team. No translator? There’s probably a continued peer-to-peer comms issue in your team
Defend & Over Explainer - most often a specialist who will defend their actions and over-explain, and lose confidence with continued behaviour. This type of team member often creates tension even when performance is improving, or doing well when a simple question seems like an attack.
Internal marketing as much as external marketing - something we are all guilty of is not internally marketing enough and well enough. External Marketing is non-negotiable, as should be internal Marketing. Educate on the campaign, on creatives and often on why we went for x or y. With tools like Notion and Loom, there are quicker and easier ways to keep the company updated than having long emails, thick decks, large numbers of people attending presentations/forums and meetings.
It’s often opt in now - likely default opt out - most team members are now opt in, not opt out. It has slowly been happening. Leverage this by asking team members if they have opted in or are all in, this is joint declaration that your opted in together or as a team. Opt out by default goes against what we were taught, but is sadly a proactive area we as leaders need to lead on
Tribal team - when things are going well, most act tribal - this is our team, this is our work - when teams aren’t doing well, team members want to be part of the tribe and know they are safe. Understand how this impacts performance and when to bring back into the Marketing tribe
Impact! Your job as a leader is positive business impact; it’s a blend of people and goal-driven performance, remind the company of the impact of your department, give praise to team members who create impact and provide insights and examples of impact when required.
Delivering news and insight into/up to leadership - a skill that many of us don’t often teach our team members and forget when we are busy. Delivering results and news can be particularly difficult as there is never a good or right time. Understanding what is the killer information/news and what is filler will be the difference between long-term trust for many company leaders. Teach your team members how to share news, updates and when to push colleagues into your insights.
Rules of 3 will always help - struggling to get across important updates or insights? Break into three headlines with a few bullet points under each. Try to make the 3 catch or theme based. We have limited cognitive bandwidth and humans often limit our intake at 3.
Noise vs signal - We live in a noisy world with so much going on and so many distractions, we can often confuse noise as signal. As senior leaders, you should know what the important signals are and being able to cut through the noise to create signal or discount noise is vitally important, especially with so many channels and campaigns running at once. Be better at understanding what signal is, and when to communicate a signal over being noisy and sharing every little movement or change
Design better environments - we are operating in a hybrid workforce now, we are responsible for designing better environments from the workspaces in the office, to the chat apps we use at work to the meetings we attend and organise. Being deliberate in designing better environments is essential to our team’s successes.
Take a pause - you have to oversee your own management, especially your time and energy. Take a pause, grab some time to reflect, time to decompress, time to reset. The more senior you become the more important time is, and often it is stolen away from you, find the times to pause and own your time more wisely.
Bonus - in business there a term called good, better, best, we actually operate in a world where it is good enough, good, better, best, greatest, if you struggle to know where your product lands its likely just in good enough, if you are seeing great growth your product is likely at best. This is a strong benchmark to use when reviewing work, competitors and product/SKUs.
With Q2 planning and likely reforecasting underway, it is likely these 17 will come as a good reminder of what you are doing, what’s important and how to guide your staff through good, bad and ugly times.
