5 common leadership mistakes you’re most likely making (and how to avoid them)

Banking on a cure-all

Ian Bennison, marketing operations director at TMF Group, was after a quick fix. His teams were heavily reliant on communicating by email, which caused friction when messages were missed. In a bid to manage resource, budget and communications, Ian bought a marketing resource tool. “All our marketing directors thought it was perfect, so we agreed a three-year contract,” he says. “But when we tried to implement it, we found it didn’t fit and was far too complex. That’s when the troubles began.” The tool was binned after two years, and in the third year it was hardly used.

Workshop solutions

If you don’t understand your processes, you’ll try to make them fit the tool, rather than the other way around, warns Ian. After the software was shelved, he created a working party with representatives from each team who wrote down their processes and workshopped solutions. Once everyone’s requirements were clearly understood, he looked for a tool that would allow them to deliver the improvements. “We bought a new piece of tech for a third of the price, and it works 100% better,” he said.

Planning before data

Riccardo Weber, director of customer care, marketing and product development at Prysmian Group UK, inherited a huge campaign that began in 2017 to enhance the group’s brand within the UK market. For him, it was clear an end-user survey was needed to identify the needs of the target group before investing. “I didn’t spell it out to my team or agency because it seemed so obvious to me, but everyone else thought they knew the market already,” he said. Before he knew it, they’d all invested time and resource into a plan with a strong focus on print advertising before getting the data. “I had to pull them all back and ask them questions: where’s your proof? I’d assumed they thought the same things I did.”

Ask the right questions

“As a leader, I learnt to be absolutely clear on the goal we’re trying to achieve, clarify my expectations on timelines or method and also probe with a few questions. My favourites are ‘why’ and ‘so what’?” This enables everyone to be on the same page, making sure they can explain why they’re doing something and managing expectations on both sides. It doesn’t take much time to ask the right questions and get everybody aligned, but if it goes pear-shaped, the amount of resource to fix it is much bigger, explains Riccardo. His top piece of advice? “Don’t assume anything. If your team knows what’s expected of them, they’ll tell you.”

Falling for the unreality of sophisticated marketing

Kerry Simmons, vice president of marketing, EMEA and APAC at Lee Hecht Harrison, struggled early in her leadership career with the idea her marketing team was focused on unsophisticated marketing activities. “It seemed everyone else was doing more groundbreaking work.” Even now, marketers can fall foul to the idea that everyone is focused on AI and blockchain while they’re struggling to report accurately. This mentality is isolating and demotivating, and illusory. “You can often think the grass is greener because other companies are using the very latest tech for example, but it doesn’t reflect the reality of what’s happening as a whole,” Kerry admits.

Engage with peers externally

Kerry gained a different perspective when she started attending networking events, run by local CIM groups and B2B Marketing Leaders roundtables. “We were all having the same basic challenges, like tracking the impact of marketing activity, and building a business case for more investment in marketing,” she says. “It made me realise that what we were doing was still the right thing to do. It might not have been what was portrayed on social media, but it was what the vast majority of marketing professionals were doing on a daily basis.” Kerry also realised a lesson within the lesson – she needed to engage with peers beyond company walls in order to gain perspective. And that she was worthy of her right to do so. “It was only when I met another senior marketer who told me to go along, and explained they were friendly events, that I went,” she says. “Don’t assume it’s not for you, give it a try. You can be as active as you want, or you can just listen and learn from other people. You have a seat at the table.”

Being seduced by wishy-washy metrics

When Doug Marshall, group head of marketing at Wilmington, first started out in marketing, there was a simple way to measure campaign effectiveness – the piles of envelope orders in response to a direct mail push. There’s a lesson here, he explains. “Despite all the amazing software, platforms and techniques at our disposal, we always need to keep our eye on commercial results.” Doug remembers his team’s excitement in the infancy of digital marketing when they reached 20,000 followers on Twitter. “But when I asked what this milestone meant the answer was vague,” he says. It’s all too easy to measure metrics which might help you look good fleetingly, rather than the harder to measure metrics which makes the company successful, he warns.

Attribution model that adds value

Today, Doug and his team at Wilmington are focused on ensuring they add value at all levels, leveraging technology to improve clearer attribution. “For example, our US-based Foundation Research Associates business has used lead scoring to improve conversion rates by 50%, providing an enhanced service to sales teams that demonstrates the currency, temperature and interests of qualified leads,” he explains. “This helps us understand the value of marketing activities and guides us more quickly on the actions to take to achieve commercial targets,” he says. “Our focus is moving to outcomes, using questions to understand to what extent learning will be put into practice, and the impact on performance, which is a better indication of value. You have to ask yourself: if the metric doesn’t give you an insight on how to measure and improve commercial results, is it worth measuring?”

Prioritising speed and efficiency

Ali Griffiths, in her most recent role enterprise marketing director at KCOM, built a reputation as someone who gets things done quickly. She was even recognised recently for her ‘Fast Acting Results’ in B2B Marketing’s Top Women in Tech. “That desire to create a rapid impact caused problems as often as results early in my career,” she says. “For a long time, I assumed, quite innocently, that my peers and direct reports would see the world exactly as I did. Even with evidence mounting up that this might not be the case, I wasn’t sure what to do about it.” If a task was requested by her boss, Ali prioritised fulfilling it as rapidly and effectively as possible. “There followed numerous examples of occasions when I would feel hurt that my intentions or directions had somehow been interpreted as malign,” she explains, “while my team were often in equal parts frustrated and resentful. According to my 360-degree feedback, I was ‘ambitious’ and ‘good at managing up, but not down’.”

A new worldview

Her personal turning point came when Aviva, where she was head of corporate marketing, sent a group of 12 on a management course. “Over three weeks in the Namibian bush, we renovated a school and built a playground, guided by Raleigh International’s leadership development coaches,” she says. Being pushed out of their comfort zones was a good metaphor for business, she explains, and guaranteed their behaviours under pressure would be exposed. “We undertook in-depth Myers Briggs personality profiling,” she explains. “Each evening around the camp-fire, we would dissect our reactions to different challenges, and explain to others why we had chosen a particular route.  During these sessions, and numerous other individual conversations and activities, I finally saw the world through multiple new lenses.”