Disruptive CMO Marketing

Is Cultural Myopia Affecting Your Ability to be Effective Globally

In today’s world of global business, the need for culturally fluent managers has never been greater.

Fluency, which comes from employing your broad world view and knowledge of cultural differences, together with an understanding that often the skills needed in this international context are different, and even opposite, to those for a domestic role.

It is critical to enhance your ability to organise management across national boundaries, develops the special skills you require in international teamwork and leadership, and brings essential understanding of the challenges of cross-cultural management and global integration that can often seem hard to untangle.

The qualities that make a manager successful in one culture may be the very reason for failure when leading across cultures. And today, most organisations operate internationally. Even executives based in their home country find themselves mansging teams, suppliers, partners or customers in others. To add to the challenge, twenty-first century teams are increasingly likely to be multicultural.

Managing in a matrix and other international structures

One of the most difficult – and yet most common – challenges faced when working in an international organisation is how to manage within a complex structure. Typically some kind of matrix system will apply but there are many other multi-dimensional variants. When both you and your team members have at least two bosses based in different countries, even the simplest management tasks become complex.

20 Difficult Job Interview Questions for Marketers

These are some of the more interesting questions I have come across or which I use when interviewing to hire a marketing candidate. They are a mix of marketing technical questions as well as behavioral and hypothetical questions. Hypothetical questions evaluate how a candidate would act in a future-oriented business situation.

1. (At end of a day) Of the people you met today, who would you hire if you would start a competing service or product?

2. What would you do on your first day at the job?
- This is interesting to test what the focus is for the employee? People? Information? Tasks? on-boarding process?

3. How would you define success in the role you are interviewing for?
- Tests whether the candidate fully grasps the responsibilities for this role.

4. How would your colleagues describe your personal brand?

5. What brands do you admire personally that have truly brought something innovative to the market place?
- See if they can come up with examples you have not heard before. Anybody can say Apple or Google, but hopefully they have a broader range.

6. How do you measure ROI in media and what are your conclusions?
- test understanding of media mix modeling and breath of experience in media buying

7. How do you see media $ shift in traditional versus digital channels?

8. How would you provide social media power to your employees?

9. Who is doing sponsorships (fill in any marketing discipline ...) well and why?

10. What skills do you bring that we don't already have?

11. What are the 3 most important things to manage an account and what successes have you achieved in each?

12. How do you get the best out of your agencies? Why?

13. How does a great brief look like?

14. What do you know about our organization? and what or how well are we doing?

15. Can you provide me a recent example where you were responsible for changing the strategy for your brand that had measurable impact on the revenue line? How did you come to this change?

16. How large was the advertising budget that you were responsible for? How did you optimize the link between brand strategy to your media presence? How did this media strategy link to the strength and weaknesses of your brand? what process did you go through to develop the latest TV campaign?

17. What do you think of brand X? What have you seen of it? What would you like to change?
- So always prepare yourself. Read broker reports on the industry and the brands. They usually provide a good assessment of the challenges. I don't like it when they find everything positive. I expect a bit more critical thinking. Although if they would say, I didn't like this because so and so, but in reality that program was very successful, it would make me doubt whether they know their stuff.

18. Then I always like to ask some observational question, to see how aware the person is: What did you observe from the time you walked into this building till you entered my office? What did you like and not like?

19. I ask them about the STARs, CARs, OARs, and SOARs
- If you’re not familiar with these acronyms, STAR means "situation, tactic, action, results"; CAR means "challenge, action, results"; OAR means "opportunity, action, results"; SOAR means "situation or opportunity, action, and results". These questions gage “proof” within the context of meaningful career challenges.

20. Testing confidence: Suppose you are asked to restore the confidence of senior leaders in your (or team’s) ability, despite a recent failure. How would you go about that?