Disruptive CMO Marketing

7 Ways to Better People Management: How to Engage, Develop and Retain Talent

 I’ve seen the good and the bad things that companies do in relation to talent management. I have heard from my team, experienced good and bad policies, spoken about this topic with HR, my peers and managers and done the odd training. Here are seven practical things you can do to create employee engagement. They seem easy but are hard to implement consistently.

1. Manage with a personal touch
- People can only deliver their best when they are emotionally connected to the business and their leader. Be personal, know them
- Provide private and public personal recognition. Praise every improvement that you see your team members make. Writing "great job" and "thank you" emails go a long way.
- Take an employee to lunch once a week.

2. Understand what motivate your employees
Tell in your 1:1s that you value your team and that he or she is critical to you and you would like to understand better the motivations that drive them. Yes, they might say a salary increase or a promotion and it might be that is not possible but it gets more interesting when asking the next question: What else? They will come up with drivers that you can give. There are a number of questions you can ask. Here are a few:
- What could I do a little more of or a little less of?
- What makes for a great day?
- What can I do to make your job more satisfying?
I keep a project sheet for each team member and review regularly the motivation drivers of my team.

3. Make the ambition, vision and strategy clear and understood
- If you have a clearly formulated ambition, continue with communication where the company is heading, what this means for your department and how this translate to the subdepartments. Keep this direction simple and clear and ensure it combines the hard numbers with the projects and products that will deliver it, what it requires from the people and how it will effect cost and top line.
- I have seen dramatic swings in strategic choices and each time they cause upheaval. It is difficult for top talent to be successful if the goals and the measurement of success are constantly changing.

4. Set expectations
Be clear and direct what you expect people to do. Ensure that your managers meet regularly with their teams to update them on what has happened in the last month.

5. Seek out different opinions
Visit customers, invite people for lunch with whom you have never had lunch, go to dinner and connect with your people

6. Energize the job
Job enrichment means change in what your employees do (content) or how they do it (process). Enrichment structures ways for employees to find the growth, challenge, and renewal they seek without leaving their current job. The key to enrichment is this: what enriches one employee is different from what enriches the next. Sometimes asking a few simple questions is enough to find possibilities of enrichment:
- In what ways would you like your job changed?
- What talents do you have that you don't use but would like to use more in the future?

7. Create career opportunities
- Have a clear career path in place with due dates for next moves, criterias to distinguish between high and poor performers, and be actively involved in peoples careers.
- If your best people know that you think there’s a path for them going forward, they’ll be more likely to hang around.

Here is a model or framework to think about the various factors influencing talent engagement, development & retainment.

 

How to make and impact on you first day at work

So you landed that great new job and it is your first day. What to do?

- Meet your new boss: As soon as feasibly possible request a meeting with your new boss to run through your job description. Ask questions. Better to be honest now while you are being ‘championed’ rather than 6 months down the line.

-  Meet with your new team: Call a staff meeting of those under your control and give them the opportunity to get to know you. Focus this meeting on personal things so they start to feel comfortable with you. Follow this up with one-on-one meetings afterwards. These should be more business focused. Their being happy and productive in their work reflects well on you so this will pay dividends in the future.

- Work on your 30 / 90 /120 day plan: jot your thoughts down so you can quickly develop your short term plan. Have key questions you ask to everybody to understand where the quick wins will be.

- Set-up meetings with the key players: figure out who are the key players and set-up meetings with them. They can quickly provide support and will have a strong opinion on your agenda as well.

   
- Make a point of remembering the names of the people you will come into contact with regularly (jot them down in your little black book if it helps).

- Do not share your blog, tweet or post an update on Facebook on your new job, befriend your boss, update your Linked-in profile. Wait before you know the lay of the land before you do any of that.

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?