Relationship building: the easily forgotten but powerful tool marketing leaders can use to fight turnover

Long before the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and now the “Great Breakup,” marketing has had a turnover problem. In my conversations with CMOs, a constant message I hear is that they’re feeling “under the gun.” My LinkedIn feed is filled with daily updates on marketers moving around. And then you’ve got the movement toward the fractional CMO model, fueled in large part by the desire seasoned marketing leaders have to take control of their own destinies.

Marketers are in high demand, but expectations of them are often misaligned

Year after year, marketing places in LinkedIn’s top 5 highest turnover functions, and a 2017 analysis by Korn Ferry found that CMO is the shortest-tenured title in the C-suite. What the experts have to say about why marketing professionals are uniquely turnover-prone echoes what I’ve been writing about lately: the job of marketing is complicated, demanding, and hard to support; it is both a great challenge and a great opportunity.

Says former Korn Ferry MD Caren Fleit in response to the same analysis, “Today’s customer-centric CMO role is exceptionally complex and requires the right balance of left as well as right brain skills, and very importantly, a differentiated set of leadership competencies…CMOs with this unique profile are in high demand and are often recruited to lead the next transformation.”

But it’s not all good. She continues: “In some cases, short tenure can be attributed to the organization not being well aligned behind the change that the CMO is tasked with leading.” Harvard Business Review elaborates in “Why CMOs Never Last”: “We believe that a great deal of CMO turnover stems from poor job design. Any company can make a bad hire, but when responsibilities, expectations, and performance measures are not aligned and realistic, it sets a CMO up to fail.”

In addition to avoiding turnover themselves, marketing leaders must protect their teams

To be clear, CMO turnover and turnover within the ranks of a marketing team are related but separate issues. Nonetheless, marketers at all levels face misalignment and mismanaged expectations. My advice to top marketing executives on how to avoid turnover themselves boils down to grounding strategy in business, driving collaboration through conversation, and measuring success more qualitatively, all of which I’ve already written about.

Don’t pass the pressures that cause us to turn over at the highest rates down to the people you manage

Another call I have for marketing leaders is this: don’t pass the pressures that cause us to turn over at the highest rates down to the people you manage. To protect our marketing teams from turnover, my advice is to remember that work—especially marketing—is relational. As the LinkedIn analysis referenced above puts it, our work is “consultative, interpretive, and interpersonal.” We ask the people who work for us to connect to our customers as humans. We shouldn’t forget to look at our team in the same way.

Remember, marketing is about relationships—externally and internally

Relational leadership, in contrast to operational leadership, means focusing on people. Relational leaders are fueled by direct interactions and value individual feelings and needs. Operational leaders look to systems, structure, plans, and outcomes for guidance. Both modes are needed for marketing leaders to effectively manage the dynamics of the job. But when it comes to retaining talent, i.e. avoiding the heavy internal and external costs of turnover, relational leadership is the sharper tool. Helping team members feel good and get what they need keeps them around when things don’t go according to plan. Attachment to outcome when the situation is hard most often comes at the cost of relationality, and the result is disengagement and burnout.

Relational practices to borrow or steal from the Augurian team

The call for relational leadership will not be new for most anyone in our industry—again, marketers tend to place care in the areas of connection and people. Instead, take this article as a reminder, and possibly a source of inspiration. Below are two practices that the Augurian team uses to show up for each other as humans. Borrow from them or steal them if they’ll help your team.

When it comes to retaining talent, i.e. avoiding the heavy internal and external costs of turnover, relational leadership is the sharper tool.

Dedicated time for sharing about our weekends as an entire team

Our team meetings are on Mondays, and half an hour of them are wholly devoted to talking about what we did over the weekend. Most leaders might feel like this isn't a good use of time—that these conversations can happen organically offline. But people naturally gravitate to others who are similar to them or end up investing the most in the people they work with the closest. By creating a platform that’s teamwide, we all learn about one another's family structures, pets, hobbies, favorite films, restaurants, and sports teams—the little things that build community and connection. This 30 minutes of bonding time goes a long way, especially in a hybrid environment where we sometimes go a whole week without seeing one another in person.

A recognition system where wins are defined and critiqued by the team

Most teams follow the practice of celebrating wins, but we’ve actually gamified team wins through something we call Baseball. On a weekly basis, individual team members have the chance to present their wins with clients. Then the rest of the team votes on whether their presentation was a “single,” “double,” “triple,” or “home run.” We keep score over the quarter and award winners for every “season.” This format not only lets us recognize each other's performance, but also gives team members the opportunity to improve their presentation skills and learn from each other. It’s a lot of fun, and lets us celebrate the incremental accomplishments as we go.

Autumn, an analyst on the team shares, “What makes Baseball so cool is that it encourages a flat structure across the organization. Regardless of title, you’re expected to give your opinion on the ‘win.’ As an analyst, having to critique teammates who are further in their careers on how they could have presented a win better is weird, but it 100% encourages a culture of feedback.”

The fact that marketers leave or are asked to leave their jobs so often illustrates the duality of difficulty and possibility we face in our profession. More so than in other industries, being a leader in marketing means remembering that our craft is about connection. Don’t lose sight of protecting the relationships on your team when things get challenging.

Follow me here on LinkedIn for more advice on navigating the challenges of being a marketing leader.

Josh Becerra?is President and Founding Partner of?Augurian, an award-winning digital marketing agency started in 2015. He also is the host of a?podcast series?where he interviews SaaS industry leaders on their marketing insights and experiences.