Starting at Negative Three

I've been doling out this piece of advice a lot lately so I figured it was worth writing a bit more about it.

If you work in marketing for a creative agency, everyone will get intuitively what your role is and what work and value you offer to the rest of the team. However, at most organizations, especially tech companies, you're going to have to explain and justify your role to people who don't inherently grasp it. I've worked over the years with some people who resent having to outline and explain their contributions and their skillsets, believing that it's the other party's duty to get up to speed, learn more on their own about what marketing entails, and transform themselves into believers. By not trusting in others, they're not behaving like team players, the rationale goes. This is the wrong attitude and approach, in my opinion.

When you're interviewing for a position in the field of marketing, and subsequently when you're on-boarding at a new company, there will be a healthy amount of skepticism standing in your way. Expect it. Part of being a talented marketer, though, is interpreting how to change skeptics into supporters. Prepare for executives or members of the engineering team to come in with unflattering ideas of what marketing is -- how it can slow down processes or even obstruct progress. Remember, their opinions aren't based on nothing. So it's your responsibility to change that perception over time with good work they will appreciate and even highlight.

In this way, I advise that marketers of all types and at every level of the chain of command approach new roles believing they're beginning at negative three. This is not a poor reflection of you or your work. Rather, it's an acceptance that marketing is often perceived to have a loose set of skills and difficult-to-define standards. Marketing executives who chalk up the industry as purely branding that cannot be fully measured or really comprehended by other business people.are misguided and wind up doing a disservice to themselves and to their teams. Instead, put in the effort.

If you're up for this task, and show you're serious about working well with others, you will accomplish your goal within your first three months on the job. People will wind up coming to you with their good ideas, seeing you as a project manager or an office leader. That's when you can crank it into the next gear, with a full and confident team alongside you.