What creatives can learn by job shadowing other marketers

My job shadowing opportunity came at a really good time – when we had conflict to resolve.

We’ve had job shadows before, usually high school or college students wanting to observe us professionals for a few hours or a day in a job they’re interested in.

In response to demand for more professional development, marketing leadership created a similar experience within the department: a job shadowing program for existing employees to learn firsthand from our peers.

Goals of the program

The primary objectives of the marketing job shadow program are:

• Learning about team members’ responsibilities and gaining insights into how the job is done.
• Sharing knowledge and experience.
• Building cross-functional relationships.
• Providing education about industry specific practices, techniques and skills.
• Enabling employees to explore potential career paths within the department.

The “potential career paths” part didn’t interest me as much as the parts about gaining insights into the job, providing education and sharing knowledge. I saw job shadowing as an opportunity to resolve some ongoing challenges in our cross-functional relationships, particularly solving the mysteries behind content projects getting delayed or rejected.

This is not a list of What "Friends" Can Teach You About Marketing. But sometimes as part of the creative team, I feel cut off from the strategic and stakeholder relations part of the team – as if, like Rachel, "I'm not allowed to talk to Ralph Lauren."

Why I requested to be a job shadow

As much as I’d love to say I thought to apply for job shadowing all by my enlightened self, I didn’t. It took a few meetings where I needed to vent first. Then two different leaders suggested job shadowing: the VP of marketing proposed it and the news director endorsed it.

I know I have some room to grow in the business and strategy part of health care marketing. I’m also naturally curious – it’s one reason I became a journalist – so I perked up at the chance to learn more. How I phrased that motivation in my application:

“Sometimes I wonder why certain project steps take time, or whether we can do something in the ‘stakeholder relationships’ realm differently. (I’m sure the ‘I wonder’ feeling is mutual. My priority is learning from them, but I can share my knowledge and experience as needed.)”

I concluded with this: “I didn’t major in marketing so everything I know I’ve learned on the job. This would be a great chance to learn from someone who practices marketing every day.”

In other words, my wish was to make the cross-funtional less dysfunctional.

How it started … how it’s going

Once my application was accepted, the job shadow coordinator assigned me to Kayla Kunde (Sifferath) , a business partner I respect and enjoy. (In our department, business partner is an enterprise-level role in consumer marketing, also known as account services.)

In our kickoff meeting, I shared with Kayla my wish to better understand how consumer marketing ticks since I only see the production end of a project. And that sometimes I felt like a nag when something was well past deadline but out of my hands.

Then Kayla shared her impression: that suddenly a team that had been easy to work with was making new demands out of the blue. The news team had started regularly checking on projects, documenting the communications and escalating to their project managers and supervisors and their manager’s managers when we didn’t hear back.

We had each told ourselves a different story. Without clear communication from the consumer marketing requester, I was left to believe that creative work wasn’t a priority. Yet without clear communication from us, she was left to believe that we were singling out a member of the consumer marketing team.

Already we were understanding each other better.

So we made a plan to take pressure off individual team members by raising any concerns to project managers first. We also scheduled time for me to observe how Kayla works with stakeholders in a series of meetings.

The project manager approach is making cross-functional relationships easier, and it’s one of the reasons projects are moving through production more smoothly now. Workload planning and traffic management are big reasons, too.

Top 5 takeaways

From attending stakeholder meetings with Kayla, here are my main takeaways:

1. Stakeholders: They’re just like us! On the production side it’s easy to treat people in leadership like celebrities if you always see them but never actually meet them. Joining them in a meeting reminded me they are humans with their own quirks.
2. Educating is a big part of our job. Stakeholders are experts in their fields, not in marketing. When they asked questions of the marketing business partner they work with, I was relieved to hear I wasn’t the only one who has to explain my job or my decisions.
3. Recommendations can require multiple conversations. Related to our education role is our recommendation role. Stakeholders can tell us what they need and still not accept how we offer to address those needs, at least not the first (or second, or third) time.
4. Building trust takes time. Once we execute a recommendation, stakeholders need evidence that it worked well or that we will change for the better next time. This process does not have a deadline; it can take weeks, months, even years.
5. We have more opportunities. While I was able to observe how Kayla works as a general resource, I’d still like to join her sometime when marketing is on the agenda and content is being reviewed.

If you don't have an internal job shadowing program like I've described, maybe propose your own on an individual basis. The right mentor will be happy to share their expertise. And it's well worth the time for both of you.

Even (especially) mid-career, I appreciate the job shadow program as a set time to develop professional skills, including strategic and relationship-building ones. Now I look forward to communicating across teams early and often, rather than letting assumptions and resentments build.

I recommend cross-team job shadowing to everyone. When we’re open to learning from each other, we encourage everyone to adopt a growth mindset. Those opportunities let us grow as individuals and help us influence a healthy, whole workplace culture.