It Really Is About (Gulp) Leadership

While I enjoy reading about metrics and convergence and all the other buzz words we marketers use and go to conferences for, the more confirmed I am that it all boils down to leadership as the marketing engine.  Yes, I know it takes all the other stuff, but ain't nothing happening until someone points the way and charges up the hill with you.  Anything else is just an experiment in frustration, mismanagement and failure. 

I know to say leadership sounds trite, but how can it not be so?  I remember in my corporate days that you had to find a "champion" in order to get the projects funded and implemented.  Better if the "champion" was the CEO.  I have a friend who says I may be a marketer, but I'm really an organizational development person because of my stand on leadership, relatiionships, values, etc..  Call it what you want but how can the way people treat each other within a group not affect the viability and effectiveness of that group and ultimately the marketing? 

What I look for when I do a business assessment is how people are with each other, what they value, how they communicate, who holds the cards and how are they played.  It can often be a clear indicator of whether the company is really ready to excel at what they do and if the marketing advice I bring will even resonate.  I facilitated a "retreat" last Saturday where the tension and fear was thick in the air and very few truly honest thoughts were spilled so that Monday morning life would resume its usual, dysfunctional pattern.  Very sad to think of those professioinals being in such a constipated environments.  Fear is such a potent and detrimental process that strips away the ability to think clearly, creatively and with any passion.  Nothing happens but the status quo and we're not sure about quo.. 

That's why leadership is important.  The bright spot of the retreat was a young associate who had just been in the company two weeks and whose observations were so cogent and searing that he was outrightly dismissed because "he doesn't know enough yet."  The problem was that he knew enough and I'm placing bets on how long he's going to stay there now that he's seen that the Emperor has no clothes.  That young man is a leader, not afraid to speak what's in his heart.  He wasn't emotioinal, he was specific about every point he made.  Woo hoo, I thought, now we're getting somewhere, but no one wanted to go to that horizon for fear of falling off the earth.  Welcome ot the Flat Earth Society.

When we don't accept our roles as leaders, we usurp our responsiblity to the business at hand.  It may not be easy to fire someone you know when you know so many intimate details about their lives, but it has to be done.  Otherwise you're an orphanage taking on people that shouldn't be representing you.  It's okay to feel bad about doing the firing, but it's also okay to make a wise business decision.  It really is change or die, as the Fast Company article I mentioned a week or so ago.

So be an organizational development person, or a marketer, or a business development person or whatever because regardless, you and I both know it's about people who need to know the parameters in which they operate.  And it's about doing the job right.  That takes leadership on all levels.