‘The more senior you are, the lonelier it becomes’: How marketers cope while leading through crisis
Marketing leaders from Marketing Week’s Top 100 share how they personally deal with managing teams through times of uncertainty.
With so much attention placed on leaders during times of crisis, it can be easy to forget they are also just people. People with big jobs to do, yes, but people that need coping mechanisms and support nonetheless.
So, how do you lead through a period of prolonged uncertainty? While the last few years have seen the UK seemingly immersed in crisis after crisis, leaders will have learnt a thing or two about staying afloat, both in terms of the work they do but crucially, personally surviving too.
Being resilient is “obviously important for your own sanity”, says Sara Bennison, former chief product and marketing officer at Nationwide. But staying level headed is also crucial for “your team, the business and everything around you”, she adds.
“They are looking to you to provide that stability, answers and a sense of calm when the world is in chaos,” she says. “And that’s why it becomes really important that you develop the ability to find you own anchor, in order to be that person for others.”
Looking after yourself as a leader can help to bolster colleagues too. Bennison says: “If you’re all over the shop, they’re not going to trust you and believe you, and that’s bad for their sense of wellbeing, but it’s also bad for the business because they’re not going to do the work you’re demanding of them.”
For Phillip Almond, executive director of fundraising and marketing at Cancer Research UK, leaders must present themselves as being calm, steady and centred.
“I think as a leader, the one place you can’t look for support is from your own team,” he says. “Your team will usually be supportive if you’re a good leader, but it’s your job to support them, not the other way around.”
Instead, if you need support, Almond suggests turning to executive colleagues or finding support from people in similar roles at other organisations.
During the pandemic, he joined a group of peers, “which was literally just a talking shop for CMOs to get together virtually”. Members of the group were often facing similar problems and he says there was “real support in those environments”.
The more senior you become, in a way the lonelier it becomes.
Sara Bennison
Leaning on people who have been in a comparable position or through a similar experience is something Almond has also found useful throughout his career.
While at Diageo in 2008, he sought out the person who’d been in his job during the recession of the early 1990s. This person had kept a document about all the lessons learnt from the recession, and while some things had changed dramatically in the intervening 25 years, many were the same. “So, seek out those contacts who’ve been through it before,” he urges marketers, while also encouraging them to think about what might be different this time around.
“I think the resilience and confidence of having been through a couple of these [recessions] is useful. And that’s why, particularly if [it’s] you’re first time, talking to other CMOs and people who’ve been through it, digging out those old bosses who might remember, is a useful thing to do.”
Trusted relationships
Like Almond, Bennison suggests another way to manage stress is to find likeminded people to share with.
“The more senior you become, in a way the lonelier it becomes,” she says. “Because you’ve got more people depending on you to be strong, and fewer people are [able] to provide that.”
She explains how finding two people you can “totally trust” is one way of coping with a prolonged period of uncertainty, where you can “let off steam and know you’re in a safe place”.
Crucially, doing this means the stress doesn’t “build up and become very visible” to the team you’re managing. “The whole thing of manage yourself, manage your emotions, is really hard but it becomes, in a way, one of the most important things – and yet it’s not something that people tell you [about] much as a leader,” she adds.
“They give you lots of management textbooks and send you on courses, but ultimately, that’s not going to help when the chips are down if you can’t keep that balance and that sense of equilibrium.”
For Nikki Vadera, Henkel’s marketing and digital director for consumer brands, talking to friends and family outside of the marketing world can also bring perspective.
She often talks to her husband who works in primary schools, which she says can be refreshing. “Sometimes he finds it hilarious when I tell him things that have happened in the day that I’m really serious about, and other times he can give me some really good advice of how he manages in this situation,” she explains.
While she does rely on friends and family, Vadera also says she has to “take a bit of ownership myself”. She commits to 15-minute mindfulness slots to breathe and slow down, which she describes as a “healthy” addition to her time.
Simple advice
Bennison also underlines the importance of exercise and looking after yourself in order to alleviate stress. This is something that was emphasised by a management coach she worked with after taking on her first executive committee role. She thought: “What is he going to tell me? Is he going to produce something from the Harvard Business Review that’s going to revolutionise my management style?”
He gave me “permission to go for a run every day, or do some exercise” to release endorphins, which can help to relieve stress. As a leader, if you don’t look after yourself, “you will get more and more stressed and you will translate that to your team”, she adds.
Rather than focusing on the “intellectual answer to, ‘how am I going to be a great leader?’”, she advises CMOs to ask themselves three simple questions: “Am I exercising? Am I eating well? Am I sleeping enough?”.
“The only person who can do it for you, is you.”
‘It is relentless’: Marketing leaders on managing perennial uncertainty
Team dynamic
When it comes to managing teams, particularly as we enter another wave of uncertainty, Vadera says it can be “really tempting to slip back into task mode” to try fix the situation at hand.
“But realistically, we need to be mindful of our teams’ personal circumstances, and so for me, things like compassion, empathy and awareness are going to be huge in helping teams move forward,” she adds.
While it feels like we’re in a perennial period of uncertainty, leaders will also be trying to keep things in perspective.
“It depends on your age to a factor how much the last period of economic uncertainty affected you,” says Vadera. “But what we can learn from that is there’s always light at the end of the tunnel.”
“It might be a really difficult and daunting time now, but we can come through it,” she adds.
Bennison points out that while leaders have been through several years of uncertainty, the landscape today is quite different to when Covid first hit.
During the pandemic, “from a leadership perspective, yes that was incredibly challenging, but there were also not many options,” she says. However, the current cost of living crisis and rising inflation, coupled with the after-effects of the pandemic, are making leadership today “more challenging”, particularly from a work set-up perspective, as businesses try and find the right balance between remote and office working.
When businesses are struggling in period of uncertainty, if anything, you should either be spending the same, or more
Nikki Vadera, Henkel
“I think that becomes really challenging to lead through because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer or one definitive outcome that you’re heading towards,” she says. So, what becomes “really important” is listening to and understanding the organisation and working out what is needed.
But there may be a problem in that too, as Bennison says, “I think the danger is it becomes so all-consuming that people forget the normal style of doing business”.
Bennison is currently on gardening leave, and space away from the working environment has led her to reflect.
“Just having some distance from the madness of those two years has been enormously beneficial,” she says. “You just think, gosh, all this time and energy talking about how many days a week we aren’t going into the office, versus how much time and energy we should be talking about where we want to take the business and what the brand should stand for.”