Eric Channing Brown is VP of Corporate Marketing at JumpCloud and is still learning how to be a better executive.
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A friend and colleague said her team was working on transitioning from individual contributor roles to more senior responsibilities and asked me to lead a workshop around “executive presence.”
I said I would be happy to—but that executive presence is the wrong goal. Presence can sometimes be too aligned with charisma, be one-dimensional or favor an outdated management style. And it often emphasizes achieving a superficial appearance.
What I believe senior leaders need more than presence is an executive MBA: a holistic approach to leadership that includes mindset, behaviors and accountability.
Mindset
I learned early on that executives must focus on the big picture, or what I call “whole organization” thinking.
Years ago, I was responsible for a company’s repositioning. I advocated for an early and ambitious PR/AR push, put my proposal together, set bold targets for media buzz and had a budget that was large but not crazy.
The executive staff applauded my presentation and yet rejected my proposal. Yes, I put together an amazing publicity plan. But I hadn’t weighed product availability, considered sales training or thought about the cultural transformation our company would require to embrace a new technology, competitive position and go-to-market motion. Executives must think about all those factors and more. A strong leader will delay or scrap a program that benefits one function but jeopardizes the success of the entire company.
The second mindset is one that balances near- and long-term planning.
Every quarter comes with pressure to deliver results. But are those results sustainable? Will a quick success be a fluke or the foundation upon which you can build future successes? How does a program that looks amazing today support your long-term growth, revenue and brand goals?
Newsjacking, issues response and Zeitgeist opportunities present themselves as relatively easy publicity vehicles. Social commentary with a provocative angle can net you some ink. Kicking a competitor while they are down may get your company mentioned in a news roundup. But do those choices support your long-term brand or what your customers care about or build a strong publicity foundation?
Finally, executives should trust the people around them while they inspect and verify.
Great executives set ambitious goals, hire great talent and empower their people. They start with trust: trust that they hired or assigned the right people; trust that those people have the tools they need or will ask for them; trust that everyone at the company wants the company to succeed; and trust that the decisions and programs their leaders make and champion will yield the desired business outcomes. Yet they also inspect and verify with metrics dashboards, skip-levels, peer reviews, employee engagement surveys and meaningful interactions throughout the company—and with customers and partners—to gauge how their company and people are performing.
Behaviors
Make giving feedback, seeking it out and getting it part of every day. Giving feedback comes naturally to most of us—but we should ask for it too. How can I help you, what would empower your success, what barriers stand in your way, and what would you do differently in my position? These are all excellent starting points.
Many experts have written about the role of coaches in business—because coaching is an executive behavior that distinguishes confident, strong leaders from the rest of the pack. In comms, it is sometimes easier—or at least tempting—to write the press release or email copy than to coach those around us on how to write well. Learn to coach, explain and model—and learn at the same time to let go. Executives who try to do everyone else’s jobs will likely fail at their own due to burnout, the inability to meet deadlines, or not setting and attaining the big-picture goals that executives are responsible for.
And this reinforces the final executive behavior “must do”: Play your position. If you are a marketer, give feedback to sales, engineering, customer service and finance peers—don’t do their jobs. Communicate the interdependencies you have with them. Ask what you can deliver to enable their success; don’t provide a blueprint for their work. By all means, if you are a PR pro and have great ideas about a demand-gen campaign, share them—but don’t jump in to optimize the overall marketing mix, media buying and planning, or creative. Great teams require people who know their position, play it well and communicate with others on the team to achieve greatness. A great executive—whether they are the head of the team or a star player—knows to play their position and not wander.
Accountability
I have seen amazing individual contributors or junior leaders stumble on their way to executive roles for the lack of one thing: accountability.
“I didn’t have the right budget, timely input from the product team, the ideal agency or a star spokesperson.” All are excuses we have heard (or said) as comms pros. Those may be okay if you are new to your job. None of those work for an executive.
If you didn’t have the right budget, you should have said so early on and asked for more money or adjusted the expected outcomes. If you didn’t have the right content or the right spokesperson or enough lead time for the launch, you should have said so before your publicity yielded lackluster results.
Here’s the thing about executive accountability: Learning from your mistakes and acknowledging and working on your own shortcomings will only make you a better, stronger executive over time. Denying accountability prevents that necessary learning. Saying that a failure was someone else’s fault absolves you of any responsibility to do something better in the future. It can also make other executives—and colleagues—think that you aren’t quite ready for an executive leadership position.
Executive presence will only get you so far with a projection of authority or expertise. Adopting an “executive MBA” approach with mindset, behaviors and accountability can give you what you really need beneath the surface to achieve executive success.
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