Alex Singleton

Sometimes people feel awkward because they go to a meeting and have nothing to say. They worry that more senior people at the meeting will feel they are out of their depth. Yet they see others take leading parts in those meetings, and wonder what it is that they are lacking.

This is a perfectly common way to feel and can be part of imposter syndrome. Whether that’s how you feel or not, there are some techniques to improve your effectiveness in meetings.

1. Be clear in your own mind about the reason for your attendance

It’s perfectly fine to say nothing in a meeting if you are there because you need to implement the decisions of the meeting, or you’re there to gain information so you can update project plans. Others at the meeting will appreciate the new project plan or the fact that the has project has been successfully completed.

While you might think, if you don’t say anything, that others think you are inadequate somehow, others normally just think you’re there because you’re doing the grafting on the project.

Some people go to meetings because it makes them feel like they are working or it gives them a sense of importance – these are bad reasons to go to them. They can also stop you rolling your sleeves up and getting on with work, and rob you of the time to think.

Dov Frohman, the founder and first General Manager of Intel Israel, says: “Every leader should routinely keep a substantial portion of his or her time – I would say as much as 50 percent – unscheduled. … Only when you have substantial ‘slop’ in your schedule – unscheduled time – will you have the space to reflect on what you are doing, learn from experience, and recover from your inevitable mistakes. Leaders without such free time end up tackling issues only when there is an immediate or visible problem.”

Or as Tom Peters puts it: “Overscheduling is stupid/couterproductive/juvenile.”

2. Prepare

If you’re not saying anything because you have nothing to say but feel you should, this can be fixed with some preparation.

Those of us who’ve spent years in work have a data bank of past experiences to draw upon, but if you’re earlier in your career, you can’t rely on that so much. So the trick is to prepare more for meetings than more senior people.

Think about data or reports you could look up on how other businesses have approached a problem. What information could help improve the quality of the decision making? If the meeting is to discuss marketing a new product, could you bring some SEO research on what relevant search terms get the most traffic? Most importantly, read any circulate PowerPoint decks or other documents in advance of a meeting, which will get you thinking.

It may be that you have more time that the more senior people attending, so look for opportunities to present. Speaking to a PowerPoint deck can be a more structured way of contributing to a meeting, and a good way to add value.

3. Don’t worry about looking silly

If you’re keeping quiet because you worry that you’ll look stupid, I can let you into a little secret. We’ve all been there – and having someone disagree strongly with what you’ve suggested is just a part of life. Over time, experience and a thick skin come to play.

As Winston Churchill put it: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Many years ago, I was in a meeting where Stuart (not his real name) gave an impassioned argument for why we should do something. Everyone sitting around the table looked at each other looked confused, and then someone pointed out that we had, in fact, already done what was being proposed. Stuart went red, embarrassed by gaffe, but soon after was promoted and has subsequently had a hugely successful career. The point is that experiences like this are not actually significant, even if they feel painful at the time.

I worked with an introvert who always had great analysis – but one-to-one rather than in meetings. I worked out I could help but responding to his thoughts by asking him to bring the points up in the meetings.

There are tricks if you are not confident that your comments will gain support. One person often starts by saying: “I’m just going to think out loud” when she throwing out a new idea. It detaches herself from the views. Another is to make a suggestion as a question: “To what extend do you think x could have an effect?”

4. Take notes – but not too many

Note taking should be about actions and recording important feedback. There’s something disconcerting when you’re speaking to see someone writing every word you say down.

Roger Mavity, in the book Life’s a Pitch, suggests it indicates that people are not actually allocating any time to process what you’re saying, but just recording it, which is not what you want. But if someone takes down key points – for example, when you’re giving feedback on their presentation – it’s reassuring.

5. Take and deliver actions

We’ve probably all come across the odd individual who seeks to push all their work onto others and never takes an action from a meeting, except to ask someone else to do something. It’s not a good place to be in as everyone quickly works out that they lack a work ethic.

Amusingly, in one job I witnessed someone deliberately orchestrating for two of these “work-pushers” to collaborate on the same project. She had great fun watching them send emails to each other backwards and forwards trying to push their work to the other. Eventually, as time ran out, they realised that they had to actually do some of the actions themselves.

Obviously, being a “work pusher” is not the way to be, and if you take and deliver actions as a result of a meeting, that’s a good indication that your participation was worthwhile. Just avoid being one of those people whose actions are always to ask someone else to do the work.

For any team to be a success, you have to build credibility throughout your organisation. That way, colleagues will trust that you know what you’re doing and see you as a useful partner.

Marketing teams are a challenge because there’s a big misconception about what marketing teams are for, and because everyone thinks they understand marketing, even if they don’t.

So if want to build credibility, how do you go about it? Here are five key techniques.

1. Build in wins

Any team trying to establish itself needs to drip-feed wins. There are always challenges that are going to say some time to overcome, but to keep everyone’s confidence you can’t wait for them to deliver wins.

Instead, while you do the difficult and time-consuming programmes of change, you need simultaneously to be delivering a steady stream of quick wins. These keep everyone off your back. It helps people view you as a winner and makes them more likely to think your change management plans are worth backing.

2. Over-communicate

Many hard workers prefer to keep their heads down and get on with the work. This is a mistake: you need to over-communicate your vision for change, otherwise you will not get support for it.

Any company meeting is an opportunity to share why change is necessary and what your team is doing to drive success. Moreover, you need to communicate what the marketing team is actually for – not the colouring-in department, there to produce leaflets and branded pens for people, but a strategic function that drives revenue.

What’s your programme of change and do people really understand it?

3. Make marketing data-led

There is no place for the fluffy approach to marketing, in which marketers say things like: “We don’t need to look at data. I feel instinctively that the campaign worked.” Research by analysts at Fournaise found that 80 per cent of marketers struggle with being able to demonstrate the effectiveness of marketing.

Fournaise said that result was that: “Every Tom, Dick and Harry is a marketer, lacking the scientific and financial knowledge expected of marketers to optimise the creative aspect of the discipline.” Ouch!

In the modern world: no data, no credibility.

4. Understand cashflow

A popular argument these days is that marketers are too short-termist and that should focus more on long-term brand building that will pay off in the end. It gets trotted out by marketers running campaigns that have no positive effect in either the short or long term.

In fact, the leading proponents of the view that we should be less short-termist, in their report The Long and the Short of It, point out that the advertising that delivers long-term brand building also drives sales in the short-term.

In fact, marketers need to be cognisant of cashflow. It is not realistic to expect companies to fund bigger budgets on the aspiration that years in the future a benefit might materialise.

In an important article from the year 2000, Drayton Bird wrote about what went wrong with so-called Dot-com companies, who had suffered a crash, and it has been significant in my thinking not just of internet companies but of scale-ups more generally:

Many of the dotcommas rightly want to build a brand. But they have it all the wrong way round. First get the sales. If the service is good, the brand will follow. What use is a brand if you’re broke? Ask Hoover [who had “grown” the brand with a catastrophic free flights offer].

Even a huge success such as Direct Line took years to climb from nowhere to being a big brand. It understood the importance of getting across the message of its unique positioning. Every ad got response and built the brand.

You want as a marketer to create long-term relationships, but if you’re not paying back your marketing investment in a reasonable timeframe there’s a problem.

5. Accountability

Lots of people don’t want to take accountability. They fear it – they want to make the decisions, but see everyone else as being to blame if they don’t work out. But taking accountability is a wonderfully liberating and empowering thing. In marketing teams, that means being a department that drives and delivers business outcomes, not just getting through a tick list of actions.

When you consider that effective marketing programmes are an iterative process in which learning constantly takes place, I believe that being accountable, far from being scary, is actually a good way to set yourself up for success.

How do project managers (PMs) gain buy-in from marketing teams? Sometimes marketing teams perceive project managers as a time drain – and vice-versa.

This disconnect, however, is unnecessary.

Over the years I worked with some fantastic project managers in marketing and comms teams. Here’s what I’ve learned to be five key ways for project managers to gain support and contribute strongly to a marketing project’s success.

1. Develop a clear value proposition

The best project managers have clear in their minds what their value proposition is, and they communicate this at the start of their engagement with others.

A project manager I worked with explained her value in terms of preventing clashes. The organisation had grown such that there were various silos who had an uncanny ability to all schedule their biggest activities of the quarter in the same week. By acting as glue between teams, she made our lives easier by spreading the work out.

(This project manager was also very good at project managing by walking around. She would stop by people’s desks for a few minutes and check that the project plan still made sense.)

2. Combine ‘connecting’ and ‘doing’

Great project managers combine “connecting” with “doing”. A qualified PM, otherwise known as my sister, tells me that you have to be seen to roll your sleeves up. Otherwise you don’t gain credibility.

That means being seen to save time of your colleagues by completing project reports and timelines, taking on some of the organisational actions or, if you combine marketing skills with project management ones, spending some of your time devising marketing ideas or even writing copy.

3. Study principles not just frameworks

Great project managers also know that frameworks, such as Prince2, only get you so far.

In fact, in marketing teams, the dominant methodologies are tick lists and the occasional Gantt chart, plus two Agile methodologies: Kanban boards and, for web development, Scrum. Prince2 just isn’t used and would not be appropriate for the type of projects being undertaken, although of course you can apply some of the ideas from it.

Zooming out from just one framework at looking at the principles of project management as a subject is useful, as is developing influencing and people skills. That’s why I believe those thinking of developing skill in project management would do well to look at courses and apprenticeships taught by the Association of Project Managers.

4. Learn the subtlety of a project

Understanding the subtlety of what the team is trying to achieve is also a key attribute. There can be hundreds of items on a project plan, three-quarters of which are pretty unimportant.

Being great isn’t just about having a risk log, it’s having a strong feel about what’s important in a project. Likewise, if you’re trying to allocate people to particular project deliverables, you need to avoid thinking of people as a commodity and understand the individuals.

5. Be relentlessly solutions focused

Finally, great project managers are solutions focused. A core skill is being able to cut through silo mentality and any personal animosities and help people get the end product delivered.

You might think it’s unwise for a marketing director like me to write an article giving away the secrets of how to be promoted. But there’s a benefit in removing the confusion people have about what might get them a promotion, whether in title, responsibility or salary. Let’s face it, it can be frustrating to be in the dark about why promotions happen or don’t.

In a world where organisations have become flatter, the idea of a promotion is more complex than it used to be. A hierarchical agency, for example, might employ someone as a Junior Account Executive, who six months later becomes an Account Executive, before becoming an Account Manager, Senior Account Manager etc – all, essentially, the same job.

In an in-house job, at a flat organisation, you might not receive any tweaks to your job title during the same period, while still being highly regarded. A promotion in this context might be more around the complexity of work you get to do or whether, over time, you can wangle a pay rise.

However you define a promotion, let’s look at the techniques to get one, what holds people back, and the one thing that’s more useful to your career than a promotion per se.

What really causes promotions?

Firstly, the most important factor is out of your control: it’s about being in the right place at the right time. If someone leaves for another employer, that role might become available. Recessions or periods of economic uncertainty reduce opportunities for promotions because others aren’t moving jobs. Boom times make promotions easier to attain.

Secondly, for any marketing job you take, you ought arguably to be good at delivering 70 to 80 per cent of it from day one. The remaining 20 to 30 percent is stuff that will stretch your knowledge and abilities, and develop you as a professional.

The point at which you are plausible for a promotion is when you are good at delivering 110 to 130 per cent of the role. That is to say, you can do the full breadth of your job well and are also impressing people by taking on tasks that someone with more experience would be expected to do.

According to one career expert, early in your career you should be getting a promotion every three years, but title improvements slow as you get more senior.

Thirdly, it’s important to be clear that you derive energy from your job. Some people are perceived as being happy where they are. They come to work but seem to get almost most of their meaning in life from outside, viewing their job as a transactional relationship. The ones who show excitement about marketing as a profession, by reading books and blogs, going to industry events and suggesting innovations, are much more likely to be considered for a bigger role.

Fourthly, are you professionally qualified, doing professional qualifications, or enrolled on a continuing professional development scheme? These make you valuable not just to your employer but also on the market outside the company, because they get you to the top of a pile of CVs – increasing your perceived leverage.

Finally, do you have a clearly defined value proposition? The work of Alex Osterwalder et al has massively influenced how marketers talk about value, and the models that are applied to products and services can help your thinking in how you position yourself. What are you best in your team or company at doing? What could you become best at?

What are the biggest mistakes that people make in trying to get promotions?

The first mistake is when people try to make themselves irreplaceable by clinging onto information and tasks. People with low self-confidence feel that they can protect their position and get promoted by preventing others from being involved in their function. They ensure that no one else has a login for any system, and they keep the details of how to do their jobs secret. In fact, the people who get promoted tend to be the ones who are train up other people to cover for them when they are away or busy, and are seen as good organisers of systems.

For example, Tony (not his real name) was always invaluable to me as a member of team because I could deploy him to any function and he’d put in place systems that worked, he write standard operating processes and easy-to-read instructions, and he’d train and guide other staff on how to make everything a success. He could have clung onto information but he gained far more by being seen as a versatile manager. His skillset made him valuable and promotable.

The second mistake is to get an external job offer as a negotiating strategy. People have a life-cycle in a job that’s unique to them. If they seek external job offers they give the impression that they are ready to move on. When someone leaves there’s always some disruption but employers often think that there are downsides to a counter offer.

When I left my last job, my boss asked me: “How much would it cost us to keep you?” I am pretty sure that I could have extracted quite a lot of money at that point, because the organisation was doing extremely well and they liked me. But I replied that it wasn’t about the money but that I wanted to become head of department. It would have been a mistake for me to stay, even though I enjoyed the job.

Another mistake is impatience. A career is not a sprint and, though it may be frustrating, sometimes time doing a job well over a good period of time adds value by showing that you can stick with things. If you can do your current job easily, it can be a good place in which to learn new things, including volunteering to help with other work. (But if you have an unsupportive boss, it can help to move.)

Why professional development is better for your career than a promotion

Human capital appreciation, as they would say in the investment world, is worth way more than a pay rise. I’ve spent a five-figure sum on professional development over the past decade, mostly on an MBA, and benefitted from some employer support, too.

If your head of department is on a journey to up-skill the team and deliver better performance, you’re in a fantastic place to grow personally. The trick is to learn how you can access training that will improve your abilities.

I once met someone who told me that he daren’t ask his line manager for training because it felt like he was asking for more money and he felt awkward. But as a line manager and head of department, I see this rather differently.

Asking about professional development is clever because:

• it shows that you want to improve
• employers can see that it benefits them, too, as long as it’s relevant
• companies in the UK are having to spend money on an apprenticeship levy, so programmes such as CIM apprenticeships are likely to be agreed
• HR types love it.

Digital is transforming how we market, and effective marketing departments need a learning culture. If you are learning at a rapid pace, this can ​be what has ​the most significant effect on your long-term success.