100 Days In A New Role: 100 Changes In 100 Minutes?

Get “the lie of the land” and have an open dialogue about what’s working and what’s not before embarking on reforms, advise U.K. digital marketing gurus.

We call it “new marketing director syndrome”: the temptation when taking on a new job to make your mark with quick and decisive action, often including an immediate agency pitch.

As a consultant helping marketers find new agencies, I meet a lot of folks who are just embarking on a new role in digital marketing. And while sometimes you may need a clean slate from the get-go, more often than not you can work much more effectively with what you already have through your existing relationships.

So I sat down with some of the leading lights in the U.K. digital marketing sector to find out what their first 100 days in a new role have looked like. What were their learnings and what is their best advice?

Assessing Digital Maturity

Tom Barker joined U.K. conservation charity the National Trust in 2014 as head of digital. He’s a strong proponent of a listen-and-learn approach.

“There’s a tendency to come in and think you’ve got 100 days to prove yourself,” he said. “The focus of my first 100 days was just to get the lie of the land. It took me between three and six months to see where we needed operational change.”

“It’s important to recognise it’s not all about you. You don’t want to lose good suppliers and good people just for the sake of change. If within six months you’re recommending change for the greater good, then you’ll get the credit.”

Ash Roots joined U.K. insurance company Direct Line Group as director of digital in 2012, with the remit to improve customers’ digital experience and help the organisation to become more digital.

“The thing you do in your first 10 minutes is the state assessment,” he said. “I did one very quickly around digital capability and performance, and that drove my prioritisation.”

Craig Hepburn, the former global director of social engagement at Microsoft, has just finished his first 100 days as vice-president, digital marketing at Tata Communications. He also believes that digital is too significant to make rash changes.

“The trick is not to fall into the path of doing things quickly because that’s what people expect of you. You’ve got to make it clear that what people see as fast movement is the result of lots of work in the background.”

Hepburn agrees the most important first step is to understand the business you’ve just walked into, and particularly how mature it is in its knowledge and use of digital.

“It’s not only about marketing,” he said. “It’s about brand, sales enablement, the strategy of the business, and the story it wants to be telling. It’s about corporate comms, and PR, and it’s the realisation of where the audience is and where the communications are missing.”

That’s also the view of Geoff Seeley, who joined publishing giant Pearson as vice-president, global customer marketing from Unilever in September 2015.

“My biggest lesson was not to have any preconceived ideas of the capability and maturity of the organisation,” he said. “It’s easy to get a skewed view of the digital maturity of the business from a small sample size, so you need to take time to get a global view.”

Working With Talent

Alongside working out where the business is, you also need to know what your resources are.

“I met everyone I was going to be working with, every stakeholder, in all our seven regions,” recalled Barker. “It’s something I learnt in my previous job; this may be the only time you meet these people, so you’ve got to understand them and what they’re interested in. Otherwise, if you hit bumps in the road, and you’ve never met them, and you’re relying on phone calls and emails, it’s all so much harder.”

Seeley describes taking a “head of digital” job as “jumping into a fast-moving stream.”

“It’s an iterative process,” he said. “Any change you’re trying to drive has to fit into the operation of the business. It’s how do you twiddle with the engine while driving down the motorway?”

Part of this involves recognising the good work already being done.

“You need to give space to the people who are already doing the work and let them show you how they can improve things,” Seeley added.

“It’s important not to stop people doing that stuff,” Hepburn agrees. “But, equally, you can’t have everyone doing whatever they want, because it’ll be a mess and the resulting data will be a mess.

“I tend to bring in a partner that I trust to help see how all the tools we’ve got fit with the overall strategy. Then I can see what’s working and what’s not, and start to replace things that aren’t.”

The advantages of meeting as many staff and stakeholders as possible aren’t just in learning the business’s digital capabilities, Seeley explains.

“A lot of value in those early connections is understanding how people can help you navigate the organisation; finding the advocates and avoiding the nay-sayers,” he said. “It’s so important to recognise the talent and use them as beacons and referral points as you delve deeper into the business. It allows you to build a new shape with the talent in mind, and gives you a benchmark for others in the organisation.”

Partnerships

Barker also advocates meeting all the agencies the organisation works with early in the process.

“I’ve spent a third of my life in agencies; I know that the best people vie to work on the best accounts, and they’re the ones where you have a good, strong, fair relationship with the client,” he said. “As a client, I always want to attract the best and brightest in my agencies, and how do you do that? By being fair.”

Hepburn also meets all the agency heads early.

“I want them to tell me where the pain points are; what’s stopping them from doing brilliant work,” he said. “Then I remove those barriers and give them a short window to deliver what they say. Some step up and deliver, others disappear.”

And he agrees with Barker that what really matters is the relationship you have with your agencies.

“It’s all about having an open dialogue,” he said. “I’ve worked with people who had okay tech, but who I had a great relationship with and done great work, and with people who had great tech and a less good relationship and done less good work.”

Quick Wins

But while relationship-building is crucial to long-term success, everyone I spoke to agrees that there needs to be short-term progress too.

Roots wanted to make quick changes, but that was driven by the needs of the business. In fact, he describes his role at Direct Line as providing “shock therapy.”

“One thing I’ve learnt is the need to deliver something quickly,” he said. “It sounds easy, but, in my case, it was hard because we had capability problems. So my quick wins were in recruitment.”

For him, sharing progress is a crucial part of keeping stakeholders on board.

“You’ve got to set your stall out with the vision. Then it’s better to have something half-baked, share it, and get feedback than to have something perfect and keep it to yourself, because getting all your stakeholders to agree on a programme isn’t always going to happen.

“The key thing is to get momentum, which doesn’t necessarily mean getting permission. So you need to see the doors rather than the windows.”

Hepburn agrees.

“It’s about trying to manage without stopping progress, but then communicating the over-arching strategy and the sort of people we want to work with to deliver that,” he said:

Evaluation And Dialogue

What’s clear after speaking with everyone is that the first 100 days can play out in lots of different ways. Even though there is huge pressure for those newly arrived to prove themselves, what seems consistent across everyone I spoke with is the need to gather feedback and data points, to listen and observe, in order to make informed decisions.

This extends to their relationships with their agencies, who are often seen as key partners in the delivery of their digital strategies. Thankfully, no one suggests rushing to call an immediate pitch to get “new thinking” in. Instead, what they all advocate is an evaluation of what you’ve already got and an open and honest dialogue about what’s working and what isn’t. It’s certainly the approach we, at AAR, see working best.