Kim Whitler | Colonel Mustard in the Study With the Job Spec How Poor Design Shortens CMO Lifespans

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1:37Learn more at typeface.ai slash CMO. Welcome marketers, advertisers, and those who love them to Chief Marketing Officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former chief marketing officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com. Here today with my guest, Dr. Kim Whitler. Today's topic, Colonel Mustard in the study with the job spec, how poor design shortened CMO lifespans.

2:21Now, Kim started her career at P &G and went on to be a GM of Aurora Foods and CMO of David's Bridal. She then shifted to the academic world and is now a professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. She has served on a number of boards, including Kalon Aesthetics, I think I said that right, the American Marketing Association, and the AMA Foundation. She is a tireless researcher of the CMO position and just published new work on the impact of the job spec. Hint, it reinforces her earlier advice to candidates, which was throw away the job spec and write your own. She is a CMO confidential OG as our first academic guest back in 2023.

3:10Welcome back, Kim. Thank you, Mike. Like it's terrific to be here and congratulations on all of your success. It's exciting to see. Yeah, we're having a lot of fun. So Kim, let's talk about this recently published work on Chief Marketing Officer, Role Design. Tell us about the study and why you took on this project in the first place and then how you did the research. Okay. So first of all, I have to say thank you. You may not remember this, but I interviewed you back in the day on an early part of this research, and then subsequently interviewed over 500 different respondents. But I have you and many other people to thank for helping me kind of understand the breadth and complexity of the role.

3:56And so I also love, by the way, your intro. You made this sound super exciting. Colonel Musler, you know, talking about job specs and CMO role design. And when I was getting my PhD in my 40s, I had a professor. We're talking about role design and job structure. And the professor's like, this is the most boring topic ever. And I looked at him. I said, what are you talking about? This is stuff that you never learn about. You don't talk about. Nobody teaches in school. And yet it's the infrastructure of success. It's like your skeleton. We don't think about it, but it's critical for performance. And so I love the energy.

4:35I am passionate about this because I've had a belief as a former CMO and GM that it's an overlooked topic. It's a it's an it's a under research and misunderstood thing. and that a lot of times we talk about CMO tenure and we're not getting at what's going on. What causes CMOs to be unhappy? What causes CEOs to be unhappy with CMOs? And what can we do to identify the problems and solve them? I think this is, and this is why we like, we love topics like this on CMO Confidential because it's a topic that people aren't always thinking about, but probably should. But it's like the disease is that the CMO and the CEO are not actually working well together and you're turning over people and you're not getting your most out of marketing.

5:29And the answer, the cure is to change CMOs when actually there's a lot of prevention that could go into this with the job spec. And, you know, I think you talked to me back when I was at Best Buy, which is a while ago. So this study is a very long study, right? Tell us how long it's been going because it's not like some one-year thing. It's pretty long. No, I started this 14 years ago. Welcome to academic research. I said, there's nothing I want to spend six months on, let alone 14 years. But that is what you do. I've looked at, I've interviewed hundreds of people. I've collected job specs from CMOs, CIOs, CFOs.

6:14We've had to code and analyze the job specs. So you have to take words and convert it into spreadsheet data that you can then analyze. That takes years. We then did empirical research where we did surveys with CMOs over time to try to understand what's going on. So this is a complex set of research. And the good news is, is that we have a number of different publications have come out of it. We have the current Journal of Academy of Marketing Science publication that's an academic journal. I can talk more about that later. I have an HBR. We were on the cover of HBR. I have a Sloan article that I think actually is very, it's high utility.

6:55I have another HBR article that's digital that is very practical. So we've got a number of different publications that if you step back and look at it in aggregate, I think it can be quite informative for CMOs, CEOs, and executive recruiters. We'll post those in the comments. But, you know, when I was reading the study, it showed, and this is, I think you said it's 500 interviews, 50 % of roles are misaligned. I want you to talk about the misalignment and then how is that possible? It's like a random walk, kind of. Tell us how this is possible. This episode of CMO Confidential is brought to you by Typeface.

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8:43now back to our conversation with university of virginia business school professor kim whittler okay so let me start by when we say misaligned what does misalignment mean so you're right 54 we found and we did we only looked at three attributes of a role and 54 of the roles were misaligned which tells us that if i looked at a complete role if we could do that in a model we would have tremendous levels of misalignment. And why do we care about misalignment at a simple level? The more aligned the role, the better marketing capability development, the better revenue growth. So there's a connection between the way that the role is designed and the performance of that role.

9:28So let's start by saying, what is misalignment? I have disaggregated, think about this we think about a CMO role and it's all it's all mushed together yeah if you if you break up what a CMO role is we break it up into its pieces and parts what do we mean we mean that you have the position the attributes of the position you have the attributes and characteristics of the person in that position yeah then you have the context under which that position is performed. So let me give you, I'll use a football example. Okay. I can use a 007 movie example, but let me use a football example. So to an indoctrinated football fan, let's think about Patriots circa 2015.

10:14You have the parts, the positions, you have a quarterback, you have a punt returner, you have, you know, a linebacker. Okay. Those are parts. You then have people who fill those roles so you have Tom Brady you have Gronkowski and everybody else you then have the context under which that role is that that that that is performed you have a coach you have a team the Patriots not the Buccaneers the Patriots and all of these things go together to affect the performance of the quarterback okay so when they're misaligned if I put Gronkowski in the quarterback role, what happens? It'd be pretty bad. Right.

10:55If I change out Belichick, what happens? So when you start looking at the pieces and the parts, then what we're looking for is alignment. So somebody who has the training, like a Tom Brady, to be effective in the quarterback position. So again, what I do when I explain this to executives is I have a big picture of a group of patriots. Now, to me, I just see a group of 100 guys or 50 guys wearing the same uniform coming at me. To a CEO, I could line up 100 CMOs. They're all the same. They're interchangeable. And yet, what you and I know is that you have one CMO position where the CMO, I'll use a financial services firm example.

11:41I'm not going to name the name, but they care not at all about marketing. And the CMO position is only responsible for nominal PR. I have another CMO role. It's an EVP role where the CMO is responsible financial services as well. Same industry. They have actuarial responsibility, pricing responsibility. They manage thousands of people. They manage, of course, all the Marcom. But they're managing pricing. They're looking at distribution. They're looking at risk. They're being prepared to be a CEO. These are not the same positions, not the same types of CMO roles. And by the way, the people filling them have very different backgrounds.

12:23So you now start seeing how complex it is because the CMO position itself has tremendous variance. You said, I think in the study of all the executive positions you've looked at, and you've looked at a lot, there's none with greater variance than that of the CMO. So I didn't want to jump the queue there because you were going to talk about this, but let's talk about this variance thing you were just going on. Okay. So let me see how to explain this. So let me use as an example where role theory comes from. It comes from the theater. So let's think about James Bond, 007, the movies. they have the position of the roles of james bond money penny the villain right yeah and generally from movie to movie to movie to movie they're somewhat similar okay james bond always has to be able to run always has to look good has to be a little tongue-in-cheek although there's a little variance in that etc okay cmos are not like that that's what's different is that um the number and types of responsibilities assigned to CMO positions is greater, far greater than it is for CFOs across firms.

13:44So we did a study, it was published in Sloan, where we looked at CFO, CIO, CMO roles. We pulled out of job specs, every single responsibility that the roles had, and we just did a count, you know, and then, so the count is far greater for marketers. Okay, that alone makes it difficult because one job you may, let me use an example in higher ed. University CMOs are responsible for crisis management, like anti-Semitism on college campuses. Okay. This is a whole skill area. It's extremely difficult and takes training. A CMO of Best Buy, As CMO of P &G, they are not trained, nor are they worried about this type of regular crisis that can occur on a college campus.

14:37That makes that role different. The requirements, the tasks, the expertise needed to fulfill that job is quite different than it is in another environment. And so the breadth of tasks and responsibility is just greater than it is for other C-level roles. That makes it more complicated to understand and fill. So, one, I totally agree with you, you know, and I think there's a lot of CMOs that are really good ones. I know they won't take the job unless they have a lot of, unless they know they're walking into the right gig. But then in your study, you said there's a giant definition gap where 90 % of CEOs say, this job is really designed well.

15:26And 22 % of the marketers say, no, I don't think so. This is a massive gap. I mean, it's like, it's a four times gap. Let's talk about the gaps and the factors and how this actually happens. And then we can talk about what to do about it. But so Mike, there's two things. This is research that was done, I believe, by McKinsey reported in Wall Street Journal. I think it's very interesting because you have at one level, there's some insight in this number and that CEOs and CMOs don't see CMO roles the same. CEOs are saying they're well-designed and CMOs are saying, no, they're not. I'm genius for doing this design and hired the recruiting firm and I got the CMO and Now the CMO is no good, and hence the clue reference about Colonel Mustard with the job spec.

16:19But yeah, let's talk about it. So that says that there's a gap there. We'll talk about that. But there's a second insight in this data that I find very interesting, which is if CMOs don't believe that the role is well designed, are they talking to the CEO? Are they not negotiating the role up front? If they're dissatisfied with a role, if they think it's poorly designed, what do they believe is their role and responsibility in getting to an optimal design? And even if you step into a role and you go, wow, this isn't working. Right. So I am about empowering CMOs and giving them knowledge and insights so that they can design better roles up front.

17:03But importantly, if you're stuck in a bad role, you don't fill out on a survey, I don't have a good role. You try to take steps to shift, navigate, negotiate, et cetera, out of that bad position. So there's two things going on. So why is the gap existing? I think the reality is that CMOs and CEOs are not experts at designing or understanding or accepting good jobs. CEOs how many CMOs are CEOs going to hire in a lifetime I don't know three four five I don't know they're not experts yet they have a lot of other responsibilities CMOs how many times are they really going to interview and accept jobs their job is to figure out how to be a good marketer not how to be a good interviewer negotiator of roles they are not expert the experts in all of this are executive recruiters and so do you roll HR in with that in addition to executive recruiters because i would say i can't just stick it on the executive recruiter because sometimes the hr department especially for small companies running the whole show here right i would say so but i still i'm going to place most of the responsibility on the executive here's why they're the ones hired for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to be the experts at finding them.

18:24HR acknowledges, CHROs acknowledge they also are not experts on CMO roles. They have to manage all of the human assets in their company. So they're not experts on CFOs, CIOs, CMOs, et cetera, any more so than VPs or directors. And so the one group that's hired to be expert at this are executive recruiters who technically have studied and understand all the different types, who understand how to write a job spec that accurately reflects the role and helps identify the perfect fit candidate. They're the ones who ultimately are held accountable for, you know, there's a guarantee of a year or two years if the candidate doesn't perform.

19:10So I still place a lot of responsibility on executive recruiters. That's their full-time job. And if they're in this space, then they're saying, I'm an expert at hiring these type of positions. So, and in here, you talk about the factors, the factors of design and operation that go sideways, that create the whole, you know, this massive gap. And I think you broke them into responsibility, experience, and status. Give our listeners the cliff notes of those things, because what you're saying is the search firms may be not doing it. The HR department can't. The CMO probably can't. The CEO can't. Let's put it out there so everyone can take their best shot at these three things.

20:01Okay. So first of all, let me also say, I don't think any of this is malicious. It's not like anybody's not trying to do their job or trying to do a bad job. I think it's, again, it's understudied. It's misunderstood. And so I think it's just a lack of knowledge. All right. So let me tell you what we did in this academic research as we start. The first thing is we have a huge conceptual framework and model for the role, the pieces and parts. A lot of different variables that help explain how a CMO can have better or worse performance outcomes. Then we just took three attributes of the model that represented each of the three buckets.

20:43One that represented the position, that's responsibility. One that represented the CMO person, that's the type of training and experience they had. and then one that represents the context, and that's the status afforded the position. More or less status than other players, other C-suite players. So we look at the interaction of these three and their effect on marketing capability development and revenue growth. All right, so we just looked at those three. And what we found, like you said, are that most jobs are misaligned, 54 % of the study. um uh and what we find generally is that well i'm not going to get into the details because it's it's it's a little too complicated for a short answer let me talk about what i find most interesting okay is that what we find is that the nature of the responsibility set whether it's it's relegated to just core marketing activities like marketing communication, or it's broader, the nature of the fit of the type of responsibility with the fit of the CMO experience.

21:57When you add status, when those two things fit, so the type of experience that a CMO has fits with the responsibility set given to the position. When that fits, when you add status, the positive outcomes are amplified. So if I have, I'm going to say, if I have a general management trained marketer, a P &L trained marketer who has a broad set of responsibilities that goes beyond marketing communication, that's a fit. When I give that position more status, you get better firm outcomes. When I give it less status, you get worse firm outcomes. but here's what's interesting what happens when you have a misfit so let's say i have a broad set of responsibilities okay they're responsible for pricing and distribution and a broad set and i have a staff trained marketer who is really focused on let's just say uh downstream marketing communication promotion stuff yeah or just or just pure brand building not not you know yeah Right.

23:03So it's a misfit. When you give them more status, so that you get worse firm outcomes when it's a misfit. When you give them more status, you amplify the negative outcomes. So giving a misfit more status hurts firm outcomes even more. So this shows, you know, I would have thought, okay, in my heart of hearts, that more status for marketers is always better. That's not true. If you put Gronkowski in as quarterback and you make, or let me say it differently, you put Tom Brady in as punt returner. Yeah. And you give that role even heightened responsibility and status, or I should say status, the outcomes are even worse.

23:49If you marginally - Julian Edelman gets really mad. Yeah. So, yeah. Exactly. So I think, you know, in hindsight, it makes sense. But when I started, you know, you start with some biases. My bias was that more status is always better for market, for CMO. Well, that's not the case. Because with status goes expectation or with status also goes a belief of incompetence if you can't run that with the peer group. So there's, is that a good way to look at it, which is if I am brought in and I have all this responsibility and all this status and then I can't run it, I am not just failing in my job, I'm losing status for the whole department emotionally around the C-suite.

24:38Is that right? I really would say it's a competency issue, right? Yeah. And so what's going on is that I need a quarterback. I have, okay, now I'm going to, I'm way out over my skis in terms of, I don't understand football. I should have used basketball terms. I understand that much better. But if I bring in the wrong experience, like let's say I have an offense that's a running offense, but I bring in a quarterback that's a passing quarterback, we have a problem. There's a misfit in the competency and the skill and expertise of the quarterback to be able to fill the needs of that position on that team.

25:20And then when the misfit happens, to your point, it doesn't just blow back on a perception that the CMO is bad. It can spill over onto the perception of the value and capability of marketing in general. And so I want to say something here that I think is, it goes back to one of the very first things you said when we started. What do we do? When I work with executives, I start with this question. I say, okay, you have a situation, you're at the C-level, and somebody underneath you is not performing well. That's always the assessment. The assessment is they're not doing well. I said, what do you do?

25:59The answer is always performance improvement plan, move them, fire them, coach them. Okay? I said, but we're going to go back to the beginning. Have you actually set the role up to succeed? Right. And so the answer to your point is the outcome assessment when things aren't right is always that it's the person's fault. But if what happened is that you needed a passing quarterback and you hired a running quarterback, you got a miss. You set yourself up, you shot yourself in the foot, and then you blamed the choice that you made as the problem. And then if you do it two or three times in a row, your marketing is totally screwed up.

26:45And your company's view of marketing is probably that it totally stinks. and it's wasting tons of money. And because, you know, you have this running quarterback who can't throw the ball. And so, you know, it's clearly the quarterback's fault when you're saying it's the system. And you are not curing the problem. You are actually exacerbating the problem. You know, so there's a great quote from Urban Meyer when he moved into the pros. his team was failing tremendously. And there's a beautiful quote, and I'm going to paraphrase it because I will not do it accurately, but he basically said, they're terrible.

27:29They're terrible. Everybody's underperforming. And somebody in the media said, well, who hired all of these losers? He was talking about all the coaches. The coaches are terrible. And he said, well, who hired all of these losers? It reflects the paradigm. In my position, when they don't perform, it's their fault. But we as architects of the role, we decide what responsibility to give them. We decide what skillset I need to hire to fit that responsibility. And then I need to give it appropriate status and the appropriate environment in which to succeed. I own that. So as we're trying to figure out what's not working, why is it?

28:12The easy answer they fail. Well, even if they're failing, let's say that that means that you didn't hire somebody who has the competency set, the experience to fit into the position. You need to go back and say, how did I miss the mark? How did my executive recruiter miss the mark? Because I don't want to do it a second time and a third time and a fourth time. Yeah. And that is probably first advice, look in the mirror and see it may be you. I have a question here. Let's say that we'll take the search firms out of it. We'll also take the, you know, I'm, I'm, if I'm interviewing for a job, you know, and I, I've thrown away the job spec, what are the two or three questions I should ask to see if I'm going to fit the team offense?

29:02That's a great question. So the, so the first thing I say is throw away the job spec, the job spec, think of it as a promotional ad sheet. Yeah, go look, it gets you in the door. 50 % off. All right, you're in the door. Exactly. So throw it away. So the first thing I would do is I would say, help me understand what the responsibilities, expectations, and accountabilities are. Is there alignment? By the way, in the Sloan document, I have a tool that I use with executives on how you can disaggregate the pieces and parts. Okay. So what I would do is I would pull out and say, help me understand what am I, like, tell me what I own.

29:43Do I own data analysis or does somebody else own that? Do I own R &D or does somebody else own that? Do I own pricing or does somebody else own that? Like go through what is it that you own? Okay. Help me understand what I own. Then say, what am I held accountable for? Okay. So think about this. You own growth. Great. You just told me I don't own R &D. I don't own pricing. I said, you do understand that growth comes from decisions around pricing, decisions around the innovation platform, strategic positioning of the firm. You just told me I don't own any of those. How can I possibly be responsible unilaterally for growth outcomes?

30:30So now all of a sudden you can start kind of matching stuff. So the first thing I would do is I'd ask questions around what's the responsibility? What is success look like? How are you going to measure me? I would also ask for, show me the org chart. This happened to me. I was told I owned something. And then when I got in, a whole department was parallel to me. I didn't own it. And so I spent a year trying to move it over. Okay. A lot of times there's shadow orgs that are doing the work already, and they're not going going to give up any power and i i think the org chart thing is really great i will say i think uh your your advice on throwaway the job spec is great the other thing i have always done is i run sample big decisions by who is the final decider yes capital money creative decision the hiring budget allocation like do i own it or are people just checkboxing me because if i don't own it i'm not taking the job.

31:33Well, yeah, you can't hold me accountable for the results. And so that's a managerial discretion. What is my authority level over what types of decisions? Then the last thing I would say, Mike, is you must write this down. Okay. So I was told at one company, I own something I didn't. At another company, I asked that question. I said, do I have the authority to change the organization to fire and fire whomever I want. I get there. I wanted to make a change. And the CEO said no. And so now the difference is, is I had written this down. So you write it down, say, thank you so much. Again, all of this is back in negotiation.