BROOKE’S PORTFOLIO
Leadership Snapshots
I seek first to understand, then be understood. This is what I expect out of my team as well.
I love learning from others. If they are willing to embrace processes that come from a place of experience, then contribute, we all benefit. If they take the ball and run with it, my heart grows a little bigger. And… if I can make myself obsolete at my organization, and the marketing team can excel without me, I’ve done my job – transferring knowledge and empowering others to take ownership. I’ll find another place, and do it all again!
Leadership approaches & examples
I lead a team dedicated to complex, cross-functional projects in the areas of marketing campaigns, account based experiences, and sales and martech integrations. Here is a collection of anecdotal evidence that explains how I manage the team of people behind all of it.
No really, that’s a big deal!
These days, excellent marketing is not obvious. You can’t just “build it and they will come” like 15 years ago. The multitude of tiny things behind the scenes are what matters, and no one will ever see them unless you tell them they’re there.
Over the years I have done myself a disservice being too humble to share my little wins. But when I started managing a team of people that are just like me, I realized it was easy for all of us to not call attention to these milestones. It’s one thing to not toot my own horn, but if I let my team suffer from weak compensation increases because I didn’t illustrate their marketing prowess, I’m not being fair to them.
I’m a member of the leadership team, so in our monthly meetings I highlight a different metric. Here are a few examples of how I have made my team show up that would easily go unnoticed otherwise:
#WittyWednesday
We once had an operations coordinator that sat near the office entrance and had a whiteboard. She started drawing weekly jokes to get people to laugh. We decided to take pictures and post them on our social pages each week, and it took off. Clients would tell us they would look for it each week, and some would send us their dad jokes. One person said we were the “El Arroyo of IT consulting” (if you’re in Texas, you know) and that was such a great compliment.
Since she left, our social media manager has kept up the momentum, converting the jokes to digital whiteboard images and keeping her spirit alive. I’m so proud that I have a team that took it and ran, giving the company a little personality in a sea of boring IT. In fact, while the creator was still working here, I worked with my marketing coordinator to design a coffee table book as a gift to her and our office lobby full of the first year of Whiteboard jokes. We grew our follower base, our personality and our fandom and all I did was encourage it!
Too late, no takebacks! (or, our Podcast origin story)
Circa 2014, we had two amazingly passionate consultants on staff that I leaned on for blog posts, webinars, and exhibit booth personnel.
Podcasting was taking off, and jokingly, they said they would want to host one for the company.
I set-up a simple podcast environment with one microphone and no agenda to see how they would handle a generic topic.
They loved it, and when we moved into our new office I pushed for a podcast studio.
We built a marketing strategy around the Transform IT Podcast, which invited guests to discuss digital innovation in a no-frills, every-day language anyone can understand.
For the years where I could depend on the talent to be available, it was successful. However we officially retired it (and the website, TransformITpodcast.com) this year, after several years of dormancy.
Ideally I’d love to continue, but we have to balance our time and resources with marketing tactics that focus a bit more on the bottom of the funnel these days.
Some ways I encourage the podcast team to turn a fun project into a brand awareness initiative:
The podcast concluded with 16 guests (myself included) and 5+ hosts over 3 years, with over 5,000 listens.
A few illustrations of how our podcast showed up to the world:
Everywhere you look, SOPs!
I love creating processes and standard operating procedures any chance I can get. With a highly creative profession, it can be rather difficult to do. However if you can establish a pattern, and ensure consistency, I document it. I’d rather have the team focus on the “wow factor” and creative side of a deliverable rather than reinventing the wheel each time.
I have created templates – literal and figurative in as many places as I can, and encourage others to do the same. Here are some examples of the repeatable methods tools and templates I have developed:
