Palo Alto, Calif. (Nov. 27, 2012)—For many chief marketing officers, moving into a CEO role and serving on corporate boards are primary career goals. To help them on their way, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council today announced it is teaming with a former McKinsey partner and leadership expert to provide online, individualized assessments of the leadership qualities and professional effectiveness of its 6,000 members worldwide.

The 4P Leadership Footprint Audit—developed by Thomas Barta Marketing Leadership Consulting of Cologne, Germany—will be part of an ongoing “Succeed by the Way You Lead” professional development campaign initiated by the CMO Council. The initial audit aims to understand the qualities, attributes and success factors that contribute to superior leadership and performance among chief marketing executives. It is probably the first academically sound leadership assessment model designed to evaluate, guide and inspire senior marketing practitioners.   

“In contrast to other research, this new online tool provides immediate feedback to marketers in the form of an individualized commentary and a personalized report,” notes audit designer Thomas Barta. The project has been co-developed with INSEAD University professors and combines proven leadership model thinking, McKinsey insights and the views of more than 100 global marketing leaders.

According to the CMO Council’s latest “State of Marketing Report 2012,” chief marketers overwhelmingly believe furthering personal leadership and motivational skills is the best way to advance their careers. On the other hand, increased collaboration with sales and/or channel organizations is their top professional priority in the coming year.

In a recent report entitled “Renovate to Innovate: Building Performance-Driven Marketing Organizations,” the CMO Council notes that a true CMO must be the CEO-in-waiting, groomed in all aspects of the business and a true leader and value-setter for the organization. “While CMOs may aspire to this role, few make it to the corner office and even fewer serve on corporate boards,” notes Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council, which has members in more than 110 countries controlling an estimated $300 billion in aggregated annual marketing spend.

Working cooperatively on the “Renovate to Innovate” study with the CMO Council was Dick Patton, the Global CMO Practice Leader at Egon Zehnder International. In his contributed commentary to the report, he noted, “Great leaders have mastered the techniques for bringing together disparate groups of individuals in challenging situations (such as multiple businesses or geographies) to work as a highly coherent, high-performance team. That ability is virtually the definition of the great CMO—and the great CEO.“

According to Spencer Stuart, CMOs now exist in 62 percent of Fortune 500 companies. The executive recruitment firm points out that “while CMOs were once known for their astonishingly short tenure—which averaged less than two years in 2004—they today serve an average of 42 months. Even now, however, the role remains poorly defined in many organizations, leaving first-time CMOs with a difficult task in keeping their seat at the leadership table.”

The 4P Leadership Footprint Audit aims to reveal the skills and strengths of leaders in four categories:

•Purpose: Having a clear agenda and outcome-oriented mindset that constantly calibrates personal contributions, customer requirements, competitive dynamics, product relevance and market dynamics

•Pull: Making marketing meaningful to the organization and mobilizing stakeholders around shared values, a clear strategic direction and well-understood business goals

•Power: Supercharging execution around a common purpose with full organizational participation and support, including both top management and LOB teams

•Productivity: Managing for strong results in order to achieve the business objective, including outstanding team leadership and marketing skills

In a survey of 1,400 CEOs and HR professionals, ManpowerGroup’s Right Management consultants sought to pinpoint the skills, competencies and development initiatives that help global leaders succeed, as well as the shortcomings that are most likely to contribute to C-suite failure. Most notably, it discovered that most CEOs come from backgrounds in operations (68 percent), finance (56 percent), sales (49 percent) and marketing (34 percent).

The top four competencies seen as most important for CEOs included creating a strategic vision (92 percent); inspiring others and maintaining leadership responsibility (62 percent); developing an accurate and comprehensive overview of the business (57 percent); and decision-making (55 percent).

The top three factors most likely to doom a CEO include failure to build relationships and a team environment (40 percent); mismatch with the company culture (32 percent); and inability to deliver results (25 percent).

For more information regarding the program and to take the audit, please visit: http://cmocouncil.org/r/current-program-succeed-by-the-way-you-lead

About Thomas Barta

Marketing leadership expert Thomas Barta specializes in coaching for senior leaders, leadership workshops, organizational effectiveness and leadership strategy. He knows marketing suites and board rooms from within. He has managed many brands as a marketer and advised global Fortune 500 clients on marketing strategy as a McKinsey Partner. Barta holds coaching and organizational development degrees from leading international universities. He continuously invests in his own research to help crack the code on marketing leadership, recently with INSEAD Business School. His thought- provoking keynotes and articles inspire marketers to step up their leadership performance (www.thomasbarta.com). 

About the CMO Council
The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership and personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing leaders and brand decision-makers across a wide-range of global industries. The CMO Council's 6,000 members control more than $300 billion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures and run complex, distributed marketing and sales operations worldwide. In total, the CMO Council and its strategic interest communities include over 20,000 global executives in more than 110 countries covering multiple industries, segments and markets. Regional chapters and advisory boards are active in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The Council's strategic interest groups include the Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE), LoyaltyLeaders.org, Marketing Supply Chain Institute, Customer Experience Board, Market Sense-Ability Center, Digital Marketing Performance Institute, GeoBranding Center, and the Forum to Advance the Mobile Experience (FAME). More information on the CMO Council is available at www.cmocouncil.org.

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Media Contact:

Crystal Berry

Director, Marketing Programs and Communications

cberry@cmocouncil.org