The Functional Blind Spot: Think EBITDA, not CPM
Throughout my career, I have had the good fortune of working across a variety of functional disciplines, including (general) management, HR and marketing. One of the best things to come out of that is the ability to link these different disciplines together, and understand that – at the end of the day – it is business results that really matter.
Most professionals that specialize in a particular area, whether it is HR, marketing or communications spend a disproportionate amount of their time interacting with their peers, navel staring or “thinking about the future of the profession”. This leads to precisely the type of internally focused thinking that the CommScrum team talks about in their latest blogpost.
Kudos to them for coming out and saying what a lot of us have been thinking for a long time now.
From my own personal experience, functional disciplines often suffer from a lack of confidence – they all want to be “seated at the business table”, but fail to deliver when they get there. Surprisingly, most communications professionals sin against one of their own cardinal rules: adapt your core message in line with your target audience.
Business executives do not want to hear about communications, marketing or HR-related issues, they want to hear about business issues. How much did this campaign contribute to the bottom line ? How much has our increase in brand value contributed to our market capitalization (and how does this facilitate our access to external funding) ? What increase in sales have we seen as a result of our latest (social media) campaign ? And, yes, they do want to see numbers – but think EBITDA, not CPM.
I agree wholeheartedly with Dan Gray’s analysis of the situation:
“Getting incrementally better at what you already do is becoming an irrelevance. The true value of communication lies in making sense of complexity and revealing the simple meaning beneath – a creative, synthetic process that distils a compelling core idea and handful of supporting messages that people can actually relate to, and which actually adds value to the business.For that, you need to be able to see beyond functional fiefdoms and start joining thing up. Failure to cross the “T” will forever condemn communicators to a life of downstream tactical execution.”
So here are five things that can help all of us get out of our “functional rut”:
1) Spend more time talking to people outside of your department – finance, accounting or audit are often a good place to start. For brownie points, think business managers or – gulp – the CEO
2) Do NOT talk about communications-related issues, but talk about the business instead – what is on the CEO agenda ?
3) Read more books, but not the ones you normally read; instead, brush up on business strategy, history or global politics
4) Spend more time thinking outside of the box – how can you apply what other disciplines are developing to your domain ? How can you learn from nature, the arts or science ?
5) Focus on the why, not the what – ultimately, your job is to help the company perform, not to get to 5M followers on Twitter
Some of the smartest and best-performing people in the marketing and communications area that I have have known, actually came out of “the business”. By maintaining their focus on business issues, they succeeded in getting their newly adopted disciplines a seat at the table – and more often than not, the ear of the CEO.
Dan Gray
Hey Ago – great follow up and thanks for picking up on the post. All five of your tips are great, but actually it’s the second one that I think is perhaps the most critical.
Far too many HR/comms pros look on engagement, diversity etc. as ends in themselves when, actually, they are nothing more than delivery mechanisms – a means to improve business performance.
Take a business whose competitive advantage is centred on innovation and product leadership, for example. Whether employees’ happiness went up a percentage point in the latest survey is a matter of supreme indifference to the C-suite.
What they care about is whether or not that engaged state has helped contributed to the development of superior products and/or accelerated the speed with which they have been brought to market.
Ago
Dan,
Thanks for the comments, and additional insights – spot on. I remember when I was consulting with business leaders around the result of our annual employee engagement survey they could not care less about the results – until it got tied into their KPIs and bonus scheme. More often than not, most of them nodded politely and then shoved it down to their HR-manager, with a clear directive to “do better next time”.
You really need various perspectives in order to successfully manage a business, including the so-called soft and hard aspects. I found a useful tool for that in the Balanced Scorecard, which can integrate financial with non-financial metrics.
As mentioned in tip 4, I find there is also significant value in looking over the wall to other disciplines, and in “teaming up” in order to address the business agenda. In the past, we successfully experimented with working across finance, sales, marketing and HR in order to build (and prove) the business case for employee engagement – and that tends to get noticed by senior management.
Ago