Resilience tips for marketing managers
As a marketing manager, your role involves meeting needs and expectations that come from several directions simultaneously. You manage upwards by keeping your senior managers informed, making proactive suggestions, and making sure your team’s work is visible and recognised. You manage sideways, aligning marketing with other departments such as sales and spotting opportunities to make a difference across the business. And of course, you also manage down through your reporting lines. It’s your role to empower and support your marketing team, ensuring that they feel motivated, productive, and able to contribute.
This makes the manager role a demanding one at any time. However, 2020 is not just any time. In every direction, our colleagues have new needs that we have to anticipate, understand and do our best to meet. And we most likely have to do this while no longer sharing an office space with them. It can feel as though there aren’t enough hours in the day. And if we’re honest, for much of the last few months, there haven’t been.
The remote working time crunch – and what it means for managers
The rapid pivot to remote working has left marketing managers with calendars blocked out by video calls and other forms of virtual catch-up. This was the experience of virtually every manager that we interviewed for LinkedIn’s new Marketing Manager’s Survival Guide, which sets out strategies for managing and planning effectively in today’s disrupted times.
The managers that we spoke to have risen to the challenge of helping their teams to adjust, and making themselves visible and available in the same way they would be in the office. However, they’ve quickly discovered that scheduling virtual happy hours or virtual walk-ups ends up blocking out a lot more time than simply grabbing people for a chat.
In the same way, marketing managers have spotted the opportunity to build relationships with colleagues in other teams; colleagues who have more demand for content or digital communication skills – and are more interested than ever in the value that marketing delivers. They’ve risen to the role of keeping senior managers informed and embraced the value they can add to business strategy. However, all of this comes at a cost in terms of time and energy levels. And it does so at a time when all of us, managers included, have worries about the future – and are feeling the pressure to do more with less.
This is why resilience is quickly becoming one of the most important skills that marketing managers can possess. As LinkedIn’s Senior Content Marketing Manager for APAC, Utah Kim, puts it: “Remember the cabin crew announcement in flight advising you to put on your oxygen mask first before helping others. Managers need to take care of themselves so that they can be the best manager they can be to help the team navigate through uncertainties and challenges.”
What is resilience – and how can you acquire it?
The LinkedIn Learning instructor and Kellogg School of Business Faculty Member, Tatiana Kolovou, defines resilience as, “the ability to not fold under pressure even if you don’t feel calm and confident, to be able to sustain energy throughout highly demanding tasks and to be able to quickly pull yourself together and bounce back, even when you’re experiencing a major setback.” As such, it’s one of the most important capabilities when facing adversity and seeking to recover from it.
The resilience expert and author, Gemma Leigh Roberts, argues that the disruption to working life that we’ve all experienced this year is adding a new dimension to the value of this capability. Resilience, she says, won’t just help you to bounce back – but to bounce forward, helping to draw positives from experiences that seem inherently stressful. “We can take the information that we get from learning how to get through the process to get better in the future,” she says. “We can take things from the situation we’re now in to be happier, healthier, more productive, and more high-performance.”
For marketing managers, resilience is crucial to coping with the personal stresses and pressures that we face amid uncertainty – but it’s also crucial to our ability to help others find a way to stay productive. “At a time when people crave consistency and stability, a leader must embrace the fact that the only constant is change,” says LinkedIn’s Senior Director of Marketing, Ryan Batty. “Change is a necessity. Helping your teams understand that will enable them to develop the agility and adaptability they need not only to make it through times of uncertainty but to thrive well beyond.”
Maintaining energy levels: the keys to resilience
Resilience, like any skill, can be acquired and strengthened through practice. It can be learned but it must also be earned. And the way to earn it is by committing to safeguarding your own energy levels – no matter how many demands on your time there are.
“You probably know how you best restore your energy,” says Tatiana Kolovou. “You either get it from people around you, something extroverts do, or you prefer to have quiet alone time in order to restore, something introverts do. However, if you restore your energy, be sure that you practice this important routine during potentially challenging times. You will be better equipped to manage stress if your energy tank is on full load.”
In other words, the best method for managing energy levels and resilience varies with each individual. It’s crucial to understand how you best operate and to be compassionate to yourself in designing a routine that aligns with that. One of the most striking features of The Marketing Manager’s Survival Guide is the range of individual coping techniques that managers have developed. Here are the top tips they shared for staying resilient that could work for you as well:
Prioritise staying rested, well-nourished, and hydrated as much as possible
You can’t separate resilience from physical health and well-being. The better rested, nourished, and hydrated you are, the more responsive and alert you are mentally – and the better able to adapt to new things. Neuroscientists like Dr. Tara Swart warn that the performance of a sleep-deprived brain starts to resemble that of someone who’s been drinking. It means you’re less tolerant – and less able to learn. To build resilience, and react calmly to new and unfamiliar situations, you need to try and keep your body on as even a keel as possible.
There are times when this will feel really difficult. The demands of the last few months mean that many of us have been forced to get by on less sleep each night. Struggles sleeping have been one of the widest reported effects of lockdowns. What’s important though, is to aspire to be as kind to your body as possible. If you’ve had a tough few weeks, try to schedule some leave to allow yourself to recover. Pay even closer attention to diet and lifestyle with a view to keeping your body healthy. And be as disciplined as you can about exercise. Your resilience ultimately depends on these things. Give yourself permission to prioritise them.
Plan a routine that works for you
Remote working creates plenty of additional challenges for managers. It’s important to balance this by embracing the other side of the remote working package – the potential for flexibility.
Try planning key tasks around times of the day when you feel most naturally energised. If you’re a real morning person, perhaps plan for early starts when you’re raring to go and have fewer interruptions – but balance this by giving yourself a clear time to stop working at the end of the day. Use strategic breaks from tasks to increase productivity and keep your mind fresh. Switching between exercise and work is a great way to look after your physical health while using your working hours more efficiently. Several of the marketing managers featured in our survival guide have adopted the tactic of blocking out time in their calendars for exercise or family commitments. They are working longer hours – but still ring-fencing non-negotiable time that’s important for helping them perform.
Schedule your dopamine hits
Celebrating moments of success is a vital part of coping with challenging times. Doing so encourages the release of the hormone dopamine, which is associated with feelings of pleasure and joy – but also with motivation and a sense of reward. Regular hits of dopamine don’t just make us feel better; they also help us to stay focused and keep looking forward. Part of the feeling of being overwhelmed and ground down by workload comes from being denied these moments. That’s why resilience experts advise trying to plan your calendar in a way that ensures you complete a few tasks (large or small) each day. Ticking off objectives regularly will help to boost morale – and equip you to cope with the longer-term demands you’re working on.
Prioritise to maintain focus and flow
“If you look at my calendar, it seems pretty horrendous,” says Upali Dasgupta, the Marketing Director Asia for customer experience managing platform, Sitecore – and one of the marketing managers featured in our survival guide. “There are calls every day and often no time for getting work done. I’ve been responding by scheduling time for thinking in my calendar so that people can’t book meetings then. I try to spend time thinking about my priority for the week ahead and try to reschedule meetings that don’t align with that priority so I can focus more effectively.”
Ask for things you would never normally ask for – you might be surprised at the response
In many businesses, the profile of marketing has never been higher and its role in protecting revenue streams and customer relationships has never been more valued. The flip side of this is that marketers have to do more with less resource – fielding increased demands from across the business at a time when budgets often have to be pared back. This creates obvious pressures. As marketing rises up the agenda internally though, you might find that other forms of support are available.
“Content production has been a real pressure point,” says Veronica Valdes, Marketing Manager for the recruitment outsourcing firm, Resource Solutions. “My team needs to produce a lot more content in a lot less time and with fewer resources. I’ve been trying to figure out where else in the business I can leverage support from – reaching out to teams that have a bit of spare capacity at this point. That could involve training a PA up on Instagram or taking content that our Learning & Development team has created and adapted it for an external audience. It’s all helping us to stay agile and responsive in a changing situation.”
Greater flexibility and imagination in how teams can help one another out is becoming one of the hallmarks of businesses’ response to professional life during the pandemic. The relationship of marketing to other functions is changing – and there are positives to be found there as well as new pressures. When marketing managers are able to build up their own resilience levels, they give themselves and their teams the best chance of leveraging those opportunities.
Would you like more advice and support for managing through uncertain times? You’ll find it in The Marketing Manager’s Survival Guide, which is packed with insights and experiences from businesses large and small. It’s available for free download now.
Source: LinkedIn
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Comment
No comments found.