Cheryl Hayman on what marketers can bring to the boardroom
Cheryl Hayman, Non-Executive Board Director, sits down with Mark Jones to discuss the value that marketers can bring to the boardroom, and how marketers can best market themselves.
It might be surprising, but only 2.6% of board members have marketing experience, according to the Marketing Science Institute.
Why might that be the case?
According to Cheryl Hayman, non-executive director, it is because the marketing function is often misunderstood.
“I think everybody always thought that was a skill that was in the organisation and didn't need to be around the board table,” Cheryl says. “What we do isn't black and white, and that's what makes it hard for people to understand.”
Cheryl is on the board of a number of companies and organisations, including HGL Limited, Peer Support Australia and Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand. With a background in marketing, Cheryl is an outlier on a lot of boards, and is passionate about promoting the value marketers bring to the table.
“I think we're often put in a box and described as being from the ‘colouring-in’ department. We are so much more than that, we are the entire toolbox and you need a huge amount of really diverse skills to take a product or service to market,” Cheryl says.
The things that equip marketers as great marketers also makes them great members of boards - being insight driven, growth oriented and being accountable for return on investment. Cheryl says, “We have to know a little bit about a lot in order to actually ask the right questions and get the very best from the people we want to help us bring the best success to the organisation.”
“I think that's been somewhat undervalued, and as marketers, we need to up our view on the value of those things,” she says.
Cheryl explains one of the best things about being on a board is the diversity of representation, “You sit around a board table and everybody's different by and large. What I love about it actually is you meet really different and interesting people that you may never have come across in your normal functional role in a corporate sector.”
What advice does Cheryl have for marketers keen to join the board at the table? “You have to be open to be curious, to be unafraid, to ask questions and to recognise you are often with people who have a lot more experience than you.”
To hear more from Cheryl Hayman and find out how marketers can use the power of self-promotion, tune into this episode of The CMO Show.
Resources
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Transcript
Host: Mark Jones
Guests: Cheryl Hayman
Mark Jones:
As marketers we’re not afraid to use all the colours in the crayon box.
But for some companies, decision making at a board level can sometimes seem a bit black and white.
If the last couple of years have shown us anything, it's that out-of-the-box thinking -- or colouring outside the lines -- can add some unique and innovative perspectives to solving business challenges.
Marketers bring more than just the crayons - we bring a whole toolbox of knowledge and experience - so how can we market ourselves to draw up a seat at the table?
Hello friends! Mark Jones here. Great to have you with us on The CMO Show.
Today we have a fantastic conversation with a marketing leader who has made the move from CMO to board director, Cheryl Hayman.
Cheryl is a non-executive director on the board of a number of companies and organisations, including HGL Limited, Peer Support Australia and Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand.
Cheryl shared her career journey, from marketing assistant through to where she is today.
She discussed the challenges of being on a board, especially asking how do you extend your “line of sight” to see the whole business, and how do you know what the right call to make is?
We also touched on the importance of organisations to ensure they are making sustainable positive decisions for the future.
Let’s go to my conversation with Cheryl Hayman.
Mark Jones: Welcome to the CMO Show. And it's great to have you on the show, Cheryl.
Cheryl Hayman: Thank you very much for having me, Mark. I'm pleased to be here.
Mark Jones: Absolutely. Now, we got introduced through your work in a couple of spaces, but Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand is one of our clients, and just so much fantastic work in the non-executive director space. But before we get to that, you've started out in marketing. I'd love to get a quick snapshot of your career.
Cheryl Hayman: Sure. So I did the classic commerce degree with a major in marketing at New South Uni, and then did the rounds of interviews and happily ended up as a marketing assistant with Unilever, that great cultivating organisation for young marketers and for a career in marketing in a blue-chip organisation. So I spent nine years at Rexona division both here in Australia and also three years in London as an ex-pat with the Elida Gibbs personal products business, plus I had a nine month stint at J. Walter Thompson. So I had a lot of varied opportunities with Unilever and I loved every minute of it. It was a fantastic experience. And I still have a lot of good friends from those days here and overseas.
Cheryl Hayman: Then I left and joined what is today called Yum Restaurants, Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell, so another multinational organisation in fast food obviously, and the restaurant business. So that was fantastic. So a very fast moving organisation. And then I joined George Weston Foods, another global organisation this time with a British head office, again, working in baking and across a couple of other divisions. So I had a fantastic 21 year career across those three main organisations which I feel very fortunate to have. And yes, lots of great training, lots of great people and a really terrific network.
Mark Jones: Is it true what they say about when you work at a pizza company you never want to eat pizza again?
Cheryl Hayman: It's actually very funny. As a sidebar, when the recruiter rang me and told me there was a role going at Pizza Hut and was I interested, I said to him at the time, "I don't eat pizza and I'm not sure." And he said, "Well, if you're 50% interested, come to the interview," which was the greatest piece of advice I'd ever been given on a search basis because I went there and it was a whole different base to what I expected and I ended up getting the job. So it just goes to show.
Mark Jones: And I also note that you were at SunRice as well, and I wanted to start off the conversation there because there are not too many people who've gone from marketing roles and then now had this really interesting and diverse set of experiences as a non-executive director. It's not a common thing to happen. And a lot of the narratives have been about how CMOs can become CEOs. But this is an entirely different set of experiences that you've had. What was the journey for you like?
Cheryl Hayman: So I'm very decisive. I made a decision to stop working in the corporate world from one day to the next almost and to give myself some time just to do some other things. I started consulting through ad agencies on their clients as a strategic consultant, and then I considered the board piece. So I didn't plan my way into board roles. And there's a common phrase, which is, you either plan your way into a board portfolio or you jump off a cliff, so I jumped off the cliff. That's how I operate. If you ask my husband, he'd tell you the same thing. As soon as I say it, I'm doing it.
Cheryl Hayman: So that was where I was. And I was relatively young at the time, so the board idea hadn't fully fertilised, I guess you'd say. So my next role would have been CEO of something, and then I opted out before that. So I actually went from a CMO position into boards, ultimately. What I did and what I'd advise people to do is if you're going to follow that path, first of all, don't be in a position where you need to pay the rent on a weekly basis because you leave relatively strong salaries and you come back into more uncertainty unless you have a portfolio planned out. So you need to balance it out. It is hard and it's a long game.
Cheryl Hayman: What I would say to marketing people is, you have to recognise that you probably have the greatest line of sight over an entire organisation than anybody, and potentially even the CEO. Because to get a service or a product to market, you have to know enough to get from an idea to commercialization. That requires you to work with everybody in all their areas of specialty to get the best possible option out to the customer.
Cheryl Hayman: So I think we're often put in a box and described as being from the colouring in department. We are so much more than that, we are the entire toolbox and you need a huge amount of really diverse skills to take a product or service to market. And I think that's been somewhat undervalued, and as marketers, we need to up our view on the value of those things.
Mark Jones: You've tapped into a long running tension in marketing which has been the unspoken narrative that we're fighting for our value or our worth in the organisation. The sense that we've got to constantly not just justify why we're spending all this money, but prove ourselves as professionals as well. And I think that's an interesting dynamic that you're really highlighting here.
Mark Jones: So where does that confidence come from that you're speaking about? Where does that come from in terms of knowing that the statement you make, which is that you've got a better view of the entire organisation than the CEO as a CMO or a head of marketing? That's a big call. So what are some more of the facts and the experiences that have helped you form that view?
Cheryl Hayman: Yeah. And I'd like to say up front that I'm not denigrating the role of the CEO. It's a different type of role, and they've got to there from somewhere obviously, and they have line of sight. But I guess you're still in the more operational piece, and that's what I mean by line of sight. Where do you get the confidence for that? You get it from recognising the value you're actually bringing. You need to be self-reflective. Marketers are typically great communicators, they are articulate, they're good at bringing people on a journey.
Cheryl Hayman: I think it's important that you stop and celebrate your achievements in that way that you learn to trust yourself and all of those around you and understand that you're like the shepherd, and I don't mean that everybody's a sheep, but you are herding everybody to an outcome and you want everybody to have full ownership of that outcome. So it's really important that you recognise how crucial those skills actually are. They actually different to skills that other people in other functions have.
Cheryl Hayman: We are by nature in a lot of what we do more generalist. So yes, we have specialisation in the creative and evaluation insights and so forth. But we have to know a little bit about a lot in order to actually ask the right questions and get the very best from the people we want to help us bring the best success to the organisation. And that requires you to really run projects almost like a family, acknowledging all the different personalities and personal styles to make sure people understand the value and the role they're playing and how it's an all in and we're all in this together.
Cheryl Hayman: So I think that's a wonderful skill that you have to have as a marketer in order to get that level of collaboration and collegiality because what we do isn't black and white, and that's what makes it hard for people to understand. And we, as a brethren of people charged predominantly with growing the business as opposed to managing it like sales are and HR people are, it's important that as a brethren we sit back and acknowledge each other and the role we play and that you feel that you can literally step up into those senior leadership roles.
Cheryl Hayman: And marketers have to be leaders. We're not sitting behind a desk just adding things up or whatever you do when you're young in those organisations. Even at a young level, you have to be able to work with others very well and it's not only process-driven.
Mark Jones: So to press open this little bit of introspection on the marketing psychology, if you like, or the perspective that we hold in terms of our role, what are we not getting right?
Cheryl Hayman: I think a little bit of lacking in confidence in how to sell ourselves. So you'll find that, like most things, marketers are fantastic at marketing everything else except themselves. And that's a generalisation of course, and it comes with age and stage where that gets better. But I think you have to be able to actually articulate the value you're bringing. So it's not about the job you're doing per se, it's about the value you're bringing and adding to an organisation. And that's when you suddenly go, "Wow, I actually do do a lot and bring a lot and it is different to what other people bring." So I think that's a big part of it.
Mark Jones: Building on this career trajectory that we'll be talking about and wanting to talk about your board experience, what was it like when you first joined boards and what was it like to go from a marketing centric view of the world to start thinking by definition far more expansively about the whole organisation? What was it like at the beginning?
Cheryl Hayman: Well a little scary. It's like trying anything new. And the other piece that's always more difficult for us when we take on our first boards is you're going from being deep in the operation to having to hover more above it, so hence managers manage and directors direct. So you have to be able to morph out of being across a lot of the minutiae and detail of the organisation to being able to work with what you're told, what you ask in order to guide strategy and other big level corporate decisions.
Cheryl Hayman: That's scary because you don't know what you don't know when you first start a role like that. If you go from a marketing job to a new marketing job, the only thing you need to really learn is the new sector or the new organisation, and then you bring all your skills. And you're dealing with new people, but they're at a common base.
Cheryl Hayman: You sit around a board table and everybody's different. And what I love about it actually is you meet really different and interesting people that you may never have come across in your normal functional role in a corporate sector. But you have to be open to be curious, to be unafraid, to ask questions and to recognise you are other newbie and you are often with people who have a lot more experience than you who made either as a board director or at least on that particular board.
Cheryl Hayman: But most board directors are extremely welcoming, are very happy to help, are very open to being asked questions. There's a lot of work done in onboarding you as it's called and trying to get you up to speed as much as possible with what you need to know and where the risks and challenges are, which is probably the other bit that's a bit different. Joining a board is risky and you are accountable almost solely for those risks as a board member with the rest of your board. So you have to delve into the risks probably in a way you would never consider even asking in an interview for a job.
Mark Jones: Yeah, correct. And I think a lot of people don't appreciate that because you don't know what it feels like unless you've done it, to be responsible for outcomes and possible negative outcomes that you directly weren't working on, but yet you now hold this directorial responsibility.
Mark Jones: I wanted to pick you up on this idea of not being in the business and working on the business, which of course is an age old way of thinking about management and being on a board. What's interesting to me about your role and how that all works together is that, in marketing, you quite often test presuppositions and you know the answer to a lot of things, you know what works and what doesn't work. And there's a real sense of control that I think a lot of us enjoy in the sense of being able to make change and see change.
Mark Jones: In the board role that you take, you're now probably asking questions that you don't know the answer to and maybe in some cases actually don't know the right question, so you're hunting a lot particularly in it's areas where you're not strong traditionally, whether it's HR or sales or finance, in particular, if you haven't got an accounting background. So there are lots of aspects of the business. It seems to me that the skill comes in how you ask questions. So there's probably a two-parter here, which is, what's the best type of question to ask? But then more broadly, how did you adjust to having to have that real discomfort around not really knowing the best way to tackle this?
Cheryl Hayman: So I think you need to know just a tiny bit about what's happening in contemporary business practises, ideally a lot more than just a tiny bit. But you need to, at a minimum, know a little bit. I'm a big fan of upskilling and learning in areas I actually know nothing about in order to know just enough to know I should ask about it because it's part of today's contemporary business landscape.
Cheryl Hayman: So I think it's actually incumbent upon directors in today's world to be very keen and disciplined about continually upskilling and learning from ourselves, from other organisations. Just yesterday I sat in on one of the big four accounting firms. They run a whole series of learning for directors. It's free, it's over lunchtime and it was on a remuneration and remuneration trends during last COVID year.
Cheryl Hayman: You never stop learning, you need to continually want to learn. All the social media and other platforms that are out there like LinkedIn, etc, are full of articles every day. I think you should start each day having a look through and just having spot picking and reading things, so then you know enough to ask. You also have to, as you would in an organisation, spend some time understanding the competitive market, the landscape, who your competitors are, what's happening in ASX world if it's an ASX board. And again, learn by looking at what else is happening and thinking about how that might apply to the business you're in.
Cheryl Hayman: So the best board skill you could ever have is to be a curious person. Coming in with no curiosity probably means you're very passive and you ask very little in the way of questions. And use your directors and management to ask other questions outside of the meeting if you want to expand your knowledge.
Mark Jones: Let's then talk about how you feel about directing an organisation in the context of all the change we're going through at the moment. And there's a lot of change not just because of the pandemic, but we're seeing lots of global macro economic stuff happening that's influencing where we can sell and what we can do and changing behaviours. There's a lot of change actually going on across the world and I imagine having looked at the organisations you're working with.
Cheryl Hayman: Yeah. I mean, obviously COVID came from nowhere, so we're a little more skilled now than we were 12 or 18 months ago. So the pace was, at that point, frenetic. It's still pretty frenetic. The biggest challenges have been around the fact that you are really dealing with people, like there's just so many stories and challenges and concerns regarding all these people, whether that's staff, customers, suppliers, etc. So the people piece is massive and you want to be in business going forward. So you've got to manage the financial sustainability of the organisation.
Cheryl Hayman: So the balancing those two crucial pieces were heightened when you were struck with a pandemic. You were dealing with different levels, we're working from home, there are mental health challenges for people, you've got people trying to do a job and homeschool in a small apartment, you've got work health and safety in the home that hasn't been checked for WHS as you do in an office. Suddenly, you've got lots of people you need to bring in to help make sure your staff are well and functioning and then therefore the business can function and be sustained and still be here in 12 or 20 months time.
Cheryl Hayman: So that was a big challenge and a big change and it had brought with it enormous change for organisations. I think ultimately a lot of it is very positive. I think that a lot of it was long overdue and it's just been sped up. Everybody was doing some form of digitization or transformation in their technology platforms, that's been sped up. Has that caught people off guard? Absolutely. Does it come with enormous costs? Absolutely. Was it budgeted for? Not necessarily. And attached to it is a massive cyber risk, massive. If you're not up to date with what's out there, you are so not going to be doing the right thing for the organisation.
Mark Jones: How much of your perspective is shaped by a fear of negative outcomes as opposed to a positive curiosity about growth?
Cheryl Hayman: That's really interesting because I'm an absolute optimist by nature on everything. But I'm also pragmatic, I was always a pragmatic marketer. So I get inspired by the negative in some ways as an opportunity, and that's just in my nature and it is probably more typical of marketers than the not. But you have to be realistic. So I understand the reality of what's around me. And you do have to have that mix of heart and head in order to make the right decisions. There's this great expression of, there's doing what's right and doing the right thing. And sometimes you have to decide which way you're going to go because the ethical component is huge. And you have to balance your optimism with the right frame of ethics, I guess I'd say.
Mark Jones: Yeah, correct. And you are charged with responsibility for what's best for the company, so on you go, let those biases fall aside. That said, we came across this stat the Marketing Science Institute found a few years ago that only 2.6% of board members have marketing experience. And I was wondering why you think that might be the case?
Cheryl Hayman: Well, because I think everybody always thought that was a skill that was in the organisation and didn't need to be around the board table, which is crazy because that's exactly the same for every other function. So we had accountants and lawyers, etc, on boards, and we have them in the businesses usually too. I think it's because, and I found this when I first started, there's a view that marketers can't read a P&L, can't run a balance sheet, can't understand the financials.
Cheryl Hayman: And I say to people that is so far from the truth. I mean having to be accountable for return on investment of your marketing has been around for a long time back to even when I was in a marketing role, and that's a while ago now. We are hugely accountable for delivering a bottom line result. We just are always focused on trying to get growth in order to leverage the costs. But I don't know a single marketer that doesn't understand numbers to some degree depending on the business they work in. But I think it's that.
Cheryl Hayman: I think people couldn't really quite get their head around what we did. I think a lot of people thought it was a bit of selling and a bit of creative fancy schmancy stuff and spending money. I'm making it sound really conscious, I'm not convinced it was wholly conscious. But I absolutely didn't go far down the board path on a number of roles, particularly early in my board career coming out of a marketing discipline, on the basis that they weren't certain I understood the financials.
Cheryl Hayman: When I came off and started pursuing boards, I spoke to some recruiters and friends of mine who were in the board space. And I used that to determine where I would have perceived gaps when I was going for interviews. So then I started upskilling. So I did courses particularly in finance and non-finance types, etc, etc. And because also the financials around the reporting you see as a board director are a bit different too in the commercial space, so you upskill on those. You upskill around governance if you don't come out of a legal and compliance background.
Cheryl Hayman: I do a lot of mentoring now, and whenever I mentor somebody that's in a functional role who wants to one day be CEO or director, or both, I say to them, "You need to broaden out the skills areas which you won't be perceived to naturally have had.".
Mark Jones: Do you find yourself advocating for the marketing point of view perhaps more so than your board colleagues and do you find yourself educating your board members to some degree in some of these issues and topics that we've been discussing here?
Cheryl Hayman: Yeah. I think everyone on the board table, if you have a truly diverse board, has a particular couple of hotspot areas. Mine comes naturally from looking through the customer or consumer lens. I like to say that I have an ‘outside-in’ perspective, so I tend to look at our organisation through the eyes of somebody else, not through our eyes, because you can, and even when you're in an organisation, become very myopic about if I build it, they will come. Whereas I always go, "How do we know they'll come? What are we going to tell them that's going to convince them to come? Is there a gap? Who else isn't doing this? Why are we different?" So I'm always saying, which is a straight marketing skill, "What's that compelling thing that's going to make people want to buy our product and not company X's product as an example?"
Cheryl Hayman: So 100%, I'm often thinking from that lens. And usually the other piece is from the people lens and strategy. When we do strategy we all sit around the table and come at it from different ideas and different lenses. And mine normally is about from a strategic growth perspective. And I don't mean nobody else is thinking like that, it's that I look at growth as how are we going to achieve it, through what means, and again, why would that drive growth? So my questions come from that perspective.
Mark Jones: I think that's a really important thing. And you're quite right, it's leveraging your strength without apology, and in fact, knowing that it brings such a valuable perspective to that whole board wide conversation.
STING
Mark Jones: Now, to mentoring which you touched on, you do a lot of this. You've worked as a mentor for women on boards, ‘Her Business’, at the marketing academy. So mentoring women of all ages and stages of their professional life. How did you get into that?
Cheryl Hayman: A long time ago now, we started a business called Marketing Women Association. A friend of mine had the idea and a bunch of us got involved because we recognised that marketing women were all being mentored and back in those days and maybe now, still women weren't networking on the golf course and so on. So we decided to try and help support each other in that fashion.
Cheryl Hayman: I get enormous joy out of meeting fantastic people. I learn so much. No mentor would tell you that they don't learn something. So it keeps me fresh, it gives me insight into organisations I no longer work with or for. I do Mentor Walks as well, which is a fantastic organisation where we walk for an hour either virtually or in person and mentor up to three women over the hour as a little group. And that's fantastic.
Cheryl Hayman: It's run by Bobbi Mahlab and Adina Jacobs, but it's a bunch of mentors and then mentees sign up to it. And you get different people each time, and it's wonderful, and everyone just comes with one question. So you spend a bit of time working through that.
Cheryl Hayman: But I learn a lot, I meet lots of fantastic people. They aren't all women, but there is a large proportion who are. And I get inspired. I get inspired by the talent that is out there that you're just not aware of. And I'm always astounded by the most incredible people who are trying to get on boards who are really struggling because it's just hard and they haven't been fully recognised for what they bring in. If I can do anything to help them, then I will. And I think it's incumbent particularly among women to help each other.
Mark Jones: Oh, I couldn't agree more. And I think one of the things that you're touching on there is treating ourselves as a personal brand. And when you're doing that as a non-exec director, quite obviously, who you know becomes really, really important which is word of mouth and it's, what does this person stand for? What's their reputation in the marketplace and what value? And if nobody knows, then nobody can ask you. So it's a classic marketing problem in some regards.
Mark Jones: And one of the curious things for me about the work that you're doing here, and I just think it's fantastic, is mentoring is quite often seen as an exception, it's not part of normal HR programmes or typical career development paths, maybe you've got a different perspective, but I wonder why mentoring is still seen as an outlier.
Cheryl Hayman: I think more and more organisations are embedding mentoring into their people and culture programmes. Lots of membership organisations, Chartered Accountants, runs a mentoring programme for the industry leveraging the skills of people to each other. I think though a lot of the time it is in a functional way. So some of why I'm doing it, I suppose, is in a less functional way in the sense of, we aren't talking about a specific role in a specific company, we're trying to solve people's career or technical business problems, but with, I've got no skin in the game.
Cheryl Hayman: All the entrepreneurs that you will come across who've either started a business or had an idea that they've taken somewhere else will tell you they had mentors through the process.
Mark Jones: I think that's fantastic. I wanted to pick up on the concept of purpose an organisation seeking to make a difference in the world. It's a theme that we're running through the podcast this year.
Mark Jones: And obviously from ImpactInstitute's perspective, we also see a horizon where, we're seeing company reports coming through with impact statements and measuring not just the outputs and the outcomes of an organisation in a short term sense, but this long-term ability to contribute to big issues. I wanted to get your take on it because I know that this is an important part of your work as well.-
Cheryl Hayman: I don't think there's a boardroom in the country that isn't discussing sustainability in whatever fashion that means for their business.
Cheryl Hayman: But you need to understand that customers going forward will vote with their feet and their wallet. So they are actively looking for companies, whether it's a bank or a product company, that has at least been doing the right thing as expected by them. So you not only have to determine what you think it should be from your business's perspective, you need to match that really well with what customers will expect, because certainly the younger generations, and I have two daughters in this space, they are having conversations and changing where they get their products and services based on the moral compass of the company.
Cheryl Hayman: But I think the sustainability piece, whether it's environmental, social, or things to do with governance, is crucial. We have to report on it now, it's an absolute mandatory at least certainly on the ASX side. But even from charities point of views, there's lots of people.
Cheryl Hayman: Humans, the population have become much more cynical, much more questioning. They have lots of sources of information, sadly, not all based on fact, but they're all out there. So they're trying to decipher the real from the untrue. And so as a business, you have to be going, "We need to be very clear about what we stand for and making sure that matches what's expected of us." And I want to join an organisation now without understanding not everyone's got it perfect yet, but at least understanding that there's some roadmap and discussion going on about, "Okay, how do we answer this questions? And what's right for us and our customers and staff and people?"
Mark Jones: I think people with a marketing background on boards have a unique role to play here because we're used to measuring things, and so measurement impact is an emerging idea on boards, I think, in the sense of long-term sustained positive change. What's your sense about how boards will move from a bare minimum ASX reporting mindset to a more detailed and nuanced view of measuring that impact?
Cheryl Hayman: It's extremely hard and costly for a lot of organisations to move into this space, but equally it's incredibly important. So there's still that tension again between doing what's right and doing the right thing and making sure you're financially sustainable for the future, but also making sure you're here in the future because you're doing the right things for our future.
Cheryl Hayman: And I think you are right, marketers are insight driven if they're good and doing what is really at the heart of what we do. We don't sit around and go, "I know the answer," we go looking for the answers. And organisations need to do that. And then they need to work out what that answer looks like for them and to frame it up so that the staff and anyone else they interact with feels good about working there.
Cheryl Hayman: You want to work where you feel good. And in the old days it was like, "I was happy and I enjoyed where I was working and I had great cohort," and so on. And they're all still right. But now I want to go to work knowing I'm working for a company that's doing all the right things. And we need to understand what that means, because that requires a cultural change. You need to measure culture.
Mark Jones: And that's why, as you say, it's such a complex and potentially costly area because of the staff angle, you've got partners, and how sustainable are they? And you've obviously got the customer piece that we've been speaking about. So look, it's a big area and I'm interested to see how all of that unfolds over time, and in particularly the way organisations tell the story of what they're doing.
Cheryl Hayman: That's right.
Mark Jones: In closing, is there a piece of advice that you would leave with marketers who are looking to continue growing into the board space?
Cheryl Hayman: Yeah. I think workout where you might have some perceived gaps, think about what you want to be doing in the future, think about an environment that works for you, and really understand the value you provide to the organisation and the personal areas of enjoyment for yourself, because you have to work where you enjoy it.
Mark Jones: That's great advice. Cheryl Hayman, thank you so much for joining me on the CMO Show today.
Cheryl Hayman: That's a pleasure.
So that was my conversation with Cheryl Hayman.
What an illuminating conversation. It is always so rewarding to speak to other leaders who have to make the final decisions.
I think Cheryl’s point about the stigmas that can surround marketers are so important to consider, as they open the conversation to personal value adding and branding.
It’s important not to forget what we are contributing to the team at large and how we can continuously grow and develop as marketers.
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Thank you for joining us on The CMO Show. As always, it’s been great to have you with us.
Until next time.