How do you prepare for the departure of a highly tenured marketing team member?
Sort By:
Oldest
Cyber risk / cyber insurance professional, CMO in Software2 months ago
Transitions should be prepared way ahead of actual transitions. I demand all my team members to put on paper their playbook - all activities, with cadence, people involved, tech in use... so that anybody (or almost anybody) can pick up their responsibility more easily. It's like tech and security, make sure you don't have a single point of failure or in this case make sure you don't have a single point with the knowledge.
CMO in Consumer Goods2 months ago
In a perfect world, you'll have prepared for it thru succession planning and have advanced notice. But even with planning, a lot of times the highly tenured team member does a lot of things we don't even realize that keep things humming along. A few thoughts for preparation:(1) CULTURE CHECK - check-in with other members of the team to get a pulse on how folks are feeling. Any departure will bring along some emotions from other people on the team, so understanding the mood and reassuring / stabilizing things will be critical to keep everyone else operating at their current levels.
(2) KEY STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWERS - connect with key members of this person's team / organization and cross-functional members. Understand the unique value and knowledge this person brings for them, and where there may be critical gaps.
(3) KEY PRIORITY ROADMAP - get a list of key priorities and tasks from your departing team member. Understand from them what's mission critical vs. exploratory / 'nice-to-have' projects, and if there are any key partners (internal, agency, contractor) they're working with who might be able to transition some or all of the work to.
(4) TRANSITION PLAN - work with the departing team member (and with inputs from other key stakeholders) to develop a transition plan. This should also include background documents, project plans, key contacts, critical dates / milestones, etc... Make sure files are readily available on a shared server or transitioned privately (when applicable) in case you need things later. If reasonable, ask if the team member would be open to a call or email for a period after departure if necessary.
(5) COMMUNICATION - communicating up, down & across will be important for managing expectations. Will you be using this as an opportunity to shape the organization more broadly? How long will it take to backfill the role? What projects / responsibilities are transitioning to whom and by when? Any work that will be delayed or paused during the transition? You won't think of everything, but focus on the big rocks to manage expectations and minimize disruption.
Best of luck!
Director of Marketing2 months ago
Never any easy situation and I've been on both sides of this. Hopefully there is plenty of notice to plan project transitions and knowledge exchange to other team leaders. Provide an open forum for that knowledge transfer and be positive for all involved that change happens in business. Being transparent and effectively communicating change is vital to the team culture. Change also brings opportunity for others to step up, learn new things and take on new responsibilities. The initial impact of team change is a downer, as a leader, its an opportunity to move forward positively and give others a change to rise to the occasion.
If that is not the situation, then consider bringing in a fractional CMO with the intention of evaluating the current state, offer a gap analysis and help you find the best replacement from internal resources if they are ready or external sources. The fractional CMO should be the best interviewer from your recruiting team for this role, since they understand both the high level and the details needed to be an effective marketing leader.