This post originally appeared on MarketingProfs.
The pandemic has given B2B marketing leaders a golden opportunity to rethink the culture of their marketing teams. Rather than worrying about how to recover, the best B2B marketers are thinking about how to get stronger. While true culture change takes time, one of the best ways to start is by integrating it into your employees’ professional development plans. After all, you are what you measure. According to Campbell’s Law, if my raise is solely dependent on meeting a sales quota, I’m going to do everything I can to meet that quota, even if that means slacking on other parts of my job (managing my teams, developing my own skillset, etc.).
That’s why you need to build innovation into development plans and, subsequently, into employees’ annual reviews. This way, you can start holding them (and yourself) accountable for the change you want to make. The metrics of what a successful employee is has to start including those behaviors you want to see. Otherwise, your teams will treat culture change as a “nice-to-have” rather than giving it the focus it needs.
Unfortunately, telling your employees to “be more innovative” or “take more risks in your work” isn’t all that helpful. Instead, focus on creating professional development goals that are specific, attainable and measurable, and then provide detailed recommendations that are time-bound and actionable.
If you’re a B2B marketer, use the pandemic as an opportunity to assess your professional development plans, both for yourself and your teams.
- Do you have a development plan? Do your employees? When was the last time it was updated?
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- What are your career goals? This year? Over the next 3-5 years?
- What do you need to accomplish those goals? From yourself? From your team? From your boss? From the organization?
- When was the last time you spoke with your team members about their personal career goals?
- Do you have a plan for how to help them achieve those goals?
- Do you hold them accountable for meeting their goals?
- When was the last time you went down on the factory floor to better understand the complexities of your product manufacturing?
- Do you monitor industry associations and know what the latest trends are?
- Have you shadowed your sales force to truly hear the voice of your customers and understand their needs and what they are looking for?
Once you’ve assessed the current situation, start creating plans that will form the foundation for a more innovative and effective marketing communications department – one that will attract, develop and retain innovative employees.
Professional development plans should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely). Here are a few sample development plans for employees up and down your org chart that will build a foundation for a more innovative marketing team that could actually apply those strategies and tactics you see in conference agendas, blog posts and white papers.
These plans should always be customized to the individual employee – everyone has different strengths, weaknesses, goals and interests – but they provide a good framework for creating lasting culture change in your B2B marketing.
The pandemic may have forced us to adapt on the fly and come up with creative solutions to challenges we couldn’t have imagined a year ago, but it’s also showed us what’s possible if we think beyond best practices and identify new solutions. Let’s do more than recover from this. Let’s make this the start of a new beginning for all of us.
Prof. Development