What Your CMO and BDO Wish Everyone at the Firm Knew (Regional Conference Recap)
By Holly Harper
Management Consultant, Anagram Consulting
Let’s all stop for a moment of gratitude. Spend a few seconds in silence and reflect on who in your firm is holding everything together.
If you said, “my manager,” it’s time we give a tip of the hat to the connective tissue holding the attorneys and leadership at bay while making space and finding the resources for our coordinators, specialists, content writers, and marketers to to get things done.
At the closing session of the 2022 LMA Mid-Atlantic Conference, a panel of four CMO/BDO-level executives took the stage to tell “us” - the attorneys, consultants, marketers, administrative staff, new hires, and partners - what they wish you would all know to make their jobs, your jobs, and everyone’s work experience better.
The key takeaway from the panelists was: Consider that if we have this job title then we are qualified in this role to facilitate compromise between competing priorities across the firm, and we would be so grateful for a tiny bit more TRUST.
Panelists:
Three Takeaways from the GC Panel
- Trust when your project budget gets slashed: If your project, campaign, initiative, or even idea gets shot down, slashed, canceled, or paused - trust that your CMO/BDO fought for you until the decision was final-final.
- Trust when she pushes your buttons: In this asynchronous, virtual, fast-paced world we work in, it’s important to remember that your CMO or BDO is a human, too. Practice grace.
- Trust when she pushes your envelope: If you’re an attorney, then you are trained to know the law. If you’re a CMO or BDO, then you are trained to know the marketing. Trust the marketing pros; they’ve got this!
- Trust that she knows more than you do. Period: The thing about marketers at the CMO/BDO level is that we are now highly trained strategic thinkers. It’s part of engaging in marketing campaigns from ideation to measurement over many years that builds the body of knowledge and wisdom whereby we can do our jobs. We’re smarter now. Trust us.
Trust when your project budget gets slashed
Imagine when the partners share news of a downturn in a closed meeting, but don’t want to spook anyone because of a hot new opportunity on the horizon. Out of an abundance of caution, they decide to batten down the hatches, cutting funding for your project, campaign, or commercial shoot. That smarts.
But what’s worse is that your CMO/BDO has to come break the news to you, hold space for your disappointment, and also enforce the directive from the leadership. It’s not fun for her, either.
What makes it harder: she fought for you.
She asked if they would consider a “cut back” or a “scaled-down version” or “pausing work on the new thing over in HR.” She can’t tell you the details, she can’t disclose the meeting contents, but she wants you to trust her when she says, “I’m sorry. I tried. We need to move forward.”
CE Opportunity: If you are a manager in a law firm and your team members consistently question your decisions and support for their work, consider performing a series of empathy-building exercises designed to help you build shared understanding of the competing priorities.
Trust when she pushes your buttons
Remember the early days of the lockdown when we had peak levels of concern, grace, and collaboration as we learned new things about ourselves and our colleagues? Well, that’s not a lesson we should soon forget.
Remember that your CMO or BDO lived through 2020, too. They have been struggling to make a new normal, too. They may have unseen stressors in their lives that they try to protect you from when they’re at work, but that tension might slip out.
In the words of Don Miguel Ruiz, stop taking it personally. Your colleagues may be incredible managers, Ted Lasso optimists, or brilliant legal or strategic minds, and if they hurt your feelings, step on your toes, or challenge you directly then it’s time for a pause. Don’t do anything. Just pay attention, step back and examine your role, and give them the benefit of the doubt this time.
CE Opportunity: The idea of empathy is often confused with the activity of empathy. One is theoretical, a “he who throws the first stone” situation, and the other is a practice whereby we learn to pause, process, ask for space, ask for a second opinion, remove our biases, and re-engage with the shared goals of our team, project, or firm in mind. Yes, everyone might get snarky once in awhile, but give grace three tries. If that doesn’t work, then it’s time to teach the team how to diffuse and eliminate the growing undercurrent of resentment through a series of assessments and empathy challenges - before we have an eruption.
Trust when she pushes your envelope
Dear Attorneys, Please let us do our jobs. <3 - Your CMO
As marketers, we all abide by the universal law of “do not publish without permission and approval from on high.” So, when we have been doing our jobs for such a long time, and we have gotten explicit or implicit permission to market the law firm, there is only one thing more important than bringing in business: that’s covering our “bases” (ahem).
We know the limitations on attorney advertising. We know the rules and penalties for offering legal advice inappropriately. We know the target audience. We know the tools and have predicted the outcomes. We also know how to use an asterisk.
In marketing we have approximately three (3) seconds or six (6) words to get a potential client’s attention, so we need to make some bold stroke statements every now and then. But once we’ve got them past the headline and into the content, we cover the page with facts (and asterisks) to make sure we are honest, clear, and not over-promising.
Let us market. Let us be bold. Trust us when we say that it is our top priority to do you proud, protect the brand, and keep everyone moving forward.
CE Opportunities: Nearly 100% of people, including marketers at a junior level, believe that marketing is a series of tactical ideas that we put into the world and those return mounds of leads. No, you’ve watched too much Mad Men. Strategic marketing management is the art of capturing attention, a method of educating people, a system to track 300 moving pieces, a budget that is always two-sizes-too-small, and an ability to see the forest and the trees at the same time. Before you ask us “what if?” another time, just trust us. If you keep getting push back as a marketer, consider offering your team a Strategic Marketing Management workshop so they can understand the role of marketing, identify their roles in the broader system of marketing. The perspective will help them see how it works, plus all of the safety valves, backup plans, crisis considerations, and meetings that are in place to protect everyone from a marketing faux pas.
Trust that she knows more than you do. Period:
You know when you ask “why” you have to do a thing you don’t understand the point of? Or when your boss gives you a task and you complete it and she’s sort of annoyed instead of grateful for your effort? Or when you are told to attend a specific training and it’s a total waste of time?
Well, good news! Your boss is smarter than you, so she’s trying to help you become smarter, too.
All of the panelists encouraged every person on the team—from managing partner to associate to legal assistants to law clerk to you, marketing coordinator—to get curious. CMOs and BDOs grew into their roles via long journeys of deep investigation, research, trial and error, and developing strategic perspective to predict what might work even better next time.
If you want to take step into a strategic, management, or C-suite role someday, then consider what did the people around you do to get so smart?
“Be curious, not judgmental,” said Ted Lasso and this panel.
CE Opportunities: This is where our panelists could not stop with the flow of ideas to develop a skill set that goes beyond marketing. This is a foundation for growth for every professional and every person in every industry.
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- Listen deeply and broadly: If you want to excel in marketing, you have to develop intellectual curiosity. Writing good copy, closing tough deals, planning flawless meetings are your job. It’s literally required for you to be paid. But growth into new roles of increasing responsibility requires initiative and a desire to learn more. From podcasts, books, periodicals, marketing blogs, the news, pop culture, your industry press, your peers, and your subordinates, you need to open yourself to learning about the world you inhabit. Our shared goal is to transform it into a better place, so you better understand how it works. Note: Don’t start asking “why” all the time either, instead…
- Learn to manage up: Managing up isn’t bossing your boss. It’s taking initiative to tee up the decision makers so they can act quickly on your good information. If you have a “why,” Google it. If you can then come up with a good question, as your immediate supervisor or a colleague at the appropriate time. If that warrants escalation, escalate. Managing up isn’t knowing everything, it’s learning how to solve as many problems as possible on your own so you can make their next steps smooth sailing. For example, if she says “Please edit this document for distribution in our next newsletter” do it. But then think of what comes after that, too. Should you format it? Find an appropriate graphic for it? Tell her where you saved it and provide a link for quick reference? Offer to start on the next one? Or even do all five assignments before you send them, because no one needs five different emails when one summary would suffice. Managing up is a skill around teaching yourself efficiency and forward-thinking. Your CMO and BDO will appreciate all of the time you’re saving them.
- Set up a learning academy: Silos are the enemy of marketing. In order to bring in new clients, we need to know who they are, how they behave, what words they use, and more. You need to know when they’re opening a door to new business or when your tone is going to cause trouble. Learning soft skills and hard skills and new skills should be part of a continued learning process for well-rounded teams of legal and non-legal professionals in the firm.
- Do a personality assessment and follow it with some coaching: Do you think you know yourself from the MBTI or the StrengthsFinder™ or your astrological sign? Well, bad news. Humans have a bias blind spot. We all know some things about ourselves, but we are notoriously bad at gauging our abilities. We consistently under- or overestimate what we are capable of. If you find yourself hearing (or saying) “It’s just the way I am” or “I can’t” or “You should,” it’s time to get a third opinion on how you show up in your personality at work. Most of the time that’s a half-day workshop, but any good training program includes follow-on exercises to help troubleshoot and provide tools for navigating your real day-to-day experience. Self-awareness in organizational contexts has been artificially constricted by our outdated norms around professionalism. Now that we know that people matter, invest in CE that shows that your people matter, and that their own self-esteem and potential deserve to be built up and released for everyone’s benefit.
- Acknowledge wins: It isn’t just attorneys who get to proclaim victory. It is so important for non-legal professionals to have their own category of celebration and achievement that is recognized on par with attorney accolades. We know it’s the attorneys who do the legal work, but they couldn’t do anything without this team of powerhouse professionals behind them. Celebrate more and often (and definitely don’t forget Boss Appreciation Day, either).
Now that you’ve peeked behind the curtain of the CMO/BDO brain, there are so many exciting things for you to explore, learn, try, and absorb. Marketing is one of the most social, fun, strategic, broad, and creative professions, and marketers, operations professionals, and lawyers can all learn from the communicators and facilitators among us. And have fun doing it!