Building a performance culture

Grant Leboff: Thomas, one of the things you talk about in the book, which of course is extremely important, is building a performance culture. Teams that can really do well and perform. How as a marketing leader do you go about doing that?

Thomas Barta: The first thing you do is recognize it is important. Our research had shown that neither bosses of marketers nor teams of marketers say marketers are great performance managers. Most of them say, “You know, we get away with stuff.” This is actually quite a challenging situation, when you have a team where people get away with stuff. For two reasons. One is – if you’re not calling out bad performance, if you’re not following through, if you’re not having clear agreements on deliverables and then your people do not see any consequences if they screw up, things can get toxic.

Because the people who are really performing well get really angry, and those are the first ones who leave. You can’t afford that. You have to call out bad performance and take consequences. It’s not comfortable but it is your job as a leader to get the good people or retain the good people. Also you have to celebrate success. Many times we assume people are doing hard work which is just the right thing and if everything is fine then everything is fine. We need to celebrate. We need to call out poor performance but we also need to celebrate very good performance, outstanding performance. You just need to remind yourself as a leader that that’s crucial.

Grant Leboff: Would you say in your experience, in your studies of looking at different marketing leaders, that they weren’t very good internally at setting KPI’s for teams? Did you find that people fell short of having real KPI’s that they had to meet?

Thomas Barta: Yeah. It’s not as developed as it could be, let’s say it like this. There’s a good and a bad reason. The bad reason is people aren’t setting KPI’s because they just don’t think it’s worth it. Maybe HR does it, right? Some metric system in the company takes care of it. It normally doesn’t. But there is a good reason because sometimes things are hard to measure in marketing, yeah? We always have this part, but I think what we have to change is for everything we can measure, we got to put measurement in place. You can work with your team to set what those goals and measurements are, right? You don’t have to invent everything yourself. Everybody in a marketing team needs to be very clear on what the deliverables are, what good looks like. Everybody needs to know if I perform badly there will be a consequence and if I perform really well I’ll get celebrated.

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