Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
To transition successfully into a leadership role, managers need to develop a leadership mindset. To do this effectively, leaders need to be able to:
- Visualize how things should be.
- Communicate the vision.
- Take a wider, more panoramic view.
Leadership mindset
Leading requires a different mindset to managing. Leading is more focused on creating the unknown than on controlling the known. It deals with setting direction rather than with operational detail.
Changing mindset in order to think like a leader is not easy. Metaphorically speaking, if you are naturally left-handed, choosing to do as many things as possible with your right hand is a challenge! It would require disciplined thinking, and doing consciously things that you would normally do automatically.
Managers are accustomed to planning actions and events on a ‘get the job done’ timescale, and used to finding solutions to undo problem situations. So how can they adjust to longer timescales, and the challenge of envisioning new situations or realities?
Example
Imagine a manager is governing a village in a valley. What if the manager decided to move up from the valley to the mountain top and look at the entire landscape from higher up? Seeing to the far horizon could reveal a storm coming in that could flood the village. The manager, with this information, now has the opportunity to act as a leader!
A leader could envision moving the village farther up the mountainside to stay above the flood. The new challenge becomes how to inspire and persuade everyone to move house, leave the familiar, and create a new home above the flood plain. The leader is not concerned with how specifically to move and re-build the village. The leader is just concerned that the village is moved and re-built.
Changing mindset may need courage and determination. What if a new site for the village is difficult to find? What if people don’t want to move house and live farther up the mountain? What if the mountain looks hard to climb in the first place, or the view turns out not to be worth it? This is the challenge facing the manager: how to climb the mountain anyway, just to find out.
Visualize how things should be
As the example shows, to develop a leadership mindset, a leader needs to be able to visualize how things should be and lead by communicating that vision. For example, a manager at one level pays most attention to how the business produces its products and services, and how efficiently it does that. Meanwhile, a manager at a higher level pays attention to its target market and how to satisfy that market by producing the right products in the right way. This second manager may be a director of the business, and considered its leader. But the activity described is still managing.
What if that director’s horizon moves to the entire industry that the business serves at national or even international levels? Questions may then arise. For example, is our target market the only one for us? With such a wider scope, new possibilities become obvious and creating a vision to achieve them a more compelling idea.
Communicate the vision
Once a vision begins to crystallize, the challenge of how to make it happen presents itself. As a first step, you need to explain the vision to others so that they can become enthused by it. Then you have to recruit people, opinions, and resources to the cause, to gather momentum and make it look solid even before there is any tangible reality. The focus has now moved away from the certainties of doing the work to the more intangible. Ask questions such as “What if this…?” or “How could that…?” to engage people’s excitement and creativity.
Take a wider, more panoramic view
By doing that successfully, a leader can spot risks and potential problems before they develop. The organization can then put in place measures to deal with the challenge. From this wider perspective a leader focuses on the general rather than the specific, thinking as a generalist rather than as a specialist.
With this wider, bigger-picture perspective, seeing into the distance and noticing potential risks is part of learning to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity. Talking to a wider range of people becomes normal, because more people are involved, and wider perspectives and many more opinions and experiences become available. Making decisions and choices has wider implications, and whether or not to make something happen as part of progressing a vision, may be one of a variety of such decisions. In this way, the leader’s thinking is naturally more generalist in its focus than the pragmatic, implementation-focused manager’s mindset.
Back to TopOlivia Kearney
Olivia is CMO of Microsoft Ireland she is responsible for developing the longer term strategy for the Irish business and leads the marketing strategy across B2B and B2C.
A passionate marketing leader who cultivates big ideas to drive growth and brand distinction and brings her international experience in the Tech and FMCG industry.
Cathal Melinn
Cathal Melinn is a well-known Digital Marketing Director, commercial analyst, and eommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.
Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specializes in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimization. Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.
Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue-generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.
Over his career, Cathal has worked client-side too, with digital marketing agencies and media owners, for brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.
He can be reached on LinkedIn here.
Kevin Reid
Kevin is a Senior Training Consultant and the Owner of Personal Skills Training and the Owner and Lead Coach of Kevin J Reid Communications Coaching and the Communications Director of The Counsel.
With over twenty years of experience in Irish and International business with an emphasis on business communications training and coaching, he is a much in demand trainer and clients include CEO’s, general managers, sales teams, individuals and entire organisations.
With deep expertise in interpersonal communication through training and coaching and in a nurturing yet challenging environment, Kevin supports teams and individuals through facilitation and theory instruction to empower themselves to achieve their communication objectives. This empowerment results in creativity, confidence building and the generation of a learning culture of continuous self-improvement.
Bill Phillips
Bill is an international facilitator, trainer, and team coach. He has successfully coached CEOs, board members, directors, executive teams, and team leaders in public and private companies, NGOs, and UN organizations in 15 countries across four continents. He is also the creator of Future-basing®, a highly potent process for building strategy, vision, and cooperation.
