I know this is not the type of article series you would normally see coming from me when compared to my past articles. Upon exploration, I found this is a topic that was very under-represented both officially and in community content. 

I went out and looked for any articles or reference material related to leadership in Marketing Cloud and found…nothing. With all the new community content coming out and all the new voices filling the space, I was honestly shocked at this gap! This finding led me to the idea of writing a series of articles around leadership in the hopes to help both new and existing leaders grow and better enable future success for their teams. 

NOTE: Most of my experience is on the Engagement platform, so most of the examples and such that I use will be in that environment as a frame of reference. The vast majority of this is easily translatable to other SFMC products though.

I will be releasing multiple articles, as a series, on this topic here on my blog. My goal is to help make a series that provides support and knowledge to the community around leadership and advocacy inside of Marketing Cloud.

In this article, I will be doing a quick introduction into Leadership in Marketing Cloud and plan to touch base on the following subtopics:

• What is Leadership? A quick dive into what is leadership and what a leader is and does.
• Leadership Paths: A comparison of the two basic paths of leadership
• How does this fit into Marketing Cloud? Dipping our toes into the differentiator of Marketing Cloud from generalized leadership

Being a leader in Marketing Cloud is unique in many ways, but it does also have carry over from generalized leadership. I do want to make it clear that if you are a strong technical leader in other areas, most of that will definitely translate across – with some adjustments. But before we get too far into that, let’s first explore what leadership really is.

What is Leadership?

Leadership is usually defined as something like “characteristics of being a leader” or some similar rhetoric, so I think the more helpful definition would be the meaning of the word ‘leader‘. A leader, as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, is “a person who manages or controls other people, especially because of his or her ability or position“. Pretty straightforward and simple, right? But like most things in leadership, simple is a red flag. For instance, the ‘controls’ part of that definition does not sit well with me (and likely others), but it is not necessarily wrong. And just because you manage someone does not mean you lead them. I am going to take a stab at defining what a leader means to me as I don’t think that definition does the word justice.

My definition of a leader is a bit more subjective and contextual. I feel that a leader is better defined as “a person that takes responsibility and accountability for the wellbeing and growth of a group of people.” Essentially, a leader is someone that is always pushing the path of the greater good for a group in consideration of all variables and contexts, despite any individual’s losses. I feel that although a leader is the one that is in charge, they only have the power that their team lets them have. Without consideration of the needs and desires of the team, a leader will not likely be a leader for long.

Although there are many different ways of being a leader, most involve long hours, sacrifice and very little accolades. Most people will view their leader as someone with a cushy job that allows them to just sit there and tell others what to do without doing much themselves. If you look objectively at output from a role, it can be understood why people feel this way – but that is not usually the case. A leader tends to be dealing with many administrative tasks as well as strategic and tactical decision making that there is little time for more ‘production’ type tasks – limiting their output capabilities. 

Essentially, a leader is someone that is always pushing the path of the greater good for a group in consideration of all variables and contexts, despite any individual’s losses.

For example, on a given day as a director, a good majority of it is spent being in meetings, preparing for meetings, postmortems after the meetings and then communicating out the results of these meetings to the team. This leaves me little time to actually work on the platform itself, meaning that I am unable to really contribute to the workload directly. Although I am not able to directly contribute often, the work I do is integral to the success and advocacy of the team. Without someone taking on these tasks, there would likely be such disorganization and entropy of tasks and focus on objectives, that the team output would suffer greatly.

A leader is not ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than others on the team, the differences are around what each person is accountable and responsible for. The further you grow into your career; each movement accrues accountability and responsibility. As this continues, regardless of title, you become a leader in different ways. 

This leadership does not need to focus on people but can instead focus on a product or technology. Being a leader places you where your every action matters. If you have an off day or lose your cool, it can have a much larger impact on the team and company. The key thing to remember is although you have more accountability and responsibility, as a leader, you are at the mercy of your team. If they do not accept your leadership and/or refuse to do the proper work with you at the helm, you will likely be out on the street very quickly. Every person on the team is highly important, regardless of title.

Without consideration of the needs and desires of the team, a leader will not likely be a leader for long.

The other major aspects of leadership are mentorship and the advocacy of growth of the individual. As a leader, the expectation is that you will be available to the team in order to help guide them on a path of development. This goes beyond teaching skills or knowledge that is directly relevant to the team, but instead involves helping the individual develop good work/life habits, learning stronger communication skills, networking and collaborative skills, and even things like career pathing and growth. 

Many leaders may not be fluent in Marketing Cloud to the same levels of their team, but that in no way limits their ability to mentor or advocate for them. Even if you are a master of your aspect of SFMC, as you grow as a leader, your skills will likely drop below your team. This is to be expected and embraced. You need to be able to delegate the production tasks to your team appropriately, meaning if you are the leader and the top producer, you will have a terrible work/life balance and it will stunt the growth of your team.

Now that we have a strong grasp on what a leader is and what makes someone a leader, let’s start our dive into terminology and see the different Leadership Paths that are available.

Leadership Paths

In this section, I plan on going over the terminology I will be applying to Leadership Paths. Although there are more paths and sub paths, for this series I am only going to talk through two different paths. These, I think, are the most applicable and most relevant to our discussion.

Do note, these terms are uniquely defined by me for the purpose of this series to help label some ideations on leadership into a simple word or phrase. These are not the universal definitions or understanding of the words. I feel strongly about these definitions, but there are many different people and groups that might disagree with my definitions. So please do understand, this is just my point of view from my experience that is defining these terms.

We will be discussing two different paths of leadership below, technical and people leadership. A good portion of these articles will focus on People Leadership as that tends to be the more predominant leadership path. That being said, most of the information shared around People Leadership can be easily translated to Technical Leadership with some slight adjustments. 

On that note, let’s first take a look at what is Technical Leadership.

Technical Leadership

A Technical Leader is an individual that is highly skilled in the platform, most likely a subject matter expert (SME), who now focuses on leading the technology as well as the experience and skills of those using that technology. Essentially, view it as this person is the direct representative of that specific technology and how the company is using it.

This person will be leading not only things like implementation, solutioning, and execution, but also focus as a Center of Excellence. They would work to ensure the creation of boilerplates and templates for the team to use as well as building multiple ways for the people that work in the platform to ‘skill up’. They are the person everyone looks to when they have questions or need help in that specific technology or platform.

With a better understanding on what Technical Leadership is, next let’s take a look at People Leadership.

People Leadership

This is the pathof leadership most people are familiar with and is the predominant leadership you see in practice. This is where you take the lead of a team of individuals and you are responsible for their growth and capabilities, while also accountable for their output and performance. A People Leader is someone that is focused on the ‘people’ part of the team and ensuring those people are able to perform at the highest quality while also retaining a strong culture that permeates satisfaction and happiness in their role. This person tends to be the glue that holds the team together.

Now that we have insight into what Leadership is and the two different paths available, I wanted to address the burning question everyone probably has…

How does this fit into Marketing Cloud?

This likely is the part that most people are wondering about. All the above is very generalized and not SFMC specific. This is true and done on purpose. As we dive further and deeper into Leadership over the next few articles, I will have more details on specifics of Marketing Cloud only aspects. In this, I can say that although the above is generalized, it is also cropped down from many other aspects and definitions of leadership into what I feel is a good overall generalization of Leadership theory and practicality which are relevant to SFMC.

For example, most Marketing Cloud teams are fairly lean and tend not to have large numbers on the team. Most leaders will only have a few direct reports – although sometimes those direct reports will be leaders themselves and have direct reports under them. To this extent, I limited the view to a more involved and localized leadership level. Think of it as if there were 5 different descriptors for team sizes: Tiny, Small, Medium, Large and Extra-Large. For this series I will be focusing on the Medium sized teams, but still highly relevant to Small and Large. Although this can still be helpful to Tiny and Extra-Large teams, these articles may not be as relevant to you. 

The idea being that Tiny represents a maximum of 3 or 4 people and Extra-Large is a team of 40 or more people reporting to you (direct and indirect). As the vast majority of teams and leaders for Marketing Cloud fall very much in the middle of those two, that is where I focused.

Another fact to consider for Marketing Cloud is that the work done in the platform can be both a science and an art. Inside the platform, you are doing multiple different types of work, from creative and artistic work, like designing emails or imagery to data science and development, like ETL and coding emails or landing pages. This can make a very unique team dynamic to work in. Because of this, common leadership best practices will not fit well and your ability to be agile across leadership personas and styles will be the key to success.

Conclusion

Thus concludes my first article on Leadership inside Salesforce Marketing Cloud. My goal in this article was to provide a detailed overview to help us have a base to further discuss the more in-depth topics over the next few articles. For this article, we focused on what leadership is, the two different paths of leadership as well as an overview of how these would work inside SFMC.

The next few articles will go into things like the different personas of leadership, what makes a good leader, leadership styles and the impact of good leadership. I hope you found this interesting and look forward to seeing you in the next article!