The Harvard Business Review report below, highlights some of the issues that commonly exist between CEOs and their CMOs and suggests some solutions. At it's simplest level, the issue seems to be poor communication and this problem isn't solely the preserve of CEOs and CMOs.
Many of the internal influence issues which we at Applied Influence Group find when we speak to clients, revolve around this issue.
One of the simplest ways to improve communication amongst top level teams is to stop asking questions and to start giving commands. This might sound counter-intuitive but the command "Describe your ideal Chief Marketing Officer to me" will get a more detailed response than "What do you want your Chief Marketing Officer to do?"
Tell, Explain and Describe are all useful verbs when you are trying to understand someone else's position - the main issue at hand here. These three verbs are even better than traditional open questions such as who, what, where, when and how. They are an invitation to fully explain something, the first step in resolving the sort of poor communication in the article below.
The results reveal that 80% of CEOs don’t trust or are unimpressed with their CMOs. (In comparison, just 10% of the same CEOs feel that way about their CFOs and CIOs.) CMOs also sense a serious problem. In our own surveys, 74% of them say they believe their jobs don’t allow them to maximize their impact on the business. This troubled relationship helps explain why CMOs have the highest turnover in the C-suite. According to an analysis by Korn Ferry, they stay in office 4.1 years on average, while CEOs average 8 years; CFOs, 5.1 years; CHROs, 5 years; and CIOs, 4.3 years. Our own research indicates that churn rates may be even worse: We found that 57% of CMOs have been in their position three years or less.
https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-trouble-with-cmos?utm_campaign=hbr&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
unknownx500
