Are you a growth leader? Take the research-based assessment to see how you lead for growth—and where to lead better.

Growth leaders are different. They drive measurable business expansion. They IGNITE growth through openness and creativity, RALLY people through strategic alignment, and DARE to act when others hesitate in uncertainty.

The question is: do you have the behavioral patterns of a proven growth leader?

Take the brand new 2-minute research-backed assessment to discover your growth leadership profile across the three dimensions that consistently drive business results.

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How the Growth Leader Test Came to Life

This brief growth leadership assessment is based on behavioral data from over 3,000 business leaders across 50+ countries. We measured specific growth leader patterns against real business outcomes—revenue expansion, market share growth, team performance, and organizational influence. The three dimensions consistently separated high-growth leaders from traditional managers across every business metric we tracked.

This quick assessment gives you an initial snapshot of how your leadership style aligns with proven growth leader behaviors. It's designed as a rapid indicator, not a comprehensive evaluation—think of it as a starting point for understanding your growth leadership potential.

For success, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) often hone in on their technical marketing skills. They might be missing the mark. Our data from the world's largest ever study on CMO impact reveals a profound truth: it's leadership that move the needle. Here's an invitation to a fresh paradigm: marketing leadership.

Download the latest edition here.

Doing marketing isn’t the same as leading marketing. Most discerning CEOs would agree: lasting, profitable growth requires marketing done right. If that's the case, marketers should be front and center, integral to every pivotal company decision. The CMO voice should resonate loud and clear throughout the organization.

Reality paints a different picture. Many companies talk a big game about being customer-centric but don't even have a marketer at the helm. Few CMOs graduate to the role of CEO, and often, the rapport between marketers and CEOs is, well, complicated. From our conversations, it's evident: CMOs worldwide yearn for a more influential seat at the table, a platform to relay vital customer insights and game-changing growth plans.

However, this struggle for influence isn't ubiquitous. There are those trailblazing marketing leaders who've carved out a formidable voice within their organizations, creating ripple effects that benefit both the customer and the enterprise. The upcoming case is testament to that.

Mark Sandys, Diageo's global head of beer, anticipated thriving St. Patrick's Day sales for Guinness, when the Covid pandemic hit abruptly. Global pub closures led to millions of liters of unsold Guinness beer. The business faced a dire situation with evaporating revenue. Mark could have resorted to common fixes like extending beer due dates or offering pub loans. But together with his team he chose a bolder approach—investing hundreds of millions to repurchase beer from pubs and provide reopening support with cleaning teams. After internal debates, the strategy got approved. Upon pub reopening, Guinness sales skyrocketed. Despite a second Covid wave in the fall, Mark’s team persisted. They convinced Diageo to reapply the buyback and cleaning investment. Ultimately, this resilience paid off, with pubs eventually reopening and propelling Guinness to market leadership, achieving record-breaking sales and unprecedented brand success.

Mark Sandys and his team understood precisely where the needs of the customer and company converged. The sweet spot. We've dubbed it the "Value Creation Zone." Beyond crafting a stellar marketing strategy, the team also wielded their leadership skills, rallying an impressive assembly of internal players to champion its execution. They weren't just doing marketing; they were leading the ship.

The marketing leadership gaps

Before exploring marketing leadership, let's examine the unique challenges intrinsic to the role of marketing. Conversations with CMOs have revealed gaps that many other leaders don't face in the same manner. We've labeled these as the marketing leadership gaps:

The Trust Gap: Marketers strive to anticipate future customer behaviors and sales. However, the unpredictable nature of the future often makes colleagues and managers second-guess their forecasts. When a CMO presents next to a finance head, their projections might appear less concrete— because they are. No one can guarantee the future. Yet, a CMO's duty involves shaping that future and earning the trust of others.

The Power Gap: Creating an unparalleled customer experience demands collaboration across multiple departments. In many firms, however, these departments don't report to the marketing team. Simply put, some organizational silos might ignore marketing’s suggestions. Consider the digital transformation: Achieving a unified view of the customer often means connecting data from varied company corners. Who’s leading this? Who makes the decisions? It’s often a delicate task.

The Skills Gap: With marketing technology evolving rapidly, marketers constantly race to stay updated. But here's the twist: even as advancements offer CMOs unparalleled marketing opportunities, the sheer volume of information can shake their confidence, echoing the sentiment, "I can't keep up with everything."

Few leaders naturally possess the skills to span the trust, power, and skills gaps. Universities seldom include navigating such complex terrains in their syllabus. Given these challenges, it's no surprise that many marketers wrestle with their roles, struggling to bridge these gaps—and sometimes falling short.

The factors for CMO success

What really makes for a successful Chief Marketing Officer? In pursuit of clarity, we have spearheaded - the best of our knowledge - the most extensive global study on CMO success to date. First, we evaluated how well the leadership behaviors and personality traits of 1,232 senior marketers from over 80 countries could explain their business impact and career success, Using an advanced Neural Network model developed by expert Dr. Frank Buckler. For a more nuanced understanding of CMO success determinants, we partnered with INSEAD Business School Professors Roger Lehman and Manfred Kets de Vries. The latter also provided us invaluable access to his vast 360-degree feedback database. With this resource, we dissected over 67,000 assessments to discern how board members perceive CMOs compared to other leadership roles. Moreover, insights from over 100 CMOs, business leaders, and leadership experts enriched and contextualized our data.

When people think of successful marketers, they often picture a famous Coca Cola, Samsung, or Mercedes marketing campaign. The prevailing view suggests marketing success hinges on technical proficiency: launching impactful campaigns, exploring new distribution avenues, optimizing pricing. While these factors are critical, our research uncovered: purely technical marketing skills, though valuable, aren't sufficient for success. In fact, our research findings have revolutionized our perspective on CMO success:

• Only about 15% of marketing executives' business impact could be explained by their technical marketing skills. The most successful people in our study were "good enough" technical marketers-but not always the best.
• Far and away the biggest factor for CMO success: marketing leadership skills (55%). The most successful leaders in our study were able to find the overlap between what customers need and what the company needs. However, their standout quality lay in actualizing marketing strategies. They were able to mobilize superiors, colleagues, teams, and themselves to make the critical growth strategies actually happen.

For generations, books, schools and universities have taught marketers the skills of branding, pricing, distribution, digital—hoping this would be enough. As our research shows, these skills are useful but only the beginning. We suggest marketers treat technical skills as the entry ticket; the permission to play. Once a marketer masters the basics, it’s all about adding the skills to bridge the marketing gaps, and to make marketing strategies inside an organization actually happen.

Put simply: for success as a CMO, leadership trumps technical skills.

The Value Creation Zone

In our extensive research, a clear pattern emerged: The most effective marketers actively collaborated across their organizations, ensuring that marketing strategies align with both customer needs and company objectives. We've named this vital intersection, where the needs of the customer and the needs of the company converge, the "Value Creation Zone" or "V Zone". Marketing leadership is all about finding Value Creation Zones—and enlarging them. Take the PlayStation, for instance, now recognized as the global leader among gaming consoles and Sony's hallmark product. The lesser-known narrative behind its inception is instructive. During a period when Nintendo was setting the foundations of the gaming world, a significant portion of Sony's leadership expressed reservations. However, Ken Kutaragi, an assertive executive of that era, spent nearly a decade vigorously advocating that gaming is both a customer and a company need: a Value Creation Zone. Without Kutaragi's proactive leadership, the PlayStation might never have materialized (and Sony's corporate trajectory could have been starkly different).

 Marketing leadership in 360 degree

You might be wondering: what exactly does it take to enlarge the Value Creation Zone? A deeper dive into our data provides clarity. Our analysis identified four crucial elements that explain the leadership prowess of marketers (% = contribution to the explicable variation in senior marketers' business success):

• Leading Upwards (23%). The most successful marketers bring important customer needs into the boardroom, work on issues that really matter for the top management, create and prove returns, and work with the best external partners to create the highest possible impact. In other words, for success, marketers must know how to help their bosses make better decisions—and see the V Zones.
• Leading Sideways (22%). We spoke earlier about the Power Gap, and that marketing often has to influence other departments. So it's no surprise successful marketers know how to mobilize colleagues, give hope through an inspiring narrative, create movements—to make V Zone-projects actually happen.
• Leading Teams (30%). Unsurprisingly, great marketers are great team leaders. Even the best CMOs can’t make change happen alone. They need skilled teams that have the trust and confidence to help the organization become even more customer-minded.
• Leading Self (25%). Marketing is an important and very exciting role. But it's also hard work. That's why, for success, marketers must be very clear about their own purpose, do work that matters to them personally, so they have the energy to get up each day and lead change—even when things get tough.

The importance of upwards and sideways marketing leadership

Modern leadership books often focus on guiding executives in team leadership or in discovering personal purpose. Unsurprisingly, these elements are also pivotal for marketing leaders. However, as we have shown before, for marketers, mobilizing superiors (upwards) and colleagues (sideways) were even more important. Taken together, these upward and horizontal actions were about 50 percent more important than managing subordinates for business success (45 percent versus 31 percent)—and well over twice as important for career success (47 percent versus 19 percent). This isn't to undermine the importance of team management — quite the opposite. But as the trajectory of Guinness leader Mark Sandys illustrates, exemplary marketers know how to engage both upwards and sideways within an organization. Marketing leaders are change catalysts!

Given their importance in marketing, we will delve into the components of upward and sideways leadership next.

Mobilizing upwards

When we asked Chief Marketing Officers about their main responsibilities, many highlighted roles like "overseeing the marketing department" or "leading the company's ad and branding campaigns." We suspect that other functional leaders might echo such department-centric perspectives. However, the standout leaders in our study characterized their principal duty differently, emphasizing goals like "boosting company growth" or "enhancing customer outreach to bolster performance." These leaders keenly addressed the “big issues,” aligning their priorities with both the CEO's vision and the overarching company goals. This alignment with the CEO's goals accounted for 10% of the CMOs' business impact and another 10% of their career success.

But how well do marketers align with the CEO's vision? A significant 76% of our surveyed CMOs believed they were in sync. However, only 46% of superiors in our 360-degree assessment felt that their marketing heads truly grasped the company's direction. This suggests a potential alignment gap at the functional leadership level. Being perceived as a judicious manager of resources also bolstered a CMO's rapport with the CEO. In our research, visible returns orientation accounted for 12% of CMO business impact and 3% of career success. Yet, another disparity surfaced: 67% of our CMOs believed they were return-driven, but a separate study indicated that only 39% of C-suite executives felt their marketing leaders were consistently yielding measurable ROI for their expenditures. Mobilizing upwards is among the most important skills every marketer must learn—the earlier the better.

Mobilizing sideways

For impactful change within an organization, it's pivotal to lead assertively and share a compelling narrative. Capturing the attention and support of colleagues, even those outside your immediate team, can create a cascading effect. A well-articulated action plan that yields results can foster an environment where colleagues become advocates for the cause. As we have said earlier, the customer experience is generated by the entire organization, and few of the leaders responsible for this experience report directly to marketing. That’s why, for marketers, mobilizing colleagues to become these advocates is crucial. The most critical sideways skill marketers need to master is what we call "walking the halls." This involves engaging with leaders from departments outside of marketing to create a better customer experience. This skill alone accounts for 13% in terms of both business influence and career growth. Role modeling and effective storytelling are the other two important skills. Combined, they account for roughly 10% of business impact and around 20% of career success. However, our research revealed that only 56% of CEOs perceive their marketing chiefs as exemplary leaders who champion causes, and a mere 61% of CMOs admit to acting as role models within the organization.

Intriguingly, while many CMOs excel at crafting stories that entice customers to buy, they often overlook using this talent for internal engagement, even though its benefits are clear. Mobilizing peers requires more than just digital communication. Although one might assume that video interactions suffice in today's age, they rarely inspire. Stellar leaders prioritize face-to-face interactions. They engage in town hall meetings during regional visits and collaborate in person to address pressing challenges. The silver lining? Strategies to engage both CEOs and fellow colleagues often align. For instance, when functional leaders actively foster collaboration with other departments, they are often also creating tangible outcomes and promoting the broader organizational strategy.

Learning marketing leadership

We found something quite uplifting in our research: for business impact, gender hardly makes a difference (we're talking less than 1%). While firms could benefit from more women in leadership roles, our study suggests that when in the spotlight, both women and men shine equally. Now, speaking of personality: It's not the be-all and end-all! We dove into the widely-used Five Personality Traits model, considering things like how open, diligent, or extroverted someone might be. But all these traits together? They explained less than 5% of what makes a marketer successful. The big takeaway? Not many are born ready to leap over those big hurdles like trust and power gaps. Marketing leadership skills aren't just innate—they can be learned and polished.

To all marketers: while technical marketing expertise is crucial, it's imperative not to rely solely on it. Strive to excel at mobilizing superiors and colleagues. Embrace the essential task of acquiring additional marketing leadership skills. We believe Mark Sandys and Ken Kutaragi would endorse.

Thomas Barta is the Director or the Marketing Leadership Institute, a marketing leadership advisor and international keynote speaker. A former senior marketer and former partner of McKinsey, his research includes the world’s largest ever studies on CMO success, impact and bravery. Thomas is the Dean of the Global CMO Fellowship and an Honorary Fellow of The Marketing Society.

Patrick Barwise is emeritus professor of management and marketing at London Business School. He has published widely on management, marketing, and media, including his prize-winning 2004 book with Seán Meehan, Simply Better: Winning and Keeping Customers by Delivering What Matters Most. He also served for many years as a trustee and then chairman of Which?, the world’s second-largest consumer organization.

Their book The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader is now out in its 2nd edition.

We conducted the largest ever global study of marketing leadership, analyzing detailed original data on over 1,200 marketing leaders and more than 67,000 existing 360-degree assessments of both marketing and non-marketing business leaders. The research revealed 12 essential traits that can make or break marketers’ business impact and career success. The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader is the first leadership book for marketers based on anything like this level of research evidence. It tells you how to:

• MOBILIZE YOUR BOSS: Make an impact at the highest level and align marketing with the company’s priorities.
• MOBILIZE YOUR COLLEAGUES: Inspire and support your non-marketing colleagues to meet customers’ needs better than the competition.
• MOBILIZE YOUR TEAM: Build and hone a winning marketing team. Become a leader of leaders.
• MOBILIZE YOURSELF: Focus on goals that will benefit your customers, company, and long-term career.

In The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, you will read firsthand accounts of marketing successes from around the world—and gain psychological insights that will surprise you into the leaders who drove the key decisions. You will learn how to persuade your colleagues, motivate your team, and strengthen your leadership skills. Warning: this isn’t a marketing book. It’s a leadership book for marketers, using the latest research on what works—and what does not work—in the digital age of marketing. By zeroing in on the value creation zone (“V-Zone”)—the all-important overlap between your company’s and customers’ needs—you’ll be able to help your business to win in the market and achieve your career goals. Remember: doing marketing isn’t the same as leading marketing. With The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, you can lead the way with a new vision that is powerful, transformative, and ultimately life-changing. Read more >

Get your copy here >

Praise for the 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader

Here's what people say about the book:

• “Everything you need to know to be a superior marketing leader!” – Marshall Goldsmith, The World’s Thinkers50 #1 Leadership Thinker
• “A must-read for every present and future CMO who cares about making a difference.” – Seth Godin, Author of All Marketers Are Liars
• “The essential leadership playbook for the CMO of the future.” – Jim Stengel, former Global Marketing Officer, Procter & Gamble
• “A persuasive perspective on the opportunities open to marketers to lead for change.” – Paul Polman, CEO, Unilever
• “A masterful dissection of what it really takes to lead marketing.” –Syl Saller, Global CMO, Diageo
• “An essential read for any marketing professional looking to take the next step in his or her career.” – Dominic Barton, global managing director, McKinsey & Company
• “Research-based, but brought to life by human beings.” – Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and CEO, WPP
• “Stuffed full of sound analysis, crucial career advice, and fascinating case studies—this is an effortless must-read for the ambitious marketer.” – Gavin Patterson, CEO, BT
• “I only wish I had been able to read it a good few years ago!” – Amanda Mackenzie, global CMO, Aviva
• “This might just become the bible for marketing leaders.” – Sherilyn Shackell, founder & CEO of The Marketing Academy
• “Here is a must-read book for marketers as leaders.” – Richard Hytner, founder, beta baboon, former DY Chairman, Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide
• “This book gets under the skin of what makes a great marketing leader.” – Peter Markey, CMO, Post Office

The book review

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From the world's largest ever study on marketers' success, we have created this little marketing leadership test. If you honestly answer the following questions, you'll get a quick read on your marketing leadership strengths. We hope you'll find this assessment enlightening. (Japanese 🇯🇵 version is here)

What you will learn:

• Which marketing leadership skills you lean on most. It’s situational, so your score might change when your role or tasks shift.
• Which leadership skills you can sharpen, if you think they’ll help.
• The key leadership skills that truly matter.
• Where to go to build these skills.

About the marketing leadership test

Leading Marketing isn’t the same as doing Marketing. In the world's largest ever study on marketers' success (The Marketers’ DNA), we discovered that Leading marketing is a comprehensive task. The world’s most successful marketers know how to mobilize bosses, peers, teams, and themselves. Our team surveyed 1,232 senior executives from over 80 countries. With the assistance of INSEAD Business School, we analyzed data from one of the world's most comprehensive databases. In total, our study involved over 68,000 executive assessments (all details are in our book, The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader). The assessment uses statements from our research that best describe the four important marketing leadership dimensions. While it's not a perfect evaluation, it will provide valuable insight into your strengths.

Most of the leadership advice aimed at senior functional managers is how to build, align, energize, and guide a world-class team. This is a challenging task in its own right, but we all know it isn’t the whole story. Leaders, even those in the C-suite, must also extend their influence upward and horizontally.

Organization theory suggests that managing upward and sideways is good for both the company and the individual leader’s career: CEOs need the insights and pushback of trusted executives to help sharpen strategy. And complex modern organizations benefit when people engage with their peers across functional and business-unit boundaries to bring a range of perspectives and drive change and innovation.

Our research confirms this theory, and then some. In a wide-ranging study of the leadership actions of chief marketing officers (CMOs)—a good proxy, we believe, for the skills and behaviors of functional leaders in general—we’ve shown how managing upwards (the CEO) and mobilizing colleagues increases business impact and career success. (For leadership research on another C-suite proxy, the CFO, see “How functional leaders become CEOs.”) To test our hypothesis, we asked more than 1,200 senior marketing executives from 71 countries about their perceived business impact (contribution to revenue and profit growth), their career success, and their characteristics against 96 variables. Using statistical techniques (explained below1 ), we were able to relate to these outcomes the 96 variables (which included leadership behaviors, functional skills, personality traits, sociodemographic variables, and external factors, such as peoples’ fit with the company). We supplemented this research by analyzing existing 360-degree data on 7,429 marketing and non-marketing leaders—a total of 67,278 individual evaluations by these leaders’ bosses, peers, subordinates, and themselves.

Managing upwards and sideways is a big factor for success

Our findings lend support to the notion that senior executives should pay more attention to mobilizing their bosses (managing upwards) and functional colleagues (managing sideways) (exhibit). Taken together, these upward and horizontal actions were about 50 percent more important than managing subordinates for business success (45 percent versus 30 percent)—and well over twice as important for career success (47 percent versus 19 percent).

Managing upwards and sideways can improve your business impact and career success.

Clearly, there’s more to success than managing up and sideways: leading a high-performance functional team accounted for 30 percent of the explained variation in our CMOs’ business impact, and 19 percent for career success, and managing yourself accounted for the remaining variation. Mobilizing subordinates, in particular, is the base executives need to build from if they want to establish credibility with the CEO and with colleagues. The best executives build strong teams, relentlessly enhance team members’ skills, keep subordinates focused with objective performance measures, and establish an environment conducive to trust and loyalty.

But they also do much more. Our model helped us identify the most important specific actions associated with managing upward and horizontally, and our 360-degree survey data confirmed that some of those actions receive less emphasis than they should.2

Mobilizing your boss: Focus on strategic issues and demonstrate financial results

When we asked CMOs about their primary role, some responded that they “ran the marketing organization” or “led their companies’ advertising and brand campaigns.” We believe many other functional leaders would provide similar departmentally focused responses. By contrast, the most effective and successful leaders in our study were more likely to describe their primary role as increasing company growth or better outreach to customers to improve performance. We found that a key determinant of success was taking on the big issues, those in sync with the CEO’s agenda and contributing to the company’s overall performance. Aligning with the CEO’s strategy explained 10 percent of CMO business impact and 10 percent of career success.

But are functional leaders well aligned with the CEO’s agenda? Seventy-six percent of our CMOs said yes—but just 46 percent of the bosses in our 360-degree database believed their marketers knew where the organization was going. Many functional leaders, it seems, could and should better align with the top.

Building a reputation as an effective user of resources also increases standing with the CEO. In our study, the ability to demonstrate returns explained 12 percent of CMO business impact and 3 percent of career success. Here, we again found a gap: while 67 percent of our CMOs said they had a strong returns orientation, only 39 percent of C-suite executives in another study reported that marketing executives were delivering measurable return on investment for their expenditure.

Mobilizing your colleagues: Forge strong ties with peers to build momentum

If you want to build a “movement” within the company, lead from the front with an inspiring story to win the hearts and minds of colleagues, including those who don’t report to you, and with a clear action plan to deliver tangible results. That can initiate a virtuous circle of internal recognition by energizing a cadre of early followers among colleagues. Our research suggests that leading from the front and having a strong narrative together explained nearly 10 percent of business impact and about 20 percent of career success. The ability to reach beyond the marketing silo to executives in areas such as IT and finance explained an additional 13 percent of the variation in both business impact and career success.

Only 56 percent of CEOs, however, described their marketing leaders as role models who lead from the front, and only 61 percent of CMOs said they use their storytelling skills. Tellingly, while marketers are adept at telling stories that mobilize customers to buy their products, we find they are less likely to ply that strength internally, despite the importance of effective engagement with colleagues.

Mobilizing horizontally means walking the halls, getting out of the office to share ideas with peers, listening to their concerns, and working jointly to attack strategic issues. In theory, leaders could do many of their interactions on video these days. But that’s rarely inspiring. Instead, the best leaders connect directly with as many people as possible through town halls when they travel to local markets, and hunker down to help teams solve their biggest problems.

Fortunately, the actions needed to mobilize the CEO and colleagues are often mutually reinforcing. For instance, moves by functional leaders to build support horizontally are often related to their simultaneous efforts to show tangible results and advance the organization’s strategy.

While CEOs rely on functional leaders’ ability to build high-performance teams, much more needs to be done to help these leaders extend their influence upward into the C-suite and horizontally across the organization. Happily, our work suggests that not only business impact but also career success redounds to those CMOs (and, we believe, functional leaders of all stripes) who can increase their span of leadership influence upward and across functions.

(From Patrick's my McKinsey Quarterly article).

About the author(s)

Thomas Barta is a McKinsey alumnus and was a partner in the firm’s Cologne office.

Patrick Barwise is emeritus professor of management and marketing at London Business School. They are coauthors of the new leadership book The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader: How to Succeed by Building Customer and Company Value (McGraw-Hill Education, September 2016).