One of the hardest jobs I have done is being a junior employee.
Because poop rolls down hill.
I got saddled with a lot of work my senior counterparts didn't want to do because it was BORING but had to be done.
I had some good managers that taught me the why behind those boring projects. And I had some not-so-good managers that treated my position as a catch-all for any administrative task they didn't want to do and didn't bother educating me on the why of the business need.
Can you guess which people I learned a ton from?
If you guessed both, you are right.
The good managers made me want to learn more about the business and how to get those low-value manual tasks automated. The not-so-good managers taught me how to not be like them.
How are you teaching and training the next generation of business leaders?
Are you training marketing coordinators to be marketing coordinators or administrative assistants? Are you training them to be a business strategist or as a task taker and a task doer? And those are two different things. How you train marketing professionals is actually going to make your business better over time.
It's going to make that person better throughout their career because one, you are essentially going to constantly delegate to them. To do the things that are a checkbox. "Make sure this is done. Make sure that this RFP has all the right tabs in it. Make sure that this person has their information and their resume correct it."
It's a lot of check-the-box, make sure it's done, move on to the next checkbox. But to really work with and grow a business strategist from a marketing position, you want to encourage them to think analytically, to think about campaigns and what those campaigns can generate for the business. Is the goal of the campaign to generate revenue or it is to build brand reputation?
There's so many different things that we can do with people junior in their career in marketing and getting them to the table to help make business decisions because whenever you can get other team members to help make really solid business decisions as a marketing leader that removes a lot of weight from my shoulders, and it gives them the ownership and the responsibility and the accountability of what they're taking on. And that helps them grow exponentially.
Really think about how you're treating the junior marketing team members and maybe those new marketing coordinators coming onto the team, and giving them the leeway to grow as an actual professional.