This is a self-learning session on the Da Vinci Humanized Growth Leader profile. Its three objectives are to understand the opportunity for marketers to drive more humanized growth, to explore the profile, and to identify development opportunities for the participant as a leader.
The profile comes from a study by IRG and Spencer Stuart’s Marketing, Sales and Communications Practice, which interviewed hundreds of leaders worldwide about leadership and performance and identified a group of overperforming leaders.
Key findings
- The overperforming CMOs in the study hold two beliefs at once: that unleashing technology needs both data and human creativity, and that sustained growth requires creating value for all stakeholders.
- The study’s performance claim is direct: human-centric growth strategies deliver superior shareholder returns.
- The profile has ten parts: five attitudes and five behaviors, drawn from leaders described as effective in multi-stakeholder realities, good at connecting, understanding others, and building bridges.
- The five attitudes are authentic, open-minded, courageous, optimistic, and future focused.
- The five behaviors are acting strategically, leading change, building talent, collaborating and influencing, and driving results.
The attitudes, and who demonstrates them
Authenticity is being true to who you are. The example given is Marc Pritchard, who stayed humble, approachable, and honest about his story even after winning a lifetime award.
Open-mindedness is being interested and imaginative, listening to different perspectives and wanting to learn more. Hanne Sondergaard, then CMO of Arla, became so interested in sustainability as an ecosystem challenge that she moved from CMO to chief sustainability officer.
Courage is standing for something and being willing to take a risk for it. Khensani Nobanda at Nedbank is cited for work fighting financial inequality for women, something she believed in and saw as relevant to her industry.
Optimism is described as an opportunity mindset rather than cheerfulness: turning risk into opportunity. Rupen, then CMO of the fruit company Dole, worked with partners to turn waste into products, including a vegan leather made from pineapple waste now used in shoes.
Being future focused is knowing where you want to go and being resilient about getting there. Patricia Nzolantima is the example, described as having faced more hardship than anyone should and fighting for what she knows she will achieve.
The behaviors, and who demonstrates them
Acting strategically means a strategy is only relevant if actions follow from it, used to prioritize and to address short-term challenges in a long-term context. Norman de Greve, formerly CMO of CVS, is cited for the decision to stop selling a profitable cigarette business as the company moved toward being a health company.
Leading change means rallying change makers inside and outside the organization and thinking in terms of systemic transformation rather than a single silo. Sylvia Lagnado is cited as one of the people behind the Real Beauty campaign, which required a wide and systemic push.
Building talent is about the next generation of leaders. Antonio Lucio is described as the epitome of servant leadership, running a program for candidates not yet ready for a C-suite role and mentoring them on stakeholder management and value creation.
Collaborating and influencing runs inside the team, across the organization, and outside it, with an emphasis on listening to understand. Mim Haysom, CMO of the Australian insurer Suncorp, is cited for One House to Save Many, which brought together a university, a scientific research organization, and an architecture firm to design houses that survive extreme weather.
Driving results, read through humanized growth, means creating multi-stakeholder value through shared KPIs that also enable innovation. Sean Summers, CMO of the Latin American e-commerce platform Mercado Libre, is described as acting as a spider in the web, streamlining communication and holding a shared KPI overview.
What participants do with it
The workbook exercise is a self-rating from one to five on each attitude and behavior, then selecting the top three to focus on, then choosing one and explaining why.
The stated key learnings are that marketers are best positioned to step up and drive humanized growth, that the profile outlines what growth leaders of the future need, and that it can be used to drive alignment inside a company about which experiences and attitudes matter most.
Three optional pre-reads accompany the session: a McKinsey piece on three types of CMO and their rapport with the CEO, a Harvard Business Review article on what AI-enabled management cannot replace, and an excerpt from James Clear’s Atomic Habits on building behaviors that stick.
The session closes with leadership perspectives from the webinar series, featuring Keith Weed, former CMO of Unilever, and Raja Rajamannar of Mastercard on the role of the CMO.
Scope and limitations
This week is self-learning and has no live session, so the profile is worked through individually on the platform rather than discussed with peers.
Source
This page summarises SESSION 4: Da Vinci Humanized Growth Leader – Attitudes & Behaviors, by Institute for Real Growth (IRG), Spencer Stuart’s Marketing, Sales & Communications Practice, 2024.