Your team needs to fail
Specifically the marketing team.
That is of course if you want to grow. Whilst there are many paths to achieving growth, there is none more pivotal or successful than implementing a failing forward culture.
In a few words, failing forward is a strategy of adopting a growth mindset around failing into your team's mode of operation, i.e. try something new, learn, iterate, and repeat. Your team will quickly fall into a cycle of testing, learning and improving.
Similar to contrarian thinking, failing forward is a well-spoken and written topic, especially after the books by John Maxwell, "Failing Forward" and Ryan Babineaux’s “Fail Fast, Fail Often.” But ironically, a concept that is rarely in use in most companies.
The idea of learning from your mistakes is well known and most managers will point out that it is something that they practice. Even those who are not avid sports fans would have seen or heard Michael Jordan's infamous quote.
"I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
And yes, whilst learning from your mistakes is crucial, it only touches upon the true concept of failing forward. The true beauty and difficulty of using a failing forward strategy is making sure the entire team adopts and continually pushes it forward.
However, this can take quite a bit of courage and fortitude. Every second of every day your competition is increasing. And without fail, so do the demands of management to increase results and growth. With this added pressure to deliver, it is hard to ask teams to take a chance. It is natural to fall back on things that you know work instead venturing into the unknown. Sadly this nothing but a short stumble to watching your creativity die.
Unfortunately, as this happens, managers will often push the teams for new ideas. What are we doing next? what will the next campaign do? how will it beat the targets we have? Etc etc. At this point, you are too late. You cannot simply demand a new idea from your team when you need it. Creativity doesn't work like that. Likely it will have the opposite effect.
Instead, you need to be more forward-thinking. As a manager, it is your responsibility to create an environment where your team is enthusiastically pushing and trialling ideas without fear of recourse. Only then will you see a surge in creativity and ideas that exponentially beat your targets. This is not a magic bullet that will give you new marketing ideas right when you ask for them, but with this structure, you won't need to.
One of my favourite anecdotes is taken from a completely different field. It comes from David Bayles Art and Fear. A ceramic art class is divided into two, Team A is told that they will be graded on the number of pieces they make and Team B is told they will be graded on the quality of one piece. Team B spent notably longer crafting one piece of work but they were completely outdone by Team A in both quality and quantity. This is because Team A continued to iterate and implement their learnings into new pieces. The creativity and skill exploded and as a result, they had a significantly better result.
“The more you do, the more you fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better you get.” - John Maxwell
Alright, I'm sold - how do I do this?
Needless to say, this needs to be managed up as well as down. If you are operating in an environment where people are afraid to admit their mistakes due to the impact it might have on their career, then you and your boss need to work on that together. Teams need to feel safe for them to exceed their potential. Especially in a marketing team. If in doubt ask your team, do you feel safe?
This is the bedrock of successfully implementing a failing forward strategy. But even if they do there may be some obstacles in the way that we need to change.
Culture is like a large ship, it can't change course quickly. But, it can change. The key point is to keep failing forward. The results might not be magical off the bat but you'd be surprised what might develop.
Start small by holding a brainstorming session and make it fun. No ideas are off the table.
Then try the idea.
This is important. There is no point holding an open session if you aren't going to try any of the ideas. Sure, most of them will be crazy and off the wall but that is the best part. Make the team have fun. Make them excited about marketing. Make them excited about their job.
But try it on a small scale. Limit the financial and brand impact on the company. Remove the chance of absolute failure. So that if it fails ....it fails. So what? Try another idea and keep going.
Not only will your team move away from worrying about failing, but they will be excited and even more creative in their roles.