Seven of nine: building a marketing team that stays
One voluntary departure in three and a half years isn't luck. It's a few unglamorous decisions, made on purpose.
I hired seven of the nine people on today's marketing and ecommerce team. My first hire was in social media. Three years later, she's been promoted twice. In three and a half years, one person has chosen to leave.
7 of 9hired, 3 promoted, 1 voluntary departure.
People assume there's a trick. There isn't. A team that stays isn't something you fix at the exit interview. It starts before anyone's hired, and it runs on a handful of decisions that are easy to describe and hard to keep.
It starts with the job description
My job descriptions are long, on purpose. They spell out what success looks like in the role. In interviews, I'm up front about our warts. Nobody should find them in month three and feel misled.
When candidates ask what I'm looking for, my answer is always the same: someone who drinks our Kool-Aid. I want to work with people who are excited about our mission. You can't teach someone to care, and I don't want to work with anyone who doesn't.
I also hire for different personality types. Our customers aren't a monolith, and our team can't be either. You need someone on the red team. You need someone who sees what you don't.
Clarity from day one
Every new hire gets a job scorecard, their roadmap to success. They get our team expectations doc, and a guide to working with me: how I communicate, and what I need from them.
From there, everyone owns a written annual strategy with KPIs they helped define. People stay where they can see their own scoreboard. When they can point at a number and say "that one's mine and it moved," they stay to move it again.
When in doubt, write it out
We document everything. Plans, decisions, how things get done. Writing it down is how a team runs without waiting on one person.
We're also as transparent as we can be. Leaders can't let the team in on everything, but the more we share, the more trust we earn.
And there are no bad ideas. It's a cliché, and we live by it anyway. Some of my favorite campaigns sounded crazy in the room until we found the workable take.
Every quarter, everyone, from graphics to content to web development, presents their own results and learnings. Not to report. To think out loud about what worked and what's next.
On the team, not above it
I'm willing to get my hands dirty. If someone brings me work that's 90% there, that's an A. Adding the last 10% is my job.
When someone makes a mistake, we fix the problem first. Then we figure out what we learned. It's easy to take accountability when the result is help, not blame.
ABC: always be coaching
Feedback is a gift, so my team gets it regularly, and it goes both ways. But coaching is more than feedback. It's making room for the conversations that help people grow. That's why, once a month, I take someone from the team out to lunch, one-on-one, because the honest conversation happens away from the desk. It's why skip-level access stays open, so nobody feels trapped under one relationship. And it's why I say yes to the conference, the course, the stretch project, even when the quarter is tight. The cost of a departure is always higher than the cost of the course.
Coaching also means noticing when things go right. That's where Friday stand-ups come in, because adults need applause too. Saying "good job" and "thank you" costs nothing and can mean everything.
A team that stays compounds. A team that leaves sends you back to the start.
The cost of doing this
It's slower. Documenting, onboarding and coaching take time you could spend shipping. There are weeks I'd rather just do the thing myself. But if I'm the only one who can do it, I haven't done my job. My job is building a team that can do it without me.