At early-stage companies, strategy and execution are at the forefront of everybody’s mind. Tactical alignment is essential, and communication and influence gradually become integrated until they are solidified as more pertinent facets of mature startups and larger organizations.
This isn’t unlike employee development. Early in our careers, we focus on execution mastery and evolve into broader strategy thinking and long-term vision planning. As talented individual contributors (ICs) move into management, communication and influence become increasingly important, especially when it comes to delivering feedback. You’re no longer solely focused on your own individual growth and success, but shaping the development and careers of your team members.
Having started my career in growth marketing, the perspective of building scalable tools to solve every problem is ingrained in my approach. I evolved from executing marketing campaigns to managing a team focused on growth marketing, to leading multiple functional teams, and then to solving my organization’s greatest challenges on a broader and more complex scale.
Whether you’re a growing company or an individual professional, there is always more room to advance, but there are expectations to meet before you can transition into your next career phase. Just as CEOs work to develop and nurture their companies on the macro scale, great managers are focused on bringing this growth mindset onto the employee level.
KPIs like revenue, headcount, and customer acquisition are easy for companies to quantify and adjust as the company matures. However, the long-term growth of an organization is truly a composite of how each employee grows within it. But when it comes to employee development, it’s a trickier mandate to turn quantitative contributions into actionable, individualized growth plans. However, it is equally important to adjust these expectations and metrics as employees and the companies they support mature and grow.
Whether my team members want to get to the next level of their current function or set themselves up to shift into a new position, I believe a primary directive of management is setting them up for success in whatever direction they choose to grow in, as long as it bolsters broader business requirements. To accomplish this on both an employee and org-wide level, I’ve broken down skill families in a Growth Competency Rubric that has helped my team excel in their current roles and grow in tandem with the company.
If you’re a manager looking to improve how you cultivate talent or an individual contributor ready to intentionally up-level your skill set, these rubric criteria may serve as a helpful guide and provide structure for either self-evaluation or delivering feedback to others.
Meet the Skill Families
Some skill sets are often closely related, so an easy way to begin to understand this framework is by defining the skill families and then diving into each of their members. The skill families included in this growth competency rubric are presented in alignment with how an employee develops in a broader sense, from mastering execution to refining their leadership abilities.
The rubric includes:
- Execution
- Customer understanding
- Strategy developmemt
- Communication & influence
- Team development & leadership
Execution
Execution, the foundation of an employee’s skill set and this rubric, is largely contingent upon an employee’s ability to deliver measurable results. The more confident they become in execution, the more skilled they will become at achieving high-impact outcomes. For my growth marketing team, the members of this skill family are channel fluency, channel operations and marketing technology, and experimentation.
Channel fluency begins with an employee’s ability to understand how each of our utilized channels plays a role in driving acquisition, activation, engagement, and retention. At an earlier level, they don’t need to be experts in these channels, but should have a strong grasp on how they interact and can confidently choose channel strategies that align with business goals.
Moving onto channel operations and marketing technology, the expectation is that an employee should be able to build and execute strategies, like paid ad campaigns or CRM journeys, and understand how to leverage tooling and data to construct and launch new campaigns and strategies, as well as properly selecting and troubleshooting events as needed.
Finally, in experimentation, the expectation is that employees should be able to generate meaningful hypotheses around the levers that drive growth. Employees at this level can design, organize, and prioritize experiments to maximize learning and produce and interpret statistically significant insights. This also includes understanding what statistical significance means, and what test size is required for achieving it. They should be able to distinguish between high and low-impact experiments that don’t yield material learnings or move the needle enough, and extract meaningful statistical insights.
Customer Understanding
The customer understanding barometer is centered around an employee’s ability to understand their customers’ behavior and motivations. The best growth marketers can see what happens, understand why it happens, and execute accordingly across channels and in experimentation.
The primary members of this skill family are customer mindset, customer messaging, and data fluency. Marketing, at the end of the day, is generating an emotional response with your customers, whether you’re building a relationship with existing customers or acquainting new customers with your brand. Doing this well means understanding human psychology — why and how people think, what shapes their perspectives, and what weighs on their minds.
Adopting the customer mindset and perspective becomes the focus, including empathizing with how they think, operate, and navigate the world. They need to understand how the customer connects with the product: their different use cases, features they’ll value, challenges they might face, and how it fits into their broader objectives. Finally, employees at this level need to communicate effectively with each distinct segment through tailored messaging strategies with relevant propositions.
In terms of data fluency, an employee should first be able to collect and interpret qualitative and quantitative data, ask the right questions, and effectively manipulate, analyze, and interpret this data. From there, they should be able to identify any gaps in necessary data, and articulate their findings to technical and non-technical audiences alike.
Strategy Development
With a baseline of execution mastery and customer understanding achieved, employees can then be evaluated on strategy development, which includes forecasting and measurement, prioritization and roadmapping, and resource allocation.
Total forecasting and measurement competency requires partnering with analytics teams or subject matter experts to make strong hypotheses that support broader business goals. The employee must establish what strategic success looks like, and what it takes to keep stakeholders on course.
As an IC, you execute the goals that are assigned to you. But as a leader, you’re setting the expectations to catalyze these results from your team. To set these expectations, you’re partnering with analytics and subject matter experts to define the right metrics and goals, which can then be used by teams to drive accountability.
With these goals in place, prioritization and roadmapping take center stage, which involves identifying opportunity sizes, prioritizing initiatives and experiments, and subsequently building plans that balance short-term success and long-term investments. From there, employees can be evaluated on their ability to articulate and scope new experiments and their potential impact based on first and second-order thinking. This level of prioritization also extends to effectively allocating budgets and ensuring that investments are used wisely in conjunction with broader business objectives, as well as capturing and articulating ROI figures and insights.
Communication and Influence
With most of the core tactical skills and strategy foundations in place, the focus starts to move toward communication and influence. That’s not to say effective communication and influence are only focuses once strategy is mastered. Growth marketing is tremendously collaborative and relies on cross-functional alignment and communication for both developing and executing objectives. This communication and influence skill family includes stakeholder management, narrative development and storytelling, and maintaining buy-in from internal leadership.
Stakeholder management primarily covers an employee’s ability to identify and engage relevant stakeholders, ensuring that all collaborators work in sync. The importance of this varies depending on the size and scale of an organization; in larger organizations, your ability to grow and progress is highly dependent on these skills.
Shifting toward narratives and growth, the evaluation centers around their ability to communicate the right level of detail to any target audience, from functional leadership to an executive board. This also involves understanding and anticipating the questions and concerns each level of leadership may have with regard to growth strategy and results.
Finally, employees should be able to effectively anticipate questions and feedback from leadership and prepare answers; they must understand the reasoning behind the feedback, deduce implicit assumptions, and address possible misunderstandings. Many senior leaders are not thinking exclusively about marketing efforts, and are evaluating your messaging through a lens that may also overlap with product, sales, operations, etc.
At a high level, an employee who can effectively translate their expertise into broader, more digestible terminology will be able to win over and influence these decision-makers. Just as you’d segment customer messaging at a more junior level, segmenting narratives or internal targets is equally important to ensure that your messaging sticks the landing.
The last piece here is driving urgency — leaders must often spread their attention across objectives, so persuading them to prioritize their budgets, time, or other resources toward your goals is what can separate good employees from rising stars.
Team Development & Leadership
As I mentioned above, a company’s success can often be a composite of the success of its individuals, and therefore nurturing this development benefits the individuals and team in tandem. This skill family focuses on improving competencies, setting a team up for greater success, and acting as a megaphone to the organization at large.
Starting with competencies, an emerging leader must be able to quantify an employee’s leveling and provide structured coaching and developmental pathways. They must be able to evaluate and articulate strengths and weaknesses, establish tangible goals, and produce environments in which objectives can feasibly be achieved. Each employee’s professional capabilities and aspirations should also be worked into these individualized plans. Finally, maturing leaders should be able to be a megaphone, and share wins, learnings, and flags in appropriate channels and to the right audiences. No matter how frequently they occur, wins should be celebrated.
Final Thoughts on the Growth Competency Rubric
Just as this framework applies to individual employees, high-level leadership can use this to evaluate their organization as a whole. How strong is your execution? How well do you understand your customers? How effectively can strategies be designed and implemented? How powerful are communications? How impactful are leadership efforts? Whatever your level or stage may be, the best way to grow is together.
Send me a message if you have questions about implementing this framework into your own career or want to learn more specifics about the rubric. I’d love to chat!
