This week, I share a top acronym and the revelation that it’s not Tuesday.
I admit, there are a few things wrong with this week’s Tuesday 2¢.
For a start, I can’t lie, it’s not Tuesday, and the second, well, you may have heard the phrase “this book could have been a blog post”; well, this blog post could have been a LinkedIn comment.
That’s because it is inspired by this brief post by Chandar Pattabhiram, who has done a lot of the work.
OK, all of the work.
I don’t know Chandar, (comments from my chums Drew Neisser and Grant Johnson set off the algorithm’s spidey senses) but according to the post, over a cocktail (I like this fella already), Chandar sketched out a simple model from a discussion about how CxOs should measure senior executives that he called TOP – Talent, Outcomes and Perception.
And, I wanted to give it a little ride around here in my weekly musings and maybe see what you think, especially those of you who coach and advise executives, as it resonated with me and my experience.
TOP describes what we should bring to a senior role and how other senior people judge us, and of course, I will look at this through a marketing leadership lens.
Here is how I interpreted it:
- Talent – This isn’t just about your talent, but what talent you personally brought into the business, who you hired, and how you nurtured the talent already there. For marketers, I suspect this would include agencies, contractors, designers, and all the talent you bring to bear.
- Outcomes – What impact did you and the team have, not just the things you and the team did, but what those things achieved? I actually think ‘outcomes’ is the reigning marketing word of the year for 2024 and has a good shot at getting all the academy’s votes in 2025.
- Perception—What did people think you did? The problem with perception is that it’s an opinion, and once someone has a position on something, they are emotionally vested, and it’s hard to argue against it – trust me, I’ve tried – so make it good.
Perception is probably the one doing all the work here, as this is presumably based on how well we communicated the first two: the talent of the team and what we achieved.
For marketers, this is often called “marketing the marketing” which pulls at the thread of communication, a common topic on my little podcast (Rockstar CMO), when we discuss marketing leadership success. It’s always about communication.
In the comments on the original post, there are suggestions on how you might augment TOP with other factors to a leader’s success, like Alignment, which is a good shout.
And I think if we dig into this more and make this a SMART goal or more of an OKR for ourselves, then we’d need to figure out how we measure our TOP’ness…..
But….
I like this simplicity – TOP works.
I thought that maybe the author had been inspired by some other research, I had a noodle, but while HR folks talk about models for “top talent,” they don’t mean TOP; this seems to be original. Nice.
What do you think? Should we bring TOP to the top table?
Fancy more of this?
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I’m a 3xCMO, now a marketing strategy advisor and podcast host at Rockstar CMO. Although, I’m not a rock star, but a marketing leader, strategist, content marketer, columnist, speaker, industry watcher, and creator of ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust) for the companies I work with. But most of all, I am an enthusiastic tea drinker.
You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or now Threads! – or listen to my weekly podcast at Rockstarcmo.com
The half-baked thoughts shared on this blog may not reflect those of my employer or clients, and if the topic of this article is interesting or you just want to say hello please get in touch.