Meet the Masters - Tom Wallis, Gousto
TOM WALLIS
This week for our Meet the Masters series, we talk to the Chief Marketing Officer of Gousto, Tom Wallis. Tom shares with us his thoughts on what makes a great marketing leader, how his metric-driven approach helps build high-performing teams, and reflects on the leadership lesson he has been reminded of over the past year.
In your opinion what are the top three attributes of a great marketing leader?
To start with, being humble. Marketing covers such a broad spectrum, from brand, performance, digital to retail, and it is important to not think that you can know everything in great detail. You need to be able to listen and learn from the people in your team who know more than you in their respective area, so it is always good to hire people who have expertise in other fields.
At the same time, I think it is important to be able to go down into the detail when needed. When I am working with my team and a question arises, whether it’s about PR, photography, or about pay-per-click advertising, I do try to find time once a quarter to delve a bit deeper to see what’s going on and talk to people about it. I want to understand, for my benefit as much as theirs, so that I can provide some input on how it fits into the overall bigger picture.
Finally, knowing the history of marketing and being able to understand, apply or critique the classic theories is important. It is not a perfect science. I always say to people that it is a matter of opinion, so marketers need to be able to understand these different opinions to then form their own. Personally, I spend a lot of time learning about how things were done 50 years ago as I do believe it forms a thread to today.
When you are hiring for your team, what killer questions do you ask to separate a good marketing leader from a great one?
Interviews are often about people’s achievements and all the positive attributes, but I like to see when people have felt vulnerable. I ask, ‘If I were in a room with you at a time when something was going very badly, what would I see going on around you?’. I want to get a sense of their resilience and their ability to bounce back from a really testing time.
Another question I like asking is, ‘Have there been times where you have trusted your instincts over what the data is saying?’. I have quite an analytical approach to marketing due to my background, but I have learnt that you cannot always follow that path, so I try and gauge whether they have had similar experiences of overriding experiment results or data sets.
In your opinion, why does diversity matter?
“In a creative industry like marketing, I think you get better outcomes and solutions by having multiple perspectives on life, work, and people.”
In a creative industry like marketing, I think you get better outcomes and solutions by having multiple perspectives on life, work, and people. You are constantly trying to come up with new ideas, so if you have seven people from the same background, they are likely to have seven similar sets of ideas and opinions.
Secondly, in terms of building the company and attracting new people, it widens your talent pool. Not only through directly hiring diverse groups, but also because more and more people want to work for companies where diversity is a priority. I think it increases the attractiveness of a company overall by focusing on diversity.
What advice do you have for your peers and other executives on prioritising D&I within their teams?
My first piece of advice would be to set clear objectives. By setting a goal with a timeframe and a quantitative aim, it makes it more tangible and ensures that everyone is focusing on similar aspects. It helps show the wider organisation what success looks like and that you are working with a goal in mind.
Secondly, I think you should be open and transparent about what you are working on, and really communicate within the business. People want to know about it. Ideally having someone who can purely focus on D&I, rather than spreading it across different people’s time is also helpful.
Lastly, transparency on how you are getting on with those goals. It is a difficult topic, and we all make mistakes and sometimes make the wrong judgement or miss something. But rather than hiding that, be open about it and explain that you are trying your best and you are on a journey. It is helpful to sometimes admit that we do fall short or say the wrong thing because nobody is perfect.
What have been the most important leadership lessons you have learnt over the past year?
One lesson that I have been reminded of is that it is okay as a leader to be vulnerable and to share that vulnerability with the people in your team. At the start of the pandemic, I took the attitude that as I was at the top of the organisation, I needed to be a stable rock for everyone and show that I was keeping things under control. Of course, like everyone else, I was finding it hard and to later admit that to people was a very good thing. It made it easier for my team to cope, knowing that I was finding it just as hard as they were. It was a good reminder that it is okay to share your own vulnerabilities as a leader; it does not expose you and it makes you much stronger, proving that exchange of trust with your team.
How do you create a high-performance culture and are there any examples of anything you have put in place that have been effective?
“Once people can see that bar, you can easily raise it all the time and keep moving people along as they understand what the next steps of progression look like. ”
I am very metric-driven so writing out clear objectives and plans about how to deliver success, and what that looks like, helps drive high-performance. Publishing these so they are visible to the team means that people can see how they are doing and how their peers are doing. Once people can see that bar, you can easily raise it all the time and keep moving people along as they understand what the next steps of progression look like.
In my team, we have very clear monthly and quarterly plans that are shared and presented so everybody knows what everybody else is doing – people then see the best of others and raise their own game to match those around them. The shared visible objectives and plans laid out in advance are important for the success of this.
In terms of those OKRs and people’s performance, is there a time when instinct kicks in or is it purely always based on OKRs?
The honest answer is that it is related to my point on trust. When you have a new team or new hires, you are working on building and earning that trust so during that time I think there must be a sharp focus on performance, metrics and OKRs. But as that trust builds and you get that track record of delivering, people start to be self-critical and raise their own bars, so the need for OKRs falls back. When I think about my team today, my direct reports that have worked for me for three to four years are pushing themselves and I know that they will deliver, so instinct will kick in and override data.
What is your career highlight to date?
I think there is more than one, but all my highlights have been when the big launches have gone well and exceeded expectations – that is what you do it for. When I was at Now TV, we would look forward to the release of Game of Thrones, expecting huge results and then when the results exceeded expectations, it would be the best feeling. Similarly at Gousto, the first and second of January are the biggest days of the year, and when you spend months planning in advance and over the festive holidays, and then you come in to see that we’ve done better than expected, it is a real ‘wow’ moment.
Are there any books or podcasts which have influenced your career or leadership style?
To the point that I was making earlier on learning about the history of marketing, there is a book called Marketing Communications by Chris Fill and Sarah Turnbull. It tells you everything about how advertising works which I thought was great. On leadership, I would recommend Jo Owen’s How to Lead which has a mixture of both practical and real-life examples.
Podcast wise, our Founder and CEO Timo [Boldt] is very well connected and speaks to people from various businesses on his Bold[t] Flavours podcast, so I will give that a little plug!